British politician Daniel Hannan has always been a very articulate thinker, writer and speaker for conservative ideas, so when he writes a rather doom-laden piece on what’s happening to conservatism in Britain it’s worth paying attention to.

Conservatives shouldn’t kid themselves into thinking their ideas are popular

Most voters don’t want tax cuts. They don’t want personal responsibility. They don’t want limited government. Britain was already in a dirigiste mood going into the lockdown. But, since coming out of it, it has been downright authoritarian.
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A Survation poll last year found that 65 per cent of us want to nationalise buses, 67 per cent trains, and 69 per cent water companies. Half of our heart is in Havana.

In other words it’s not just that the British Conservative Party is bloody useless in implementing conservative ideas (and has been since it was first elected almost fourteen years ago), trailing far behind Labour and almost certainly facing a thrashing in this year’s election.

No, the problem is that Tory politicians have perhaps been too good at sniffing the winds and deciding not to risk putting their beliefs into practice. What that has produced is an economy, and frankly a society, that looks little different than if Labour were in charge. The State is the largest it’s been in sixty years, inflation is here, State spending is massive, taxation revenues (and rates) the highest in decades, yet borrowing and debt is also massive, and so forth.

If you’ve got all that anyway and you either love it or don’t care about it, why not vote Labour and get more of it?

Hannan does have sympathy for the Tories, convinced that they still do want to reduce the size of the State. I’m not so sure about that:

Well, why don’t the Tories make the case for a smaller state?” Because that misunderstands what political parties can and can’t do. Voters will never view a politician as disinterested. It is too much to expect a party simultaneously to create demand for a new policy and to position itself as the beneficiary of that demand.

No, the task of changing public opinion falls to the wider conservative movement – to pressure groups, think-tanks, columnists, and associated auxiliaries. The trouble is that, at the moment, most of the people in those categories are training their fire on the Conservative Party.

Maybe so, but I don’t think he has much confidence in all these think tanks when he goes on to predict that only a massive economic downturn under Labour will change these public attitudes, much as the growing failure of the 1970’s finally culminated in Thatcher (and a few years later here with Roger Douglas and company).

But that was about much more than just another recession; the real trigger point that was the clear, obvious and growing : failure of the giant post-war institutions built by the Left and supported by the Right; all those crippled government Glide Time bureaucracies and State Owned Commanding Heights businesses. Whether you were an outsider or working for them, you knew there were growing problems that nobody could solve using the old ways.

Since we’ve only just elected our own Moderate, Centre-Right government we’re perhaps a decade away from this same scenario, and of course it may not play out the same way. But given the instincts I see on display in our government so far, plus our vastly smaller number of “pressure groups, think-tanks, columnists” advocating for a smaller State, and much else on the right-wing spectrum, my hopes are not high.

Mind you, the same Mr Hannan had a far more sunny view of New Zealand’s prospects during a visit in late 2023.