Covenant: rediscovering a conservatism that goes beyond the market
An eloquent essay by Conservative MP Danny Kruger goes back to the One Nation tradition to find a way forward for British conservatism
As this year’s election looms the first substantial intellectual broadsides are being fired in the battle for ideological leadership of a Tory party likely to find itself in opposition, and possibly for some time.
Liz Truss’s ‘Popular Conservatism’ seeks to revive the exotic blend of libertarianism, social conservatism and nationalism that carried her to the leadership. Her government’s swift implosion makes it unlikely the party will return to a highly charged ideology with seemingly little electoral appeal, but, though something of an alien graft within the Tory intellectual landscape, it has taken root and seems here to stay. Its day may come again, but not, perhaps, very soon.
The Case for the Centre Right, a collection of essays edited by David Gauke with contributions by Rory Stewart, Amber Rudd, Michael Heseltine and other moderates, offers a reasoned agenda for the more mainstream One Nation group. But, primarily comprised of a set of pragmatic policy recommendations, this rather dry offering seems to have more do with managerial liberalism than the colourful One Nation tradition to which the group lays claim.
It certainly seems somewhat bloodless in comparison with backbench MP Danny Kruger’s soulful Covenant, which seeks to deepen and broaden the intellectual case for the patriotic, socially conservative and economically interventionist Toryism that characterised the party’s successful 2019 manifesto, represented by the New Conservatives group he co-founded.
From contract to covenant
Kruger’s discursive essay follows Roger Scruton — whose influence on the right seems to have grown since his passing four years ago — in ranging through philosophy, theology and history, cutting much deeper than the rather disposable polemics usually offered by serving politicians, to make a potent contribution to postliberal literature. In doing so the book illuminates the often startling extent to which postliberals of the left and right are in agreement, a profound sympathy of outlook often obscured by the conventions of political debate.
Kruger bluntly acknowledges Britain’s social and economic ills, which have developed under his party’s watch as well as the left: ‘woeful’ productivity, swollen public and private debt, overbearing taxation, overburdened public services, a crumbling public infrastructure, and an exploitative property market. Millions lead lives of quiet despair, enveloped by ‘epidemics of mental ill health, domestic abuse and loneliness’.
For Kruger our ills run deeper than poor governance. The nation is being wasted by a spiritual sickness, a rampant libertarianism rending its social and economic fabric. Britain doesn’t just need better government, but a different kind of government, concerned not just with competent administration of the state, but the cultivation of the good society. Indeed government should be concerned less with the freedom of the individual, and more with the collective pursuit of the common good.
Kruger writes that the ‘imagined origin of a society determines its path’, and ours’ is organised according to the model of a social contract, ‘an imagined deal struck in the light of reason between the sovereign individual and the totalising state’, rather than the ancient ideal of the covenant, a civic settlement according to which disparate wills are oriented towards shared ideals.
By covenant he understands a bond brokered between strangers, ‘a way of expressing and formalising the love — unconditional, unstinting, permanent — that can exist between people who are unrelated by blood’. Recognising our profound dependence on others we align our interests with the greater good of the community. Rather than merely setting the legal terms within which individuals can pursue their self interest, the enlightened statesman should seek to cultivate the conditions whereby the good society can evolve, strengthening ‘the economic, social and cultural forces that make good people’.
And the pursuit of the good society requires sacrifice, a recovery of the Biblical and classical ideal of virtue. Returning to Aristotle, the father of the classical ideal of the state, Kruger argues that the proper telos of the human being is the pursuit of the good in negotiation with others, the discovery rather than creation of the rules of right and wrong.
The classical virtues were transfigured by Christianity, which recognised the sacred worth of the individual, including the weak. That concern for the dignity of the person opened the way for the liberal freedoms we enjoy today, and the duties our secular society still acknowledges towards those who cannot support themselves. But Kruger writes that ‘modern liberalism is the host to a parasite’ that has released ‘the inner tyrant whom Aristotle warned us of’. The gnawing scepticism of the early modern era that society only holds if bound together by legal restraint found intellectual expression in social contract theory, in which society is no longer conceived as a community bent towards virtue but as an aggregate of warring wills. We are no longer conceived as citizens living within the light of a sacred ideal, but self-interested individuals seeking satisfaction of our respective wills. We do not seek to discern a good common to all of us, but pursue our own version of the good. As the existentialists put it, ‘existence precedes essence’, our overriding obligation that of being true to ourselves, living an ‘authentic’ life.
For Kruger our ‘public philosophy is transgressive gnosticism, the worship of incorporeal wisdom, to be gained by an inner truth-seeking available only to a few.’ Today’s liberalism is utilitarian, the management of a contractural framework designed to ensure maximum personal freedom, the proper subject of political debate the question of how best to allocate tax proceeds to public welfare. Our communal life is disenchanted, conceived as a system to be reengineered rather than a collective endeavour oriented to a common ideal. We ‘have lost the language of human relations: words, like love and affection, reciprocity and respect, generosity, and justice — the language of authority, loyalty and sanctity.’
Social conservatism and an active state
Much of Kruger’s prescription for our condition will be considered strong medicine by most readers on the left. He argues for a tax and benefits policy oriented towards the support of families rather than the individual. He believes that though the state should ‘guarantee that no one will go without’, society should ‘insist in general that people have the capability and the obligation to meet their own and their neighbour’s needs before they look to the government.’ He casts controversies over gender identity as part of a broader transhumanist agenda to deny the givenness of the human condition. He wants much stronger controls on migration. And for him Brexit doesn’t go far enough: full restoration of power to Parliament and the common law will require repeal of legislation — including the Human Rights and Equality Acts — that tie us to international treaties.
But Kruger also argues for an active state that goes well beyond Tory orthodoxy, including anything the New Conservatives have so far said. In the tradition of his High Tory forebears John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle he argues for a ‘covenantal economy’ that recognises the spiritual significance of vocation and place.
He commends a communal responsibility to generate good jobs, recognising that work is ‘a job of virtue, through which our natural and acquired skills are called forth and put to work for a purpose beyond ourselves’. Leaving things to the market isn’t good enough. He wants fewer graduates and more apprenticeships, with greater esteem accorded to vocational qualifications and the businesses offering them. Wages should be sufficient to support households ‘on the earnings of a single full-time or two part-time workers’, giving people leisure, not just for its own sake, which he values, but for greater participation in civic life. There should be an expectation that all should serve their parish in some capacity at some point in their lives.
Unlike many of today’s Tories Kruger sees that support for family, neighbourhood and vocation doesn’t square with freewheeling market liberalism. Against much Thatcherite rhetoric he recognises that ‘people would rather stay with what they know, connected to the places and people they love, than get on their bikes, as Norman Tebbit said, for a precarious life in a distant city.’ And he believes that the financial sector should be oriented to the public good. A network of regional banks should be established to channel patient capital to local businesses, which in turn should be obliged to demonstrate commitment to the communities in which they are embedded, facilitating ‘an economy of production, where the purpose of a business is to make something valuable in itself’.
Kruger is close indeed here to left forms of postliberalism, which here in Britain have found their most coherent expression in the ‘Burkean socialism’ associated with Blue Labour. He recognises the contribution of the credit unions, friendly societies and trade unions established by the labour movement, and acknowledges ‘the England of dissent and progress, the narrative of our history, as the long, hard-won — still to be fully won — victory of the liberal light over the darkness of oppression and inequality.’
Red Tory, Blue Labour
It’s a sentence that might have appeared in Maurice Glasman’s Blue Labour: The Politics of the Common Good, published a year or so before Kruger’s, a book as close as that still rather nebulous movement has to a manifesto. One of several Blue Labour figures referenced in Kruger’s acknowledgements, Glasman agrees that we ‘are not simply rational heads making choices, but also embodied beings, living in a world we didn’t choose, born to parents we didn’t choose, speaking a language we didn’t choose in a place we didn’t choose.’
Like Kruger Glasman advocates an Aristotelian politics rooted in the give-and-take of negotiation between citizens towards shared ends, not neutral administration of the rights of individuals. He shares Kruger’s concern that the breakdown of mediating civic institutions — cities, guilds, corporations, churches, parishes, and municipalities — leaves people dependent either on wages offered by a capricious market or conditional welfare often insensitively administered by a remote state. Glasman, too, who also admired Scruton, is something of a romantic, with his appeals to the ‘ancient traditions of the Norman yoke, of the freeborn English’, and his nostalgia for home, recognising that visions of a ‘New Jerusalem’ express yearning for an imagined past.
Both share an essential hopefulness, the possibility of recovering a politics of virtue, a belief that the human soul tends towards the good, capable of exchange motivated by gift, not just obligation. As Rowan Williams put it in his introduction to Blue Labour: Forging a New Politics, a 2015 collection of essays musing on the movement’s identity, the ‘challenge to conventional politics at the moment is the question of what the political world might look like if it tried to work with rather than against the grain of our humanity.’
But here, perhaps, is the fundamental point of difference between Kruger and Glasman. The label ‘Blue Labour’ evolved to refer to the movement’s ‘tendency to the tragic’ as well as its social conservatism: the sad kind of blue. Though recognising that some form of market economy is essential for wealth generation, Glasman emphasises the role of covenant as a means of preserving the integrity of ‘place, work, solidarity and nature’ in an economic system, thereby domesticating ‘the demonic energy of capital by binding it into relationship with the very forces it seeks to commodify.’
For Glasman Labour’s embrace of established institutions isn’t only motivated by a Burkean veneration of sacred institutions (though that is part of it) but their capacity to defend communities from corrosive markets. ‘While Labour is continuous with various long-standing traditions within the British polity,’ he writes, ‘its distinctiveness came from understanding the particularity of capitalism and the power of money in modern society and the threat this posed to the human status of the person and his or her ability to live a meaningful life.’
Like Kruger Glasman supported Brexit as a means of re-establishing the primacy of common law and British institutions, but also to open the possibility of greater domestic protection from the harsh winds of globalisation. And he notes that those elements of the German economic system admired by Kruger — admission to labour markets through mastery of a vocation, regional banks, and representation of the workforce in corporate governance — were established under a Labour government during Britain’s post-war administration of the North Rhine-Westphalia zone. The foundations for Germany’s post-war economic settlement were laid by the state, which built institutions and embedded practices strong enough to offer shelter from the market.
Could today’s Conservative party serve as a vehicle for the kind of radical agenda envisaged by Kruger? Since the Tories returned to power in 2010 successive promises of a ‘compassionate conservatism’, a ‘Big Society’, and ‘levelling up’ have warred with a liberal commitment to the market that seems to run deeper, certainly with the membership that voted in Truss and Sunak. David Cameron’s early embrace of Philip Blond’s Burkean ‘Red Tory’ vision was submerged by austerity, Theresa May’s talk of putting workers on boards lost amidst the party’s Brexit civil war, and after the collapse of Boris Johnson’s administration the party was more enthused by the libertarian programme advanced by Truss than investing in the regions, a Johnson-era commitment that also seems to run against the grain of Rishi Sunak’s small state liberalism. Keir Starmer’s cautious Labour continues to shape its economic programme in accord with what it fears a sceptical electorate will deem credible, but unlike the Tories the party is disposed by inclination rather than electoral obligation to wield the power of the state.
In Covenant Danny Kruger offers a conservatism that will appeal to many postliberals, a high-minded vision of a state committed to cultivating the virtues rather than arbitrating between the claims of competing individuals. This is a well written, thoughtful book that will resonate with conservatives on the left as well as the right. But when considered in the cold light of the record of Kruger’s party over the past 13 years — indeed since the 1980s — and its likely turn to the right after the next election, they might well conclude that it is an agenda more likely to be delivered by others.
Covenant by Danny Kruger is published by Swift Press.
