As a student at university, it’s easy to be aware that academia is dominated by the left. After all, it is the voices on the left we hear the most. Added to this, a Conservative Party that does not look very conservative at the moment and almost like they are out of ideas – just take a look at the agendas for the Conservative Party Agendas for 2023 and 2022. But over the summer, two academic conferences of note took place, which should bring a glimmer of hope to conservative students.
The first, held at Churchill College at the University of Cambridge from the 6th to 7th July 2023, on British Intellectual Conservatism: Past and Present. This was organised by ResPublica and the University of Public Service. The second, held in the House of Lords from the 14th to 15th September 2023, on Margaret Thatcher: Her Life, Work, and Legacy. This had been organised by two research centres at the University of Hull. The first research centre was the Centre for Legislative Studies, which is led by Lord Norton of Louth, the second by Dr. Matt Beech who leads the Centre for British Politics.
The conferences, naturally, had different focuses but as a participant at both – and having had time to reflect on them, there are four things I found in common. These conferences were full of enriching academic thought, they were both thought provoking, provided a space to be reflective, and to think ahead to the future. In the current climate when it looks as though the Conservative Party will be unsuccessful at the 2024 General Election, both conferences highlighted the need for a better vision.
The two conferences in their own way provided a means to push back against the narrative we see that the right are out of ideas. Rather, the conference on British Intellectual Conservatism: Past and Present consisted of several panels, from Conservatism Today to addressing Free Speech and Conservatism. There were also two panels dedicated to two of the great leaders of the Conservative and Unionist Party, a panel on the Age of Churchill, another on the Age of Thatcher. All in all, the conference did exactly as the name of the conference said it would. A key focus of the conference was on the works of Roger Scruton and bringing his ideas, which may have been forgotten to the forefront. There is much to be learnt from this conference.
For the conference on Margaret Thatcher, many ideas were shared. The main takeaway raising the issue that politicians today do not have a long-term vision. Many who praise Liz Truss and her allies say “she did what Thatcher did” but what people fail to recognise and remember: Thatcher spent many years developing her ideas with a team before those ideas became policy.
There are lessons to be learnt from the conferences. It is people, no matter their role in politics, whether they work in academia, policy or aspire to be an elected representative, who need to take a step back. There are many great people we can learn from, but the problem with the world today is everyone is looking for the next great thing. The rivers of free-flowing conversation of ideas from conservative academics and politicians needs to be opened up before anything else can happen.
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In Defence of the Profits of Oil and Gas Companies
Few companies today are less popular than those in the oil and gas industry. Shell, ExxonMobil and British Petroleum are all resented for the great profits they are now making. 79% of the public back yet another windfall tax to get these profiteering companies to subsidise their bills. This is despite the fact the existing levy, with pre-existing taxation, is already an extortionate 65%, following Rishi Sunak’s increase to it in May. No doubt, with the forthcoming £130bn plus price cap, further increases to the windfall tax will be touted as the means to pay for it.
Increasing the windfall tax on oil and gas companies’ profits would be wrong: any windfall tax on these companies’ profits is wrong. Individuals, and the companies they constitute, have a right to the windfall gains of their labour or property, even if they haven’t done anything to earn them. To seize these gains is to violate their rights, to use them unjustifiably. Any such levy must therefore be abolished, and any increase in them opposed.
Let us proceed to bolster the truth of this liberal position by refuting the principal argument for the existing windfall tax, and by deduction all increases too. We start with the contention that the profits of energy companies are ‘undeserved’. When Sunak increased the levy in May he argued it was fair because the companies’ increased profits have not come through “changes to risk-taking or innovation or efficiency”, but rather, have come as a “result of surging global commodity prices”. The essence of this argument is that individuals are not entitled to the income they have not had to do anything for. Although not Marx’s, Sunak’s reasoning shares with his the idea entitlements to incomes cannot be legitimised simply because they have arisen through free exchange. Some work needs to be done to confer deservedness.
It is then argued that the poor need support to get through the cost of living crisis, more than the companies’ shareholders need dividends, and this is a reason for the government to seize their profits via windfall taxation. Indeed it is predicted two-thirds of households could be in fuel poverty by January of 2023 (without further intervention). Together, the undeserved profits of oil and gas companies, and the needs of the poor, allow for a windfall tax for increased benefits to help the impoverished with their energy bills.
The problem with this argument for the windfall tax is it proves far too much. Consider this example: across the country the average salary of a plumber is £35,862, putting such tradesmen’s earnings 14% above the median. Now imagine for some reason half of all plumbers quit the trade and decide to become waiters instead. The remaining plumbers would see their wages increase significantly, even though they’re doing the same hours and work as before. Let us assume our plumber ends up being paid a wage, such that his household expenditure is £45,437.60, putting him in the ninth decile of spenders. This allows his household to spend about £11,117.60 on restaurants, hotels, recreation and culture, as of 2019.
According to Sunak’s argument, the plumber should be subject to a windfall tax. Both criteria are satisfied. First, the plumber has done nothing to see his salary increase. Second, the poorest households, who really struggle to pay for their food and increasingly large fuel bills, clearly could do with the money more. Indeed, the poorest decile spends only about £1,705.60 a year on food and non-alcoholic drinks, less than a fifth of the plumbers’ spending on leisure, and that was in 2019!
This is an unacceptable conclusion. Individuals have a right to the windfalls they derive from the voluntary exchange with customers and employers. To deny such a proposition is to accept whenever there is a shortage of labour in your trade or profession you are not entitled to bargain for a higher salary, or rather that the government is entitled to tax away all the additional income you may receive. Or at least it may tax it away insofar as others’ needs are greater than your own. I doubt my reader will want to embrace this. I believe this is because most of us implicitly reject the idea that individuals are only entitled to money they have worked for, or rather are only entitled to money insofar as it was proportionately worked for.
Consider the man who stumbles across truffles in his garden, he hasn’t worked for the money he receives on their sale; it’s sheer luck. Nonetheless, we accept he is entitled to their windfalls and should pay no more tax than anyone else with the same income. Equally, we accept people are entitled to the windfall on their car if it has become very popular, despite it being sheer luck such conditions have arisen. Indeed, it is sheer luck that beauty models are born beautiful. Yet no one is proposing taxing away their genetic-based windfall, with the bar being the income the average person would get going down the catwalk. I contend that the root of these beliefs is a commitment to defending the freedom of the individual to make as much money as he so can, in whatever activity he so chooses – even if sheer luck is the cause.
By analogy then, if individuals, e.g. our plumber, are entitled to their incomes from sheer luck, then so too must the oil and gas companies be entitled to their profits from sheer luck too (from globally higher commodity prices). The alternative would be to live in a dystopian world where each job, trade, profession and commodity market has a differential tax rate to eliminate all windfalls (for why allow a part to be kept). To a few this may appear but a minor inconvenience. However, as F. A. Hayek has explained, this would lead to the impoverishment of society, as prices would be unable to direct resources to their most efficient uses.
Consider, due to potato blight, the price of wheat increases dramatically as consumers switch to pasta. Today farmers of wheat would receive far larger profits as a result, due to the high price, despite having done no more work. This incentivises other farmers to shift to wheat production, from less urgently demanded crops, eventually pushing supply out, bringing the price of pasta back down. Resources are shifted from less valued to more valued uses and thus consumers are better off. If the state insisted, since wheat farmers are conducting no more work, efficiency-savings, investing or risk-taking, they should receive no higher price for their crop, the market would take far, far longer to adjust, and in the meantime, people would be worse off. Given these adjustments are always occurring across the economy, consumers would be permanently worse off if all windfall gains were taxed away.
Indeed it is even worse than this concerning the labour market. If half of the existing bin men decided to leave their jobs today the remaining bin men would see their wages go up, which would encourage new individuals into the role. If this wage weren’t allowed to go up though there would be shortages of bin men. To stop rubbish from going uncollected the state would have to conscript people into the position: These bin men would be slaves. Such is the conclusion one is forced to, as Hayek maintained, if rewards correspond not to the value which their services have for their fellows, but to the moral merit or desert the persons are deemed to have earned.
Clearly, if applied consistently, the principle no one should receive windfalls would impoverish the people, and require the conscription of individuals into many jobs. No man committed to living in a free society can thus permit the state to operate on such reasoning. Individuals have a right to their windfall gains, whether they be plumbers, or indeed the owners of oil and gas companies. The windfall tax must therefore be abolished, and failing that any attempts to increase it must be resisted every step of the way. Only then will the extraordinary profits of oil and gas companies remain where they should have always rightfully belonged: In the bank accounts of the shareholders.
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One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
Yesterday, Rishi Sunak announced his intention to cut net migration by 300,000, calling it “the biggest ever cut in net migration” two weeks after the ONS revealed net migration had increased to an unprecedented 745,000, revised up from 672,000.
Despite the claims made by politicians and the press, this announcement isn’t worth getting excited over. I needn’t re-establish the Tories’ abysmal track-record on immigration, partially because it is common knowledge (we’ll get it into the tens of thousands this time, we promise!), but mainly because their policy will prove fraudulent and destructive, even if carried out to the fullest extent.
If the government succeeded in bringing down net migration to their stated target, it would still be far higher than anything experienced before Covid. Up until recently, net migration sat at around 250,000, peaking at over 300,000. As a net figure, these figures included upwards of 500,000 arrivals each year since the early noughties, continuing a rapid increase in arrivals since the late 1990s.
Now-infamous research by Dr David Coleman showed White British people would be a minority in the UK by 2066 if immigration continued at such levels. Coleman’s forecast was published in 2013. Ten years later, net migration has more than doubled with 450,000 every year being treated as a radical reduction by politicians and the press. Of course, it matters not whether such circumstances arrive sooner or later, it would be essentially immoral and consequentially destructive for our society, as we can infer from the past few years alone.
In many ways, what the government is doing is more subversive than not doing anything at all. It is treating pre-Covid net migration as the natural benchmark, implying anything more demanding is a form of deranged and impractical extremism, a notion which couldn’t be further from the truth. Keep in mind: this country saw the rise and fall of the BNP and UKIP, a referendum on EU membership, the triumph of the Brexit Party, and a landslide for the Conservatives before the post-2020 surge in arrivals, all of which were motivated by a fraction of what the “FAR RIGHT” (!!!) Tory government are proposing.
The government’s new policy has no intention of cutting the number of foreign students, graduate worker visas or the skilled workers list. NGOs remain generously funded, no laws or treaties are abolished or amended, whilst social care and graduate visas, along with dodgy postgrad courses at immigration-dependant universities, have been left practically untouched. Typical of the Tories, they can only address immigration in technical terms, seeing at is possibly economically inefficient and occassionally unfair, rather than a matter of sociopolitical importance.
Rather, it would scrap the shortage occupation list, which companies can use to pay foreign workers 20 per cent below the going rate for jobs with so-called “skills shortages”, ban foreign care workers and non-postgraduate students bringing dependants, increase the salary required for skilled foreign workers to get a visa to £38,700, and increase in the health surcharge to £1,035. Simply put, the government’s radical policy to regulate mass migration will not address several of the main causes behind mass migration.
Just like the “biggest tax cut in history”, the “biggest cut to net migration in history” is an admission of defeat disguised as a victory chant. Despite talk of reform, Westminster’s high-immigration, high-tax consensus remains unchanged. Nevertheless, whilst this policy is the epitome of progressivism driving the speed limit, the reaction from progressives has been nothing short of deranged. What is the country to do without the illustrious skillset of Nigerian dependants?! What about all those inspiring Somalian refugees that know how to JavaScript? Who will serve them Pret a Manger?!
Now more than ever, Conservatives should come to terms with the fact that there is no middle ground on this matter. Progressives, liberals, leftists, etc. are immigration maximisers by default and anything less than open borders is a violation of Human Rights™ and International Law™. Flimsy conceptual problems aside, just because something is The Law doesn’t mean its moral, practical or true. Laws are made to be broken; it is the implied function of government. Auctoritas non veritas facit legem!
In addition, the policy has spawned the input of several insufferable non-conservatives, bleating about how it’s ‘unconservative’ to set the wage threshold at the full-time average salary, describing the wage threshold as an attack on personal relationships and cheap foreign lifestyle journalists.
Someone should inform these people that up-ending the historical continuity of a people is as ‘unconservative’ as it gets. Drawing an equivalence between those inside and outside the political community, to the extent that the distinction between the two is functionally meaningless, is also wholly ‘unconservative’ but that doesn’t matter to them either. The reduction of the conservative philosophy to a single point of concern is to reduce the description of a hand to the presence of a thumb. The family is important and the upper-bound of the family – that is, the extended family of the nation – has been under sustained assault from mass migration for no less than 30 years. Can we conserve that, at least?
If our concern is keeping families together, I’m more than happy to support barring migration altogether to safeguard against the disintegration of foreign families, but something tells me these pseudocons wouldn’t be up for such an idea. Indeed, such a policy would be a good thing. Mass immigration has effectively made wage slavery the norm of the British economy, in which third world countries are stripped of their most talented and brought to Britain to work on barely liveable wages, undercutting native demands for better conditions and causing a host of demographic problems in the process.
Given that the recent spike in arrivals was driven primarily by non-EU migrants, originating from significantly poorer countries, it is unlikely that scrapping the shortage occupation list will do much to benefit the English worker. Such people are prepared to work for much less within the legal confines of the UK economy, subjecting themselves to conditions the average Englishman would class as unacceptable, if not downright exploitation. Oh well, at least consecutive years of mass migration has improved the “skills shortage” (it hasn’t).
In light of vague demands for an alternative, a net migration figure of zero would be a more fitting target. Far from unheard of, UK basically had net zero migration from the early 70s up until 1997, the year Modern Britain was founded. That said, this would only suffice as a short-term target. You could achieve net zero migration by importing one million insofar one million leave, the demographic consequences of which wouldn’t be insignificant. Ultimately, we need to cut the number of overall arrivals, not just the net figure, and deport anyone who shouldn’t be here. If we need to smash a few treaties here and there, if we have to fire a few thousand bureaucrats en masse to ensure the survival of the body politic, so be it.
Until then, until we see something substantial, rather than a mixture of boisterous rhetoric, statistical manipulation and historical revisionism, this policy is just like every other promise the Conservatives have made on immigration: one step forward, two steps back.
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Environmentalism: The Quintessential Conservative Cause
Over the past few weeks, a single topic has dominated the German media and has meanwhile made its way into the international media: The removal of climate activists from the village of Lützerath, which they occupy to stop the mining of lignite there.
Activists had already demonstrated in 2020 against the resettlement of the village for the Garzweiler open pit mine and subsequently occupied the village. Beginning on January 11, more than 1,000 police officers went on the offensive and began driving the activists out of the village, resulting in large-scale unrest that lasted for nearly a full week. The locality has not been cleared to this day, in part because activists have tunneled themselves into the ground and barricaded themselves in tree houses. After police officers were pelted with stones and even Molotov cocktails, the reaction of politicians on the right-wing spectrum has been concentrated on these acts. Of course, this is not surprising, but none of these politicians have really been critical of the issue of relocation and demolition of villages, their community and history itself. It seems that only left-wing people ever stand up for environmental protection and, in this case, for saving the village as well as, indirectly, its history (even though this is probably not a motivation for them). But the fact is that environmental protection should also be something important for conservatives, and it is the relationship between the two things that I intend to examine here.
Parts of the small village, first mentioned in the annals of history in the 12th century, belonged to the Cistercian Abbey of Duissern for many centuries. After more than 900 years, the village, like many villages before it, must now make way for the Garzweiler open pit mine and its owner RWE AG. As a result, the Duisserner Hof, for example, which is on the list of monuments of the city of Erkelenz because of its historical and cultural significance, has to be demolished.
A similar fate befell the village of Immerath in 2018, when the neo-Romanesque St. Lambertus Church was demolished. As art historian Annette Jansen-Winkeln noted before the demolition, it was quite dramatic that the church was partially destroyed during World War II and the community then had to invest heavily in rebuilding it, only to have it demolished for the expansion of the open-pit lignite mine. The congregation had invested in large ornamental windows during the reconstruction period, which she was able to save from demolition. The diocese of Aachen had sold the church to RWE AG “with the proviso that the [windows] be treated in the same way as the wall.”
The St. Lambertus Church was a symbol of identity from the very beginning, according to the art historian. In 1886, the village’s approximately one thousand inhabitants decided to build this new church. “For such a small community to produce such great things – there must have been a lot of social competence.”
This situation should cause an unpleasant emotion in every conservative. What is being destroyed in these cases is the active life of a village, its community, and its history, all things that should be central to the conservative view of society. Not only that, but it is being done for a purpose that is detrimental to the environment, that is, contrary to a cause that conservatives should champion: Environmentalism.
Roger Scruton captured this sentiment perfectly when he famously wrote,
‘We must make the environment, the countryside, and the settled communities of our nation into priorities of government. Conservatism is a philosophy of inheritance and stewardship; it does not squander resources but conserves and enhances them. Environmental politics therefore needs to be rescued from the phony expertise of the scare-mongers and from the top-down manipulation of the activists. Properly understood, environmental protection is not a left-wing but a conservative cause.’
Now, as Scruton correctly points out, environmentalism is seen as a core issue of the left political spectrum. Climate change organizations like Greenpeace and social movements like Fridays for Future have uniformly adopted a progressive stance on sociocultural issues, making it almost impossible to support them as a conservative. The reason that the issue of environmentalism has found particular appeal on the left is because of the way they frame the fundamental nature of the problem. The movement, according to Scruton, has
‘acquired all the hall-marks of a left-wing cause: a class of victims (future generations), an enlightened vanguard who fights for them (the eco-warriors), powerful philistines who exploit them (the capitalists), and endless opportunities to express resentment against the successful, the wealthy and the West.’
Meanwhile, for a long time, little to no real engagement with the issue was made in conservative circles, thus surrendering an issue to political rivals that is now key to due electoral decision-making. In the 2021 German federal election, the environment and climate played the second-largest role for voters in their election decision.The Christian Democratic Union of Germany’s (CDU) internal election report shows that almost one million voters switched from them to the Green Party. For the Greens, 82% of voters named the environment and climate as the most important issue for their election decision. It stands to reason that for many of those who switched their votes, the lack of climate policy competence on the part of the CDU was at the forefront of their minds.
Far from being a foreshadowing of the years to come, this situation offers an ideal opportunity for conservative politicians and movements to reflect on the principles of conservatism. Environmentalism should be an issue that conservative politicians ought to make an important part of their election platforms if they want to win. It is not the case that this is to be done for opportunistic reasons. In fact, for Roger Scruton, environmentalism represents “the quintessential conservative cause”.
Fundamental to this view is the conservative attitude toward society best captured by Edmund Burke, who speaks of society as a social contract, but ‘not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.’ The preservation (and amelioration) of nature and the Countryside is considered a duty for those who are aware that they have received everything from previous generations and must conserve it for future generations. As the great American poet and farmer Wendell Berry puts it: “The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.’
This awareness gives rise to a natural preference for the local over the distant. Which manifests itself best in Roger Scruton’s notion of oikophilia: ‘[T]he love of the oikos, which means not only the home but the people contained in it, and the surrounding settlements that endow that home with lasting contours and an enduring smile.’ American legal scholar Robert P. George aptly summarized this position when he stated “that one naturally and rightly has a special love for, and duties toward, members of one’s family, tradition of faith, local community and region, and fellow citizens.”
This love for the familial and social environment, traditions and nature is naturally linked to a sense of identity. We recognize the need for a “We” that cherishes traditions and evokes a sense of home, a place that is “Ours”. This notion of oikophilia is thereby something that is animated only because we are located in such a place. There exists a deep connection with environmentalism, since this notion has a great impact on the way we treat the environment. It is simply a fact that man tries to protect what belongs to him more than what is not his own. Now, with the environment, man receives a communal inheritance from which responsibility for the inheritance arises.
Accordingly, it is also a profoundly intergenerational view, consistent with the Burkean social contract, for thus one is not master of the land but a tenant who is but one person in a long line of tenants who are all equally entitled to receive that inheritance. One might object that this means that you may not change anything about the environment or use its natural resources, but therein I would say with Theodore Roosevelt, ‘I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us.’
With all that said, it does seem that a brief consideration of policy implications is needed. From the view of conservative environmentalism that has been presented, there are attitudes that conservatives should have toward economic and technological policies and practices.
It seems that conservatives in this case must be completely opposed to an unregulated free market, not conservative in the first place, and regulations regarding the extraction of natural resources should be supported. In this, again, it may be said with Roosevelt, “I believe that the natural resources must be used for the benefit of all our people, and not monopolized for the benefit of the few, and here again is another case in which I am accused of taking a revolutionary attitude.” (1910 speech on “New Nationalism) What seems obvious to me is that a rethinking of ecological issues should also include a rethinking of economic issues.
Conservatives should also stand up for domestic producers, discouraging them from taking production overseas, and oppose the globalization of industries, if possible. Restricting the import of certain products might also be worth considering, instead supporting local farmers and passing laws that encourage people to buy locally, which saves a lot of shipment mileage, automatically helping the environment and strengthening the local economy.
It also seems as if many conservative movements ought to change their language on the subject of environmental protection. Often excessive opposition within conservative circles creates the feeling that you can’t be conservative if you are pro-environment or you feel that you have to deny climate change to be conservative, which is wrong. It is necessary to emphasize more often that environmental protection is not only about climate change, but also about the degradation of natural resources and the preservation of the beauty of our home.
However, the most important thing remains something that politics cannot do and must come from the citizens themselves: Taking personal responsibility, which comes from rational self-interest that encourages the people to look after the environment themselves. The key for this is for people to realize that we are inheritors of this world and like a good farmer we have to cultivate this land and pass it on better to our inheritors.
