Is Michael Gove Right to Say Reform is Not “Conservative”?

The writer is in Australia.

A fortnight ago my wife and I were driving some 750 kilometres one day from the north-western tip of Newfoundland island back to Gander, home of the most important civilian airport in the 1960s because it’s where planes from the east coast of North America had to refuel to get to Europe (and vice versa). It’s also where dozens and dozens of planes landed on 9/11, unplanned of course, and the tiny town put up all the passengers for four days. They made that into a very successful Broadway and West End musical, Come From Away.

Anyway, there we are driving through the wilds of Newfoundland, a fantastically beautiful place where you’ll see moose and caribou as you drive and hope like heck you don’t ever hit one. To while away the time my wife put on a podcast by the Daily Telegraph, one in which the hosts interviewed the Editor of the Spectator, Michael Gove. It was an excellent interview but one thing stuck in my craw. You see, when pressed about Nigel Farage and his Reform political party, my boss’s boss, Gove, kept coming back to the same point. He told the interviewers that Reform was not a conservative party. And many of you in Australia will recognise that it is an exactly similar point that our Morning Double Shot Editor Terry Barnes has repeatedly made in the Australian context, namely that One Nation is not a conservative party.

This being the most pro-free speech weekly in Christendom (and you don’t really get much free speech outside of those historical lands do you?), I’d like to indulge in a bit of colonial pushback against this claim by our venerable London Editor. Because one thing Gove made clear in (and by agreeing to do) that interview was that he is a free speech guy.

So what are we to make of this criticism of ‘not being conservative’? Of course Messrs Gove and Barnes mean their censure or disparaging point to be something more than a purely semantic one, a fight over how to use a word. They mean it to have a political sting in the tail. So that leaves us with two ways to take the term ‘conservative’. One is purely procedural. A conservative party in this sense just happens to be the most Right-leaning of the ones currently on offer. It’s a shorthand for where a party stands on the current spectrum. Lots of people use the term that way. Yet that can hardly be the sense in which Mssrs Gove and Barnes are using it. They mean to make a substantive point, one with real oomph and force.

And that takes us to the other possibility. What they’re saying is that a ‘conservative’ party is one that tries to conserve the good things that have been passed down to us. But clearly that is a context-dependent value or virtue. No sane person would want to conserve anything as regards North Korea’s political set-up. In other words, you need a pre-existing idea of what things are good and what aren’t before you can play the ‘let’s conserve’ game. Right?

And that takes us to the reason why I think that so many former Tory and Aussie Coalition voters have deserted those ships. In 14 years of Tory governments what they most conserved were the woeful Tony Blair innovations to what had been one of the world’s greatest constitutional arrangements. The Tories conserved the awful Human Rights Act. They conserved the country being in the European Convention on Human Rights as it was continually remade by foreign activist judges to make deportations impossible. They conserved an idiotic set-up where top judges effectively pick their own successors. They conserved all of the democracy-enervating qangos and the inability to control the borders. They conserved the Keynesian big spending and big taxing. They conserved (and initiated) the Net Zero insanity. And during Covid they certainly did not conserve “the flood of British freedoms, which to the open sea of the world’s praise, hath flowed with pomp of waters, unwithstood”.

And the Libs in Australia in their nine years were hardly any better. They conserved or initiated the Lefty progressive policies on Net Zero, massive spending and taxing, Labour hitjobs on pensions, the entire Lefty culture war victories. Try to think of anything they undid. Meanwhile they oversaw Covid’s biggest attacks on our civil liberties in centuries.

So what the Reform Party and One Nation might reply to Mssrs Gove and Barnes is that from the vantage of the 1990s they – not the Tories or the Libs – are the real conservative parties. They want to conserve what we had then. Not what we have now. And to do that they will first have to unwind the progressive Left’s triumphs of the last couple of decades.

Put differently, do you as a Right-leaning voter prefer to be part of a team conserving what we had back then or have now? It is patently obvious that the former is the answer most Right-leaning voters are giving. That’s why Badenoch in Britain and Taylor in Australia are desperately pushing their Establishment parties in that direction, big time. ‘Good’, I say. I look at Poland and see a country with big time growth and nearly no mass immigration (putting the lie to the Keynesian, Lefty economic settlement). I also want an end to democracy-gutting managerialism that our established parties of the right ‘conserved’.

So, I think it turns out that the critique of ‘not being conservative’ is sort of time-dependent when it comes to Britain and Australia. Tell us, precisely, what you want to conserve. If it’s what we had before Blair and back under Howard then that means a lot of unwinding and repealing is now needed – to get us back to conserving the good things we had a couple of decades ago.

Moreover, that is precisely what the Tories and Libs are today trying to promise voters they can and will deliver. As I said, ‘good’. But that means the issue between them and the insurgent new parties of the Right is not about who is conservative. Nope, it’s about ‘whom can you trust?’ On immigration. On lower taxing. On getting immigration way, way down and enforcing the borders. On getting unelected judges and transnational bureaucrats out of social policy decision-making. On free speech (which to me has till lately been sold out by the established parties of the Right). On our civil liberties come the next emergency.

But if I am right, and trusting parties to keep their word is the key issue for most voters on the Right, then Farage and Hanson have a big advantage. They do not have to overcome a decade-plus record of not being trustworthy, like the serial philanderer. Yes, there are routes home for Kemi and Angus. But it ain’t going to be easy for them, is it? (For Angus in Australia, for the Lord’s sake, you have to give an explicit number for total net immigration for your first and second year in office, plus promise to resign if it’s not met, or no one will believe you on this issue, not with all the wets in your partyroom.)

Over to you Michael.

Dr James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article was first published in Spectator Australia.