Is Kemi the Pitts?

A few days ago, at the beginning of the Conservative conference, Kemi Badenoch released a 30,000-word paper called The Right Way. We are told that this paper, intended to expound her philosophy of conservatism as a foundation for intellectually coherent policymaking, was inspired by a 1976 document with a similar intention and title, Margaret Thatcher’s The Right Approach. 

Yet for all of the paper’s Thatcherite tendencies — the call for lower taxes, the desire to support free enterprise and a smaller state that does fewer things but better — there is a significant aspect of it neglected by commentators that seems to hark back to a much earlier time. It reflects an intellectual journey followed not so much by Thatcher, but by a different prime minister over two centuries ago in an age of anxiety which is disturbingly similar to our own. That Prime Minister is William Pitt the Younger.

In the background is France, ever unhappy, but at least persistent in its manner of unhappiness. If we turn back to the first premiership of Pitt in the 1780s and 1790s, its tribulations seem scarcely different from today. An impotent government worn out with debt kneels at the mercy of revolutionary partisans who hold its ideas and its adherents in deep contempt, and who are happy to employ any manner of violence to purge them away in the stampede to impose a new ideology.  

Anything that smacked of the old settled order which bound society over centuries, they were eager to consign to the flames or the executioner: the universities, libraries, archives, courts, clergy, aristocracy, monarchy. Monasteries are pulled down. Christianity is suppressed. Churches and cathedrals are seized and converted to the new religion of reason. Anyone who resists and expresses a desire for France’s inherited customs and culture, whether prince, priest or peasant, are given over to the justice of the mob. 

As Pitt came to realise, the problem was not just one for France, but for all of Europe. Revolutions by nature desire their own export, and this was no exception. The execution of Louis XVI was a challenge to every neighbouring government: “Let us fling down to the Kings the head of a King”, declared Danton. “They have explained what that liberty is which they wish to give to every nation”, Pitt warned Parliament shortly afterwards in February 1793, “and if they will not accept of it voluntarily, they compel them.” 

At the first outbreak of the Revolution, Pitt had been sanguine. In early 1790, he had declared that “The present convulsions of France, must, sooner or later, terminate in general harmony and regular order.” It was only his fellow parliamentarian Edmund Burke who saw the danger early, admonishing him in 1791 that the French were “the ablest architects of ruin that had hitherto existed in the world.” 

Yet, as the situation unfolded, Pitt began to realise that the revolutionary ideas were beginning to cause cracks in the order and cohesion of British society as well. Radical groups, boasting of vast numbers of members and contacts with France, began to mushroom across the country. The Society for Constitutional Information (SCI) and the London Corresponding Society (LCS) expressed their sympathy for the happenings in France. Thomas Paine published the second part of his Rights of Man, which called for revolution and the abolition of all forms of hereditary government. Whilst Britain faced the external threat of invasion, the radical societies, further agitated by food shortages, were planning internal upheaval with a “General Convention of the People” to supersede the rights of parliament and the church. Reports swirled that they were also preparing weapons caches. In October 1795, a mob even went so far as to stone King George III’s carriage as he went to open parliament, shouting “No King! No war! Bread!”

As Pitt contemplated the danger of mob rule, imported from France, being seen on British streets, he came to understand the necessity of action. He abandoned his earlier ideas of parliamentary reforms, seeing that stability was necessary to preserve the constitution which he declared “a monument of human wisdom, which had been hitherto the exclusive blessing of the English nation.” And his defence of that constitution and English liberty, in that emergency, called for a level of resolution equal to the threat of revolutionary violence. 

For a brief period, he suspended Habeas Corpus, to allow imprisonment without trial. He saw acts through parliament to ban large gatherings and rallies, and to expand the definition of high treason to include simply writing or speaking about the idea of doing harm to the King or constitution. Pitt’s progressive opponent Charles James Fox lambasted Pitt, lamenting “the whole beauty of the constitution of England will be gone… the people will be affected by a total death of their liberty,” but Pitt stood firm. Parliament, rather than any new people’s convention, should be the forum for liberty, and its preservation was necessary, even by force, to maintain the tradition of liberty. 

Pitt’s unnerving use of raw force managed to head off the immediate danger of disorder, yet there was a second prong to his strategy. He realised that it was not just a matter of forcing the hostile societies to close down, and recovering the economy to make sure that everyone had bread. Dealing with the revolutionary notions which threatened to break up the stability of British society also required a battle of ideas — a culture war — in which traditional ideas of the constitution, loyalty, the British settlement, undermined by the influx of radical thought, were reinforced amongst the people. 

Thus, he used all the means in his power to strengthen these notions of a shared culture. He supported the founding of loyal societies in support of the Church and King, for the preservation of liberty and property, and against Jacobinism. He also supported the distribution of a vast number of tracts to counter the radical notions being introduced from France. He subsidised George Canning to produce a weekly pamphlet, the Anti-Jacobin, Edmund Burke to turn out further anti-revolutionary tracts, and even the cartoonist James Gillray to make the radicals the subject of his lampoons. 

Fast forward to the present. We see a debt-ridden France convulsed by weeks of rioting, motivated by a revolutionary coalition of Islamists and leftists who wish to overthrow the settled order and character of the state. Here, the same ideas are causing the growth of radical groups sworn to pursue similar ideals of overthrowing our culture and institutions. We look nervously across the Channel to see the how such notions, in a more advanced state, can erode and break down once peaceable societies, and see with horror how we seem to be going the same way, as communist and pro-Hamas protestors stamp on and vandalise monuments to our war dead, and abuse British Jews. 

It is the first time in over a generation where Conservative party has treated the question of culture, and its role in the stability and cohesion of the nation, when such stability and cohesion is dangerously threatened, with the depth and seriousness that it deserves

Kemi Badenoch’s document, The Right Way, as one might hope for from a Conservative leader, is clear in offering solutions to the nation’s financial discontents. Yet, it is the first time in over a generation where Conservative party has treated the question of culture, and its role in the stability and cohesion of the nation, when such stability and cohesion is dangerously threatened, with the depth and seriousness that it deserves. One can page through every Conservative manifesto back to the millennium, and one sees that culture is a complete afterthought, sometimes thoughtlessly turned into the category “culture & sport”. However, The Right Way changes this entirely. 

Just as Pitt came to realise that the prosperity and strength of the nation relied not just on economic vigour but also cultural cohesion, Badenoch has also come to the same realisation and made it a central tenet of her thinking. “Britain’s economic and cultural malaises are not unrelated,” she argues. For a start, a functioning economy requires “trust, social cohesion, personal responsibility, judgement and well-functioning, efficient institutions.” 

Yet, it is more than financial. Britain should be as a home, and to be a home there must be “the same shared culture and values; where the same rules apply to everyone and where each generation strives to leave a stronger country than it inherited.” The Right Way embraces similar forceful legislative action as Pitt did to maintain intrinsic and inherited British liberties – for example withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights – but it also recognises the need for the resolute support for and propagation of a shared British culture. 

“People who make Britain their permanent home should embrace our culture”, remarks Badenoch. “Loyalty to Britain and her culture and traditions, as well as a rejection of imported sectarian conflicts, must come before all else,” and British institutions should stop being embarrassed at their own special and unique qualities. Multi-culturalism is a fool’s errand: “Countries that have multiple cultures sitting side by side have to work so much harder to keep the peace.” 

This paper, as has been said, is dedicated to defining a political philosophy ahead of developing policy. Whilst it goes some way to defining British identity by way of its institutions and principles – freedom of speech, free enterprise, equality before the law – it is less expansive in trying to define British culture itself. Badenoch has spoken on this matter in other places – for example, last year’s Wilberforce speech, where she spoke of the formative influence of Christianity in the development of British society. But there is more for her to say on this question. 

It should also be noted that Reform, in the person of Danny Kruger, has put forward a similar philosophical manifesto, somewhat shorter, but which moves from philosophical ideas to more concrete proposals. Like Badenoch, Kruger is also thoroughly alive to the question of cultural cohesion, and in his manifesto itself he has also been more forward in highlighting the role of Christianity and the Church in creating and maintaining a culture and society which is cohesive, stable and also tolerant for those of all faiths and none. 

This situation sets up what should be an engaging, and vital time of debate and development of policy

This situation sets up what should be an engaging, and vital time of debate and development of policy. How can we go further to define what of British culture is needful for everyone to know and adhere to? And how in this complex age, with a number of our national institutions already suborned and hostile to such an inherited and shared culture, and society already well on the way to balkanisation, how do we go about advocating for it and repropagating it in the sphere of education, the arts and public life? And what resolute measures will she be prepared to take?

Badenoch’s paper is a sign of intent that she is serious about grappling with these hard and vital questions, and that we should expect to hear more. As Pitt understood, we cannot shy away from them — but if we dare to deal with them resolutely as he did, we can hope not only to come through the threat of dissolution, but even hope, as Britain found later in the 19^th century thanks to the foundations that Pitt laid down, for renewed prosperity and greatness.