William Morris's country residence in the Cotswolds is the Eden of Tory socialism. Credit: The Print Collector/Getty Images
William Guest falls asleep after returning from an exhausting meeting of socialist radicals in London and is transported to the early 21st century — and to a socialist, agrarian and very English paradise. In this paradise, the forces of industrialisation have been banished. There is no private property, no money, no police, no prisons. All things are held in common. Everyone lives close to the land. No one is alienated from their labour. Even the repressive forces of marriage have been abolished.
This is the one paragraph version of William Morris’s famous fictional classic, News From Nowhere, a book serialised in the socialist magazine Commonweal in 1890. Though these days he is better known as a textile designer, in his day Morris was one of the pre-eminent public intellectuals of the Victorian era. He wrote books and poems. And News from Nowhere was widely read.
“Nowhere” was a reference to, and a translation of, the word “utopia,” the name of Sir Thomas More’s well-known 16th century attempt to describe heaven on Earth. But unlike More’s fictional island, situated somewhere off the coast of South America, Morris’s updated version was not a nowhere at all but based on an existing place: Kelmscott in the Cotswolds, where Morris had his much-loved country residence. The Kelmscott Press edition of News From Nowhere has an engraving of Kelmscott Manor on the cover next to the words: “This is a picture of the old house on the Thames to which the people of this story went.”
So wherever you might be going on your holidays, I reckon I have it beat. I went to paradise. I went to Kelmscott itself. As the sun beat down, I stepped out through the reeds and swam in the Thames right by Morris’s house, which is currently undergoing extensive refurbishment. My family went for country walks down shady lanes. We drank in The Plough Inn. “There is no need to lock the car door,” a local drinker informed me: “we don’t have crime round here.” The only sound in the air was that of nature and the gentle waft of cricket commentary coming from a neighbourly radio. Yes, paradise.
But I have bad news for William Morris, bad news from nowhere as it were: lovely place though Kemscott undoubtedly is, it is absolutely not a socialist paradise.
This is socialism only for those that can afford it. Zoopla informs me that, despite a recent dip in prices, the average cost of a house in the village is over £700,000 – that’s the average! This is where David Cameron was MP and it remains a Tory stronghold. Every other car is a Range Rover. Kate Moss and Gary Barlow come to the pub here from their country residences in the next village along. And only a little further afield, the whole social buzz of the Chipping Norton/Burford sets — the English version of the Hamptons — are known for some of the most extravagant, celebrity-studded, cocaine-fuelled parties ever thrown in this country. Forget socialist paradise, think The Great Gatsby.
William Morris always hated the fact that his wallpaper designs were loved by the middle and upper classes. He may have come from a wealthy bourgeoise family himself and was educated at public school and Oxford, but his commitment to socialism was real, if a little paternalistic. He read Marx. He got arrested at demonstrations. He employed working-class boys from Euston in his studio to produce the wallpapers that made his name. But his life was unmistakably one of privilege. And it really bothered him that he was becoming the great guru of middle-class taste. So if William Guest – or Morris himself – were to wake from sleep in the early 21st century, he would be appalled. Morris would also probably be appalled that Kelmscott Manor is being restored. He founded a society to campaign against restoration.
Despite News From Nowhere and its quasi science fiction fantasy, Morris was always more concerned with the past than the future. And unlike many of his contemporaries, it wasn’t the classical world that inspired him, but medieval England. For Morris, this was the pre-lapsarian paradise, full of guilds and gothic spires and maypoles, a world before the fall of the industrial revolution.
Socialism, as it came to develop in this country, and especially through the Labour party and the Trade Unions, became more and more about industry and increasingly lost touch with the John Ruskin/William Morris type of anti-industrial strain. Perhaps that is why the peculiarly Tory kind of socialism that you find in this tradition exists only on the fringes of the Left, if Left it is.
John Ruskin — Morris’ greatest political and aesthetic influence — described himself as both a Tory and a Communist. He claimed “a most sincere love of kings, and a dislike of everybody who attempted to disobey them” and yet also declared himself the “reddest of the red” – though his communism was decidedly old-school, less Paris Commune, more Acts of the Apostles. Ruskin believed that men and women had been alienated from their labour and ripped off by rapacious capitalism. This is the tradition out of which the present Red Tory/Blue Labour movements develop: socially conservative, economically redistributive. Its enemy is liberalism in all its forms, both the social liberalism of the Left and the economic liberalism of the Right.
And this, roughly speaking, is my political tradition too. But it is often misunderstood. It is, for example, a completely different thing – chalk and cheese different – from the so-called “Tory socialism” the Telegraph wrote about the other day. The article described how wealthy property developers are seeking a Covid bailout from the government. These are the people who live by the principles of laissez faire economics but are magically converted to “bail-outs” when it suits them, and they are rightly to be chastised. But they are not Tories. And it does slightly bother me that the Telegraph, of all papers, has got this one wrong.
Tories should not be confused with the rich or the business class. Real Tories believe in God, Queen and country traditionalism, they are Brexity by instinct, and ever so slightly look down upon the nouveau riche obsession that the middle classes have with money — just as true Cotswold Tories are probably just a little embarrassed by the showy extravagances of the whole Chipping Norton set.
Tories are not natural capitalists. Tories are farmers and country squires. Of course, they too need to pay the bills — so they have nothing against making money. But, to them, capitalism is not a matter of core doctrine. What they really believe in is the same land, lanes, pubs and churches that Morris did. And so this sort Toryism is a natural bedfellow of the Morris/Ruskin kind of agrarian socialism — they might sleep uncomfortably together perhaps, but would have a solid respect one for the other.
Kelmscott church – dedicated to St George, who else – is where Morris is buried. One hundred and thirty years on, the area may not look like Morris hoped it would, but it is not the Tories who have ruined it. This is Notting Hill in Hunter wellies. And these people are, broadly speaking, natural liberals, often both socially and economically. All his life, William Morris feared that his work would be appropriated by the forces of liberal capitalism. And nowhere is this fear more realised that here, in the place of his burial, in the very heart of the English Eden.
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SubscribeLeveling-up forces the socialists to admit they want to level-down.
Thankfully, most of us are one nation tories. We’re eternally grateful to the grocer’s daughter for rescuing our country from its undemocratic trades unions in the city and elsewhere.
I see little appetite for returning the means of production to the government. It cannot even do procurement properly, let alone anything more useful that caring for the already sick.
Now, we need a viable market to pay for care in our old age.
Well, let’s get on with finding that “viable market” cause it’s taking an awful long time.
You got that right. When did illness become so called social care? It is scandalous that the NHS got away with making council’s provide illegal levels of healthcare thus removing an un-sexy specialism and improve their budgets.
One parent with an acquired brain injury. Bed bound Cognizant and to a degree mobile in a wheelchair. The other with Alzheimer’s in similar circumstances.
Which one was funded as a sick patient in a home, for a decade? It wasn’t the one with the equally destructive Alzheimer’s disease.
All very well for those of old to retire of their own volition to the Bide A Wee home for the elderly. Totally different to have to fight for NHS Continuing Healthcare for someone ill by the Kafkaesque process that does not permit the use of precedent, i.e. my parent’s needs are the same as this or that other funded person so they should be funded too.
Until you’ve jumped through years of local and so called independent appeals, you can’t even get into a court that would be obliged to permit comparison of needs.
Even the medical professionals use precedent in providing treatment. But not one of them is allowed to do so in assessing illnesses when it comes to who pays.
Even better is the concept that someone passing through let’s say, dementia, to their inevitable death, can actually get better and at annual or more frequent assessments, can lose hard won funding.
You couldn’t make it up.
The market is viable. The state then extracts about c 40% of the private sectors output each year and spends it very inefficiently and ineffectively. The later is the problem, not the former.
Thank heavens for someone like Domonic Cummins, who realise the whole NHS/Civil Service needs a kick up the bum. Efficiency doesn’t count for that lot. Work but not hard, big pay off and fat pension. That’s their goal.
I had in mind a viable market for insurance. Achievable only if the government caps the cost of social care.
Maybe, but in fact the UK boomed until the 70s. A slight fake boom following Thatcher’s selling of the family silver, and after that the logic of globalisation and neoliberalism means China is top dog, and wages are stagnating in the West.
How old were you in the 70’s? I only ask because don’t you remember those dreadful strikes, the weakness of the wretched Heath creature, and likewise Wilson, Jim Callaghan et al?
Why on earth do you think we opted for the Common Market, as we supinely believed it to be? We were on the cusp of bankruptcy due to the profligacy of the unsustainable Welfare State. Then we grovelled on ‘all fours’ to the IMF. A real case of ” the Colonels dead and the Gatling jammed” if ever there was one.
Incidentally you are in error, China is not ” top dog”. On the contrary they ‘eat’ dogs don’t they? How vile is that I ask you?
I wasn’t born until 1980. I am sure the strikes were bad, but I am talking about the period 1945-1970 more or less.
Although I lived idyllically during those halcyon days of 1945-70, I do clearly recall my farther’s generation being driven incandescent with anger about the almost continuous plague of strikes that afflicted the country.
The Miners, the Dockers, Power workers, Fleet St Printers, Car workers of every variety, and eventually, even the good old Fire Brigade.
During the same period we witnessed the collapse of the Aviation industry, Shipbuilding, the Car industry, and countless other related manufacturing jobs.
Why do you think we ended up
“grovelling on all fours” to get into the Common Market?
The 1959 film “I’m All Right Jack”, starring the late Peter Sellers is a brilliant evocation of era. Try and see if you haven’t already.
Ah yes, the ‘Three Day Week’ when we worked under the light of camping-gas lanterns.
We got on well enough, even with this handicap. But what made us angry was that, for no apparent reason, Heath suddenly just gave up the fight.
Yes indeed, what a “waste of rations” the wretched Ted Heath was.
My father a shop steward ranted and raved at his Union members for not turning up to meetings in the early fifties. Claiming the Communists were taking control of the unions. Three years later the manufacturer closed. Loss 5,000 job’s. My intense dislike for Unionism was born.
Now well past my sell by date I listen to the Teachers Union and the msm taking the opportunity of the current exam turmoil to spew out the same hatred of any view that does not fit their alleged utopia.
That great socialist Ernest Bevin had the measure of the communist menace, but sadly died too young to expiate them from the Labour Party, to the nations eternal regret.
Funny, I don’t know many Chinese folks, and I know quite a few, who eat dogs.
The boom in the 50’s and 60’s was initially brought on by the rebuilding of the country after WW2 and then artificially extended by socialist policies. Socialism is always successful at the start, but then the damage begins to set in. We lost most of our world leading industries to nationalisation, trade union strikes, wage setting, price setting and tax and spend.
The boom was caused in part by that of course, but not all countries recover from wars to be much richer than before, or else the Middle East would be the most prosperous area in the world right now. The post war consensus was successful and the growth in economy widely spread. Wages grew as fast, or faster, than profits. There were no banking collapses in the Bretton woods era.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
What it was replaced by, neoliberalism and globalisation, was what was responsible for Britain losing most of the world leading industries. I wouldn’t deny that trade union practices played some part, but that was something unique to the UK, Germany skilled up and still has a manufacturing base.
“We lost most of our world leading industries to nationalisation, trade union strikes, wage setting, price setting and tax and spend.”
Oh, sorry that the British working class didn’t want to go back to 19th century working conditions so as to compete with the Chinese, their bad. You must be a business owner, otherwise your prejudices don’t make sense. Resentful that you didn’t make all the money that was your God given right to make? The world is so unfair.
This thing about Socialism being good at the beginning and bad in the end, what can I say, I’ve heard this trope a few times and it reflects bad on the person who repeats it. You’ve got to have some nerve to say that in the face of the destruction that capitalism and its attendant aberration, consumerism has unleashed, some triumph of the human spirit indeed.
This thing about Socialism being good at the beginning and bad in the end, what can I say, I’ve heard this trope a few times and it reflects bad on the person who rejects it. You’ve got to have some nerve to do that in the face of the destruction that socialism and its attendant aberration, communism has unleashed, some triumph of the human spirit indeed.
The country was booming right up until Wilson and Callaghan drove it over a cliff. And then it boomed again until Blair and Brown did likewise. And now it’s too late for the Labour Party to learn any lessons from that because frankly it’s barely a mainstream party anymore.
Did 1976 signal the end of your so-called boom? Actually, it was the climax of decades of weakness (according to the FT).
That was when the Labour government was ‘forced’ to obtain a bail out from the IMF to stabilise the value of sterling.
The loan was also accompanied with conditions to cut public spending and raise interest rates.
Because as we’ve just seen the Government cares for the sick so very, very well! (Why don’t any other countries imitate our glorious healthcare system?)
Funnily enough I am currently reading Fiona MacCarthy’s biography of Morris, published 1994. It seems to be very good. Particularly enjoyable is the little bio of MacCarthy that says: ‘She writes for the Guardian and lives in Derbyshire and Southern Tuscany’. Is it mandated that every woman who writes for the Guardian must have a villa in Tuscany?
Either there or Provence – or somewhere similar as long as there are no pesky immigrants living close by. File under the heading: ‘Hypocrite/hypocrisy’ Sub heading: ‘Loony Lefty idiot, best ignored’
Umbria is probably ‘smarter’ these days.
“Tories are not natural capitalists”
Are they not natural rentier capitalists? Isn’t this where the money comes from to pay the bills? The Tory Party is the political wing of the City of London, the capture complete during the ghastly Thatcher’s misbegotten term in office – Big Bang et parasitic al.
The Chamberlain strain of Tory protectionism is long gone unfortunately – and we did and do really really need an industrial base under domestic control, I am afraid that the chickens are now about to come home with a vengeance here, as the ephemeral service funny money gig economy simply melts away like an ice lolly in the fierce sun
Also Morris’ vision is hardly consistent with mass immigration, the population has increased by 8 million over a couple of decades thanks in large part apparently to the lunatic globalism of the Blair/Brown regimes – the latter seemed greatly enamoured of glooobalisation in one country. One consequence has been white flight from the cities and ruined towns and the consequent proliferation of box type accommodation into our green and pleasant dream space. I thought Rev Fraser was pretty supportive of taking in all comers, so his view would be interesting here.
It’s also doubtful that country squires, such as actually still exist, are huge fans of gay marriage, Islam and Caribbean immigration. All of which are intractable parts of Fraser’s values.
I would have thought that Fraser would be a fan of Wm Cobbett, the ultimate Tory radical, who also harked back to pre-Reformation days. But a cursory search shows nothing – maybe Cobbett’s Tory radicalism was too much English bulldog variety for Fraser.
Fraser was very enthused by the Levellers and the Putney debates which he said “laid the ground for modern British radicalism” (Guardian 2003) – crucially he noted that “religion was to be a matter of conscience”, and the idea of the spiritual equality of believers certainly underlay demands for political equality.
But then in 2017 he opines in the Guardian; “This is what I most admire about British Islam. Its bolshy “Protestantism”. Its refusal to be bought off by official trinkets. Its refusal of respectability”
I must have missed the bit where Islam allows freedom of religion. And the mores of “British” Islam dominated as it is by the Deobandi sect offend not only genuine liberals but also those of socially conservative stamp too. To equate Islam with bolshy Protestantism seems pretty bizarre to me, I doubt Colonel Rainsborough would have been overly impressed.
I have no personal animus against Fraser but I find his mixture of contrarianism and sentimentality bizarre. The rural elites are mass beneficiaries of the EU agricultural policy and the average landowner is far more interested in legal loopholes to use pesticides than the Norman tracery in the local church. Naturally Fraser needs to find a constituency for this postmodern rainbow feudalism he envisages but dredging 18th century caricatures to serve isn’t the answer.
“Rainbow feudalism”. Pure genius! Love that – permission to borrow?
All yours!
Yes, come on, Giles – let us know how you reconcile this with mass immigration & support for Islam. It all sounds rather incoherent –
There is some truth to making and growing things being preferable. i.e. owning and/or seeing the results of one’s labour.
I do wonder at stress and mental health issues caused in some at work, by never getting to the end and enjoying that moment.
Starting again with a clean sheet being perhaps, daunting, but far less complex and worrying than the alternative.
Great article, Giles. Alongside Morris and Ruskin you could also place Gustav Landauer – the “romantic” German socialist of the early 20th century who despised Marxism precisely because of its close allegiance with industrialism. E. Lunn’s “Prophet of Community” is probably the best book on him.
What the author describes is just right wing socialism. Socialism, but for natives only (or Socialism for white people). Arguably the worse type of socialism. That is socialism without a moral premise. I can’t stand normal socialism, but at least they make some attempt to claim their’s is a ‘moral cause’.
Classical Liberalism is a very British invention and one we need to stop dismissing as ‘vulgar Thatcherism’. Classical liberalism is what’s made this and many other countries free and wealthy. Reject it at your peril
You could not be more wrong. The SDP draws its principles from Catholic Social Teaching. It combines a respect for communitarianism with a desire for greater equality. It simply dislikes identitarian politics, because they are divisive and corrosive.
Classical Liberalism has this attribute -> it makes you richer and then it makes the other guy richer. And you poorer.
Anyway, like a lot of empires the British started off mercantilist, then free traders, then protectionist again. The US is moving into phase 3.
It makes everyone richer. Just look at any metric on living standards. Since the birth of capitalism poverty has reduced by about 90% in real terms and increased living standards many, many times over. And all while the population grew by a factor of 10.
At what cost?
Of course, some of that was technological increases, It was far better to live in East Germany in 1980 than Britain in 1800. And China now, of course, isn’t pursing a classical liberal approach.
In fact if you mean by pure classic liberalism the fusion of social liberalism and classical economics, it ended in terms of economics in most of the west in the 20C. The most successful period was the post war period which was a time of high taxes, capital controls, gold standards and Kenysian economics. In the most recent period in the West wages have stagnated, while in developing economies — very few of which are classical or neo-classical in their economics — are booming. Sure, globalisation is behind it all but in the different countries the response is protectionist or mercantilist.
Superb piece of writing. Please join us, you social conservatives, in the Social Democratic Party.
Sadly, Kelmscott is not ‘in the Cotswolds’.
In fact it sits on the billiard table flat, upper Thames Valley, two miles to the east of Lechlade.
Even St George’s church is less than half a mile north of the Thames.
This ‘Cotswold conceit’ has a long history. The somewhat eccentric Mitford family being one of the more obvious offenders.
Enoch Powell used to divide conservatives into “Tories” and “Whigs”. He himself was a Tory and people like MacMillan were Whigs. Toryism was about maintaining institutions because they have historic standing and he did at one point call both Benn and Foot Tories even though both of them would have abolished the House of Lords. Whigs were the more liberal end of the Conservatives who supported social change provided they remained in charge to carry it out.
This seems to be an attempt by Fraser to explain why his had gone from supporting the Stop the City protests outside St Pauls to voting back into power a government more aligned with rapacious capitalism than any before. It is a similar stretch of the eyes in which Claire Fox has gone from failing to condemn an IRA outrage to accepting the Conservative whip in the House of Lords. But however much he contorts reality to prove (to himself, few others care) that his principles are as intact as ever but the facts have changed, he fools no-one but himself.
Surely IIRC Mr. Powell and Mr. Foot stood together in opposing Harold Wilson’s attempts to ‘reform’ the House of Lords.
for different reasons. Foot wanted it gone, Powell wanted to represent the interest that it did, that is the aristocracy and leave representing the people to the House of Commons
I think the Rev Giles has partially renounced socialism, but he needs a further nudge towards the space that all right-thinking people occupy – Tory anarchism. Patron saints include William Cobbett, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and Peter Cook. Sadly our contrarianism and unclubbaility means that we’ll never be a force to be reckoned with.
Perhaps we may when all the others have gone? It seems the logical outcome and “we are legion”.
Ah, a fellow-traveller I see! I hope you’re right (and I don’t mean in a political sense)
Waugh Jr. (Bron) was perhaps the archetypal Tory anarchist: a staunch opponent of socialism and modernism who also disliked Thatcherism and abhorred the death penalty.
Indeed. And sorely missed today…
Interesting essay. You get the same sense reading Disraeli’s novels before he rose to party eminence. Whilst of a different cloth, there’s also the municipal Toryism of the turn of the last century. A very practical example of improvement and pioneering in many respects, for example the first council housing in Europe was the initiative of the Tory modernisers of Liverpool. They held power, believe it or not,right through the period 1895 to 1955!
purely as a side-note, Liverpool provides a fascinating case of the effect of sectarianism in politics in that the Tory party there was very much the Orange Party as well and held power on the council and a majority of the Parliamentary seats. There was also a Liverpool Protestant Party which held seats on the Council until 1972. Having said that I have yet to find anyone in Liverpool who can tell me definitively which one of the football teams was the Catholic one and which the Protestant
That’s because today neither Liverpool nor Everton have a sectarian leaning.
In the 1930s, a major annual event (possibly the ONLY non-liturgical event) in Liverpool Catholicism was the football match between the city’s major Catholic school, St Francis Xavier’s, and Everton. “Everton” meant the full team, including Dixie Dean, that won the League in 1932 and 1939: not the collection of fourth-team reserves major teams field these days for charity fixtures.
On the other hand, Liverpool bought their training ground from SFX and named it after two of the Jesuit priests at the school. And though Everton’s original name (St Domingo FC) sounds Catholic, the name comes from the St Domingo Methodist Chapel, whose congregation provided the team’s first players. Not because there’s a branch of Methodism that believes in canonisation – but after the Caribbean city where an 18th century mayor of Liverpool made his fortune.
The SFX match, and the widespread myth still around that Everton’s the Catholic team, imply that 75-100 years ago it was: and, sectarianism being what it is, that probably means Liverpool was for Prods. The standard Merseyside explanation is that 1950s and 1960s slum clearance spawned unsectarian new housing estates outside the city centre, and the immediate disruption from the Blitz moved the segmented population around Goodison and Anfield undiscriminatingly around the rest of the inner city.
Certainly by the early 1950s, this Evertonian was acutely aware how much in Liverpool had a sectarian twist: but never saw any of it in the Liverpool/Everton rivalry.
Interesting. Thanks.
I wonder how he made his fortune in St Domingo? Just saying. What with all the nonsense recently.
Will they have to bin the entire club?
Actually, to add to the mix there was another Liverpool Constituency which returned an Irish Nationalist from 1885 to 1927
You’re right. On the football side, the received wisdom is Everton was Catholic, Liverpool Protestant. I think the characterisation is flawed. They had shared roots in the original Everton FC and there are numerous examples of Catholics playing for Liverpool and
Protestants for Everton right from the earliest history of the clubs.
I’m not an expert but I take an interest in my home territory. I put a piece on this subject in my conclusion to Sectarianism, Politics and Progress : Merseyside 1800-1914- free to view cos no one will ever want to spend money buying my self indulgent outpourings- at Academia.edu.
Wasn’t Disraeli a one-nation Tory? He wasn’t a Socialist and I don’t understand Giles’s category of a Tory Socialist. I think Giles is looking for a political home and as he started out on the left he’s finding it a somewhat difficult to call himself a Tory or a Conservative. He can’t quite leave that socialist bit out of anything he wishes to describe himself as.
Disraeli is, I think, my kind of Tory (although I need to read up a lot more about him). He had a social conscience and sought to do right. He understood capitalism and realised it could be a force for good, if properly managed, or a force for pure greed if not.
He was and whilst more pragmatic than driven by principle in my opinion, I still think his perception of Toryism has relevance for today. Blake’s biography is brilliant and you can get a good feel of Disraeli’s philosophy from his novel Sybil. You’ll also see his description of the two nations he saw existing which is the origin of the One Nation Toryism phrase.
Wow I never knew that. As a Liverpool fc fan and a tory I’m struck by the extraordinary coincidence of fortune both seem to share inspite of the mutual anitpathy between them – both were at their height of their powers in the 1980s and now. I’m sure the irony is not lost on either side!
I think Liverpool stopped voting Tory following the arrival of Bill Shankly, an avowed socialist if ever there was one. Have you read ‘Red Or Dead’ about Shankly and Liverpool by David Peace? it’s bonkers but very good.
Kelmscott Manor is now looked after by the Society of Antiquaries. Rather than being appalled, Morris would (I think) be perfectly happy with their plans for conservation and repair, with some sympathetic new build
I guess I’m a fan of Red Toryism as well, and very much resentful of the bourgeois liberalism you saddled us, your American colonies, with. Bolingbroke, Swift, Dr. Johnson, Pitt the Younger, …addressing the demands of the present with organic thinking out of the ethos of the past, Tradition.
Albert Kensington (above) points out how ‘undead’ that Toryism is today with Thatcher having sold what was left of its soul to the neoliberal cosmopolite City. But it feels like we have reached a terminus. And if Roger Hallam is correct, Communism and a return to at least the 18th cent. is the only thing that will save the species along with what civilization is worth saving, …Xtianity.
If Paradise includes the waft of cricket commentary, no matter how gentle, I’ll take Hell.
This is among the most interesting of Giles Fraser’s recent articles, largely because it gets away from the convenient, yet increasingly irrelevant and misleading left”“right categories into which so many persist in forcing matters far more complicated and subtly differentiated. So he is right to end one paragraph thus:
That concluding doubt is apt. One of the most distinctive characteristics of the English working class ” Wales and Scotland a little less so ” is the phenomenon of the working class Tory. So distinctive is this phenomenon, which stretches back well into the nineteenth century, that it has attracted the attention of researchers in continental Europe; and their interest has been aroused largely because it runs against the grain of commonly perceived class interests, both on the continent and in the UK.
At least one academic paper I read, but cannot find at the moment, was written at least ten years ago by a German researcher, who noted that according to most statistical calculations, the proportion of working-class voters who habitually voted Tory (or sometimes Liberal, especially in Scotland or Wales) was surprisingly high ” in the area of 25″“30%. The questionnaires that this researcher distributed, and his interviews with such voters, indicated three principal reasons for this Tory inclination. The first was a belief that financial reward and an adequate standard of living should be earned by the sweat of the brow. thrift and good judgement. The second flowed from this ” that welfare was regarded with suspicion because it encouraged indolence. The third was an aversion to collective action, for such action discouraged individual responsibility and judgement. One of the conclusions of that researcher was that the “Protestant ethic”, identified some eighty years earlier by his great compatriot, Max Weber, was deeply ingrained in English culture.
Other academic findings point in the same direction ” and some are especially concordant with Giles Fraser’s arguments. A number of researchers (I can provide a bibliography if requested) see the working-class Tory in a light very different from that of Marxist-influenced class interests. Such voters show similar inclinations to the Tories researched by the German scholar; but these other researchers also identify an attachment to the institutions and structures of the United Kingdom ” the kind of political and cultural attachments that Giles Fraser identifies in this article. This particular brand of working-class Tory is especially common in rural areas.
So I wonder if Rev Fraser’s neologism, Tory socialism, is accurate. Nevertheless, it has a certain aptness, because folk so inclined are likely to support traditional virtues, including those of helping people less fortunate or capable than oneself.
Alf Garnett of Till Death Us Do Part fame, is an often hilarious caricature of the working-class Tory; and like all effective caricatures, is funny because it contains truthful elements. But taken seriously, the caricature becomes a calumny, and does a disservice to a significant body of voters who, almost certainly, helped create the large majority at the most recent general election.
You really do live in a different world to the one I do
An interesting typo there I think!
Indeed
If these agrarian tories exist, why do they so doggedly continue to support a party which has served only businessmen for at least the last 100 years? The Tory Party has done more than any others to tear up the English countryside and wipe out the rural communities so beloved of Morris and Ruskin.
I had to laugh. Starting with the title: Tory socialism indeed.
The mess that capitalism and its latest cult Neoliberalism has put us in is now so noticeably dire, that the comfortable think that they can have a stab at resuscitating Feudalism and the Old Regime and try to sell it to people in the hope that perhaps we’ll buy it. You couldn’t make it up!
“Tories should not be confused with the rich or the business class.”
Perhaps not, I’m not conversant with the class structure of the people at the top of the social pyramid but I’m certain they shouldn’t be confused with workers. Unless the Tories the author is thinking of is the millions of Tory voters who fancy themselves on the same side as the rich…
“Real Tories …every so slightly look down upon the nouveau riche obsession that the middle classes have with money ” just as true Cotswold Tories are probably just a little embarrassed by the showy extravagances of the whole Chipping Norton set.”
Is this a piece about the jealousies and envies of ‘new money’ by ‘old money’? Didn’t the Old Regime lose this battle to the merchant class round about between the 16th and 18th centuries? Don’t tell me these jealousies still exist in the face of human extinction!!! This lot is more removed from reality than I ever thought!
“Tories are not natural capitalists. Tories are farmers and country squires…And so this sort Toryism is a natural bedfellow of the Morris/Ruskin kind of agrarian socialism ” they might sleep uncomfortably together perhaps, but would have a solid respect one for the other.”
What on earth does this mean? Does this author not realise that the people he’s talking about would be expropriated of any land that they couldn’t justify holding for their own subsistence, in the event of socialism becoming dominant?
Is this a joke piece?
Aside from anything else there is practically no agrarian socialism to be found outside London. You can paint a pig blue in the shires and watch it get elected.
Well, yes, because the people in the shires don’t want their shires turned into Haringey, Tower Hamlets, Brixton, Toxteth, Seattle, Portland or any of the many other hell holes that Labour and the left inevitably create.
Which to me suggests the absurdity of the wooly coalition of yeomen marxists and urban progressives implicit in the vision outlined in the article.
I’m still dealing with your “rainbow feudalism” concept and now you bring a coalition of yeoman Marxists – a wooly one at that!
All those places you mention are hell holes? Why? I lived in similar places in the London areas you mention and they seem fine urban areas like so many round the country, working people struggling with the cruelties of policies that have everything to do with deranged end-of-century capitalism, hardly something you can blame on the left.
Or maybe you think they’re hellholes because they contain black and brown people and immigrants.
And Labour created them…? Well, that’s infantile, to say the least. I lived there through the Major years and they were what they are today. And if I don’t remember wrong Major was the heir of a previous Tory government that lasted a decade.
A bit racist and detached from any kind of reality, don’t you think?
Well I’ve spent much of my life living in such places, with neighbours of all colours etc. Indeed I still live in such a place much of the time. I have no particular problem with the public urination and the stabbings and the nutters etc, but I can fully understand why many people don’t particularly want to be around all that.
And yet, many people moved from the countryside to these places when industrialisation started – as they do to this day in many parts of Africa and China. This Ruskin-esque romanticisation of the countryside and rural life doesn’t really explain that does it? Maybe because the supporters of this are always from the educated upper-middle class, with delusions of being upper class* – Ruskin, Morris, Giles here, Scruton etc. – and have no fear of being stuck in a small village where of course the peasants will dutifully show obeisance to them, and they can blissfully alternate between writing essays, fox hunting, convivial dinners with roast goose with the landowners from the next village and collecting the rents from the serfs all in the privacy of their well appointed manor house.
Perhaps if you half half a brain and come from a peasant or working class background, the prospect of enforced ignorance, lifelong poverty, the petty brutality of communal life, Skimmington rides and backbreaking labour to live on subsistence doesn’t have so much appeal and that might explain why so many sought to improve their conditions in industrial societies.
* The real upper class have a far more cynical attitude to the whole thing and always sought their own interests whatever happened, and were not much prone to this romantic drivel. As a brief perusal of history will reveal, from enclosures, to the huge fortunes the upper classes made in the height of industrialisation. I think this is why Scruton found it useful to make up a c**k-and-bull story about his being an illegitimate ancestor of a local lord to justify his exalted position in whatever wonderful conservative communitarian emerges.
Surely the socialism of Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites was essentially romantic, not real ?
William Morris seems to have taken it more seriously than the others.
Ruskin was so romantic he burnt all J M W Turner’s erotic drawings and paintings after his death.
Perhaps Morris and Ruskin were just romantic idealists, both of them paid a price for that in their personal lives, losing their wives to other, more practical men.
Might be a lesson in there somewhere.
It wasn’t that long ago Giles you appeared on the now defunct BBC1 late night political show This Week. From your vegetable plot you were extolling the wonders of Jeremy Corbyn?
And he was a member of the new SDP together with Rod Liddle The Vicar of Bray would have his work cut out to keep up him
We both still are, Slacky. His piece is virtually an SDP manifesto.
In my mis-spent youth during the 1960s I knew many members of the then Communist Party of Great Britian. They would have been completely at home with what Mr Fraser has described. They took their inspiration from the Soviet Union which they saw (incredibly) as some kind of folk idyll with smock wearing peasants wearing felt boots. They were William Morris down to the strawberry thief curtains and their children all joined the Woodcraft Folk. They were not opposed to churches and loved to hike to them and try to find the Green Man. It all harks back to the fantasy which even Marx shared that there was once a golden age where Adam delved and Eve span which was destroyed by industrialisation. Therefore even on the farther left there was always the seed of Blue Labour or Red Tory. Perhaps this is a peculiarly English thing, I’m not sure, but I think it explains a lot about the Red Wall and the success of Boris Johnson. His popularity astounds and perplexes the left and the woke and even many Tories. But he is actually a bigger part of the working class tradition than Corbyn/McDonnell/Abbott. It seems the English don’t mind a toff as long as he/she talks about the first person plural: the us and the we of our country within our borders.
The attitude described here reminds me of Roger Scruton. I was a student at Birkbeck in the 80s when we used to go away for study weekends. One of Roger’s sessions was based on passages from Ruskin and Morris. It didn’t seem to go down too well with his colleagues for whom they didn’t qualify as ‘philosophers’. Not that that bothered him or the students. Otherwise his book The Meaning of Conservatism was written as a warning against the ascendancy of economic liberalism on the political right. I noticed in a more recent work Soul of The World that he again repeats a quote from Hobbes ‘that a man is under no obligation which ariseth not from some act of his own’ as capturing the core of the liberal individualist contractual model of society which he rejects. Even if he sided with Mrs T and ‘classical liberals’ on nationalist grounds against Marxist left, his notion of ‘transcendent bonds of allegiance’ couldn’t be further away from the liberal model associated with her and her party. Scruton’s conservatism is closer in spirit to Ruskin or Morris than today’s Conservatives: membership / belonging / being at home in the world, his core principles could even be construed as ‘socialist’. Though ‘socialism’ couldn’t itself be a principle of membership. Family, neighbourhood, Church, trade union, nation are already given as forms of membership to which we are, or ought to be already ‘obliged’. He gives football club as an example of a ‘transcendent bond’ but then he was writing in 1979…
Giles seems to be doing a lot of twisting and turning here. Love the comments on this site.
This article seems very eccentric, but I have sometimes wondered if there mightn’t be a logical coalition, on economic grounds, between public sector workers and the small businessman who run the village shop and the local pub. Both groups probably have more to lose than gain from the free market forces that empower big multinational corporations. Social issues keep them apart, of course.
This comment was deleted just after it was posted. It was “Marked as Spam”. It has now joined my queue of around six comments that, although I have notified the administrators, are still taken down for no good reason. So I’m trying again.
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This is among the most interesting of Giles Fraser’s recent articles, largely because it gets away from the convenient, yet increasingly irrelevant and misleading left”“right categories into which so many persist in forcing matters far more complicated and subtly differentiated. So he is right to end one paragraph thus:
That concluding doubt is apt. One of the most distinctive characteristics of the English working class ” Wales and Scotland a little less so ” is the phenomenon of the working class Tory. So distinctive is this phenomenon, which stretches back well into the nineteenth century, that it has attracted the attention of researchers in continental Europe; and their interest has been aroused largely because it runs against the grain of commonly perceived class interests, both on the continent and in the UK. The phenomenon is common enough in urban areas; but it is especially common in rural parts ” which are Giles Fraser’s concern here.
At least one academic paper I read, but cannot find at the moment, was written at least ten years ago by a German researcher, who noted that according to most statistical calculations, the proportion of working-class voters who habitually voted Tory (or sometimes Liberal, especially in Scotland or Wales) was surprisingly high ” in the area of 25″“30%. The questionnaires that this researcher distributed, and his interviews with such voters, indicated three principal reasons for this Tory inclination. The first was a belief that financial reward and an adequate standard of living should be earned by the sweat of the brow. thrift and good judgement. The second flowed from this ” that welfare was regarded with suspicion because it encouraged indolence. The third was an aversion to collective action, for such action discouraged individual responsibility and judgement. One of the conclusions of that researcher was that the “Protestant ethic”, identified some eighty years earlier by his great compatriot, Max Weber, was deeply ingrained in English culture.
Other academic findings point in the same direction ” and some are especially concordant with Giles Fraser’s arguments. A number of researchers (I can provide a bibliography if requested) see the working-class Tory in a light very different from that of Marxist-influenced class interests. Such voters show similar inclinations to the Tories researched by the German scholar; but these other researchers also identify an attachment to the institutions and structures of the United Kingdom ” the kind of political and cultural attachments that Giles Fraser identifies in this article. This particular brand of working-class Tory is especially common in rural, or semi-rural areas such as my own, which is registered as among the poorest areas in the country, but that votes Tory, last time by comfortably over 50%.
So I wonder if Rev Fraser’s neologism, Tory socialism, is accurate. Nevertheless, it has a certain aptness, because folk so inclined are likely to support traditional virtues, including assistance for those less fortunate or capable than oneself. As Rev Fraser puts it:
Alf Garnett of Till Death Us Do Part fame, is an often hilarious caricature of the working-class Tory; and like all effective caricatures, is funny because it contains truthful elements. But taken seriously, the caricature becomes a calumny, and does a disservice to a significant body of voters who, almost certainly, helped create the large majority at the most recent general election
I’m sure the suspicion extant in Metropolitan left elites that country folk celebrate harvest by dancing around giant straw effigies of Nigel Farage whilst raising their pitchforks every time someone unrelated to them arrives in the village doesn’t help either.
I support “laissez faire” Sir – and I have never supported any bailouts, i do not know any British supporter of lassez faire who has supported bailouts. Do you know any Sir? J.B. Say, Frederic Bastait and the rest were translated into English long ago, as were the works of Ludwig Von Mises in the 20th century, such writers as A.L Perry and Frank Fetter wrote in English to start with and so had no need to be translated. Have you read any of the works of the school of thought you condemn – or do you condemn them without reading them?
The present society of vast government spending, crushing taxation, endless regulation and Credit Bubble monetary expansion (rather than honest money lending – the lending of Real Savings, the actual sacrifice of consumption) would utterly disgust even the most moderate supporter of liberty – let alone a supporter of “laissez faire”. I am not sure what you mean by “liberal capitalism” as you do not define your terms – but I assure you Sir that neither the Old Whig Edmund Burke, the Liberal Gladstone or the Conservative leader Lord Salisbury would recognise this society has having much connection to free enterprise – the principles of honest production and trading in industry being same as they are in farming. Certainly such men as the Marquis of Rockingham did not see a difference between their farming enterprises and their industrial enterprises, and nor should they have done. Nor were such industrialists as Josiah Wedgwood or Abraham Darby somehow inferior Christians compared to yourself Sir.
The Chipping Norton set was largely invented by mediafolk, who delight in cute labels. In fact, the inhabitants of ‘Chippy’ see the set as outsiders who don’t live in the town at all. Clarkson makes the cut for his assorted money-raising activities, especially charity auctions for the Lido, which is a delight for those of us who enjoy swimming outdoors.
Agrarian Utopias vs Urban Utopias, this is a no brainer! The Orthodox Church began in a very ‘Mediterranean’ part of the world. Europe needs to discover its Mediterranean work ethic, not this Calvinistic nonsense. Someone else on Unherd had an interesting comment on UBI and the two ethoi of work.