Of Conservation and Conservatives

The totally unconservative Tory Party may be away with the ridiculous pseudo-religion of environmentalism. But conservation, on the other hand, is a naturally and obviously conservative concern.

This is clear from the heavy predominance of those utter un-Cameroons, cultural Tories, in any conservationist organisation – large or small, national or local, permanent or ad hoc – that you care to name. Even in the National Trust, which was founded out of the Fabian Society.

The rest are overwhelmingly rural Old Liberals, or Frank Field and Kate Hoey types on what was once the Labour Right. The only notable exceptions relate to things like mining, and even then, the basic idea is one with which any cultural Tory would sympathise. Rather like mining itself, in fact.

Similarly, the civic pride bound up with local government is a cause to which any conservative can sign up, while opposition to it is simply incompatible with being a conservative. Beginning with the Tories in the unconservative Thatcher years, spreading to unconservative New Labour in its gestation, and also infesting the unconservative Lib Dem great and good (who look down on their mere Councillors for ever having run anything in their lives), hatred of local government is wholly unrelated to the nominal party in question’s success or otherwise at local elections.

The people who contest and win local elections are of course the sort who still imagine that the parties are (or, at least, ought to be) distinct, who think that parties should canvass and such like at election time, and who are to be found in any conservationist organisation – large or small, national or local, permanent or ad hoc – that you care to name. In a word, hicks. Isn’t that right?

Another word for them, of course, is conservatives.

The working-class self-help on which is founded co-operatives and other such institutions or organisations (credit unions, mutual guarantee societies, mutual building societies, friendly societies) is also of obvious attraction to conservatives.

It certainly is in the United States, where co-operatives (already very popular) will be vital to the emerging reconstitution of a Democratic Party of economic populism and foreign policy realism, of moral and social conservatism, of the South and the West as much as anywhere else, of the suburbs and the countryside as much as the cities. The Distributist tendencies within paleoconservatism more than point in that direction, and the paleocons are increasingly sympathetic towards the Democrats, having largely given up on the Republican Party. Watch that space.

Indeed, here in Britain, many Conservative Clubs – not places in which one can imagine, say, Michael Gove sinking a pint (indeed, one cannot imagine Michael Gove sinking a pint at all) – are already registered under the legislation relating to co-ops.

And then there are the trade unions. In America, the unions will, and increasingly do, have much the same role as the co-operatives in building the political future, always on the very sensible understanding that they are not in principle tied to any party (as over half of our own are not and never have been), so that every red cent, donated entirely publicly, buys something specific, also public from the outset.

The unions here should adopt the same approach. They should use their might, which primarily means their money, in relation to politicians of all parties and none as once they used it in relation to Labour alone: as a force for economic populism and foreign policy realism, for moral and social conservatism, for Scotland and Wales as much as England (or vice versa, if necessary), for the North and the Midlands as much as the South, for the working class as much as the middle and upper classes, and for the towns and the countryside (unions have a long history as the only significant left-wing or working-class bodies in many rural areas) as much as the suburbs.

The trade unions were an integral part of the old and broadly based Establishment that preceded the new and extremely narrowly based Political Class. Churchill (allegedly Thatcher’s hero) once called them “pillars of our civilisation”. Any conservative must surely agree. And anyone who does not, is not a conservative.