Lord Wood of Anfield:the crisis of Conservative values

As the Conservative diaspora gathers in Birmingham, David Cameron finds himself bombarded with advice from fellow Tories about how to stop the rot. Tory modernisers want more moderate policies, the Tory Right wants a sharp dose of cuts in tax and spending, while Tory pollsters urge the party to reconnect with the striving classes of Middle England.

There is no doubt that David Cameron has had a terrible year. A double-dip recession, the collapse of confidence in Osbornes economic Plan A, a Budget that prioritised the privileged, and a catalogue of incompetence have all undermined the faith of the Tory faithful. But the roots of his annus horribilis run far deeper. The truth is that the crisis of the Conservative government stems from a crisis of values in the Conservative movement. Because over the last 30 years, the Tory Party has abandoned the tapestry of sympathies, principles and priorities that made it seem the natural representatives of middle class Britain for so long.

Many Conservatives like to think of their politics as pragmatic rather than based on a philosophy. But Conservative politics from the mid-19th century to the last quarter of the 20th century and articulated by practitioners and thinkers such as Benjamin Disraeli, Harold MacMillan, Quintin Hogg and Michael Oakeshott was based on a distinctive family of values. Conservatives believed in limited government, but obligations of the privileged towards those with less. Conservatives supported economic freedom, trade and wealth-creation, as well as a government that maintained the framework of markets and social solidarity. Conservatives were cautious and sceptical, Christian and civic. And Conservatives conserved. They protected institutions and ways of life that people held dear.

But something happened to Conservative thought from the late 1970s onwards. It got stripped down, reduced and mutated. It moved from a concern for how a healthy society should work to a charter for economic libertarianism. In modern Conservatism, the encouragement of economic freedoms has become a fundamentalist faith in the market, with a heroic assumption that free markets can on their own produce not just prosperity but also fairness. And the affection for limited but socially responsible government has turned into vilification of the public sector, and an obsession with reducing its size as the primary goal of politics.

The casualties of this libertarian fanaticism have been the other values that Tories cherished. Modern Conservatism has lost any conception of what holds our society together other than our participation in the market. We are united as contestants in a race, first and foremost. The responsibility of those with means to those with less has been marginalised. Paternalism offers the wrong incentives for the poor, and is bad for the economy. And instead of seeing institutions, practices and ways of life as things to be protected, modern Conservatism is more likely to view them as things to be challenged if they hold back efficiency.

It is this shift in values that is at the root of the choices David Cameron has made on issues ranging from the excessive pace and scope of spending cuts, to reducing income tax for the wealthiest as Britain re-entered recession, to attacking the principles of the NHS. Modern Conservatism in Britain has become a creed of the haves versus the have-nots, and has forgotten how and when to conserve.

British voters have spotted this change in values. Indeed the alarm bells should have been ringing for the Tories at the time of the election in 2010. The result was a terrible one for Labour, but it was a very bad one for the Tories too. 24.1 per cent of the electorate voted for Cameron in 2010, just 1.6 per cent more than their record defeat in 1997. David Camerons project to detoxify the Tory brand was always hamstrung by the fact that underneath the surface, the modern Conservative Party has become fundamentally economically libertarian in a country that is not.

Lord Ashcrofts polling shows that those who considered but did not end up voting Tory in 2010 feel the Party under-prioritises the NHS and education, and is too extreme on the pace and scale of cutting the size of the state and the deficit. And yesterday Ashcroft reminded the Tories that they are making a serious mistake to think that those who think of themselves as strivers have a ruggedly individualistic approach to life and simply want the government to get out of their way.

The signs are that Ashcrofts warnings will not be heeded. Currently the voices of the libertarian Right are baying at David Cameron the loudest, frustrated at a life of compromise inside the Coalition, and desperate for more and more market and less and less government. David Cameron finds himself besieged and weak, more concerned to use his Conference to manage his Partys right wingers than to address the hollowing-out of its underlying values.

But values matter. Ultimately, winning elections requires parties to have values that are shared by those that vote for them. In 1959 Quintin Hogg, then a Tory minister in MacMillans government, wrote in The Conservative Case that being Conservative is only another way of being British. I am sure that millions of Tory voters in that period of Conservative ascendancy thought what Hogg said was obvious. The fact that the same claim would be laughable to most voters now should be the thing that concerns David Cameron the most.

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Lord Wood of Anfield:the crisis of Conservative values