Unionism: What is Mrs May pitching?

Unionism was Joseph Chamberlain's special province when he dominated Victorian politics. Today, Theresa May is trying to spark a resurgence. Photograph: Joseph Chamberlain plaque by Simon Harriyott (License) (Cropped)

At the beginning of last week, Theresa May launched her first full year as the leader of the Conservative & Unionist Party with a speech that called for a 'shared society' (BBC, 2017). Over the years, the Conservatives have made many rebranding attempts. Is May's any different?

For the most part, the attempts of her predecessors - Major, Hague, Duncan Smith and Cameron - have been focussed on repackaging Thatcher. They have tried to soften the harsh anti-government and anti-interventionism tone to the policies of the Thatcher-Reagan consensus (BBC, 2017{2}).

But they all contained the same disdain for the idea of a 'society' as a figment created to justify collectivism - to justify a claim that people have duties towards others beyond themselves and their own families, expressed through taxation and the state. They just tried to make rejection of the state, and embrace of the free market and privatisation in its place, palatable or 'empowering'.

May's rebrand seems different. She has appealed harder to the idea of the state's role, promising intervention in a way that none of her recent forebears would perhaps have contemplated. She has hinted at moving away from austerity and letting the state intervene more. But how does this all relate to what we know of conservatism and do these appeals follow through?

Chamberlain and Unionism

Theresa May's inspiration, it seems, for this deviation from the legacy of Thatcher is Joseph Chamberlain. Chamberlain was the Victorian political heavyweight who broke his Unionists away from the Liberals and led them into alliance, and eventual merger, with the Conservatives.

A businessman, and industrialist, he was at first aligned with the radical liberal reformers who campaigned for enfranchisement and free, compulsory - and local authority run - education. As Mayor of Birmingham he reorganised municipal utilities, bringing them under municipal control, cleared slums, and rallied public and private money to public works, such as building libraries, museums, schools and parks.

On the other hand, he proved himself to be an aggressive nationalist. He opposed Irish Home Rule and defended the Union, and further wanted to see the Empire become a truly, exclusively, British trading system, protected by trade tariffs and was willing to back military action to advance Britain's interests - in ventures not so far removed from the interventions of the neoliberal governments in oil rich countries in the early 2000s.

The Unionists, of which he was a leading figure, where a strange coalition of aristocratic Whigs with landed estates, who as a faction were drifting away from the Liberal mainstream, and a group of radical reformers led by Chamberlain. These two groups were united mostly by their opposition to Irish Home Rule, which would break up the Union.

The composition of the Unionists shifted over time, but it settled around a particular outlook: a British nationalism that transcended its constituent nationalities, built upon institutions like Westminster government, and preserved the Union; and, economic intervention at home with a protected British system of trade abroad, directed to British interests alone.

But what was perhaps most significant, from where Theresa May sit, was that the Unionists brought a working class base to the Conservative coalition. Chamberlain's personal support, centred on Birmingham, included working class voters, gave the traditional party of the landed aristocracy a broad enough base of followers to dominate government in the twentieth century.

May and Unionism

May's first conference as leader was at Birmingham, the centre of her hero's political empire and was the scene for the first two big moves of her ministry: to disentangle a still United Britain entirely from continental entanglements and to prioritise some spending over paying down the deficit (BBC, 2016; BBC, 2016{2}).

And there have been other moves. Intervening to delay Hinckley Point, alleged promises made to Nissan that speak of protectionism, hints of economic planning in the promises to develop an industrial strategy, and the continuance of the Conservative policy of devolution to the local government level that could have pleased Chamberlain (Goodall, 2016).

However - and it is a big, emphatic, however - no Conservative leader has been scared to use central government, top down, intervention when it suited them; privatisations continue; part of the Brexit rhetoric is that Britain is leaving the EU in search of freer trade, not more protected; and devolution has been hand in hand with cuts, as a way to impose austerity while handing off responsibility for its results.

Without a tangible set of policies to mark her approach out as distinct, what part of the legacy of Unionism is May promoting? Well, so far, the main thrust of May's Unionism has been cultural. Her speeches focus heavily on acknowledging injustice (Kuenssberg, 2017) and warning that it will 'undermine the solidarity of our society' (May, 2017).

That word - 'solidarity' - seems like an odd choice of phrase for a Conservative in the modern era, but it might be understood better when coupled with her phrase 'bringing our country together', which is what May presents as her solution to the rising resentment.

That phrase makes clear that this isn't 'solidarity' in its usual collectivist democratic sense, of the people standing together for mutual empowerment - an egalitarian mass movement of people aiding each other as a counter the power of an elite class.

Rather, May's point - her Unionism - seems to be very conventionally conservative: the traditional institutions have broken down and people are lost without their place in the established order. To end resentment, May seems to be arguing that a Burkean social harmony must be restored.

In that, there seems to be marked a drift in the party away from liberal conservatism towards something more purely conservative. Since the decision to enter the Coalition, a reaction within the party has grown ever louder against Cameron's soft conservative neoliberalism. In its place, rises an effort to reconcile individualism and competition, with an appeal to nationalism and community coherence, to unite the two errant wings of the ideology.

It is in the prioritising of these first two, and neglect of the last two, from which May sees resentment springing - and it certainly seems to fit how resentment has been filtered through Farage and UKIP. What May also sees is an opportunity.

Chamberlain combined local social reform with banging the patriotic drum, pitching a British system that carried a sense of a nation and tradition in which ordinary people have a stake - where everyone has their part to play. May sees a chance, in evoking the Chamberlain heritage of Unionism, to bring working people into a Conservative coalition.

Society as seen through a Prism

To do this May has taken up the language of the Left, but filtered its cause through a conservative prism. For instance, she wants to equate social justice with social harmony - in the process stripping it of its sense of distributional equality, leaving behind only class collaboration and perhaps, in the conservative sense, a 'fair deal' on work and pay.

The trouble is that social harmony is illusory. It requires citizens to accept exclusion and inequality in exchange, maybe, for a place of safety and security within the fold. Meanwhile the true elite - the wealthy, the rentiers - do not need to give up or compromise much of anything to take up their place within the harmonious order.

"A Britain that works for everyone" is not a slogan that promises very much - just as "We're all in this together" proved an empty promise to ordinary citizens, their sacrifices unmatched by the elite. Unionism addresses resentment by falling back on nationalism, looking to 'the nation', 'the Union' and their institutions as a rallying point.

Chamberlain's own Unionist star fell when colonial adventures brought misery and his closed economy could not compete with the benefits of being open to the world. The reality is that his Unionism did not leave ordinary people better off, however much it rallied them about a patriotically waved flag. Theresa May is trying to pick up and claim that fallen standard.

Progressives should not be seduced. People cannot be content with a place within May's social hierarchy: tightly ordered, tightly surveilled - living under close control, in exchange for just the hope of a little basic social security. Unionism, and its social harmony within a hierarchy, offers citizens neither liberty or justice.

Theresa May and the Brexit cause, stuck with each other, face being unravelled by a common threat: Few things in politics hit home harder than a rise in the price of food

As prices threaten to rise, Theresa May, pictured in her time as Home Secretary, is faced with the same challenge that took down the plans of her hero Joseph Chamberlain. Photograph: Rt Hon Theresa May MP, Home Secretary, at 'The Pioneers: Police and Crime Commissioners, one year on', by the Policy Exchange (License) (Cropped)

Joseph Chamberlain's vision for Britain was an Empire behind a wall of protectionist trade tariffs - literally taxing imports in order to force the use of domestic and colonial resources. Chamberlain's campaign was ultimately defeated when it became clear that protection also gouged prices, increasing the cost of basic necessities like food.

Prime Minister Theresa May seems set to emulate her hero. In the past few weeks, just the fear and uncertainty of a future Brexit alone has been enough to upset investors, which restricts the access to the credit needed to get things done; to decrease the value of the pound, and therefore its purchasing power; and to start squabbles between suppliers and retailers over the price of food.

That is not a great early sign for the May Ministry. Nothing is likely to threaten the long term longevity of a Government than sharp increase in the cost of food. Most policy can be abstracted or explained away with excuses. But little hits home more directly than it being more expensive just to eat. Having hitched her leadership to the abandoned Brexit wagon, their success and failure now appear entwined.

Remain and Leave

Now, unlike during Chamberlain's days, in terms of how the arguments were made, the debate between keeping EU membership and leaving the EU was not supposed to be a straight contest between free trade and protection. Rather, the two sides were in theory presenting different ways to go about free trade. Supporters of the European system saw a free trade area gradually pushing back barriers, while its detractors saw rules and regulations preventing business exploiting opportunities with the emerging economies beyond Europe.

Yet what looks to be an increasingly drastic withdrawal from Europe looks set to have much the same impact as throwing up a wall of import taxes. Withdrawal from the Single Market, as now seems to be on the cards, would put Britain on the outside of Europe's own tariff barriers. That would in essence subject Britain to all the negatives of trade barriers without any of the benefit of recouping tax receipts, since it would be British exports to Europe facing taxes, not the other way around.

And there is little that could be more damning for the Leavers' approach than driving up prices. If there is one thing that free trade offers, through the opportunity to operate at scale, its a reduction in the cost of doing business and therefore, theoretically, a reduction in prices.

Free Trade and Free Movement

When Richard Cobden and John Bright led the Anti-Corn Law League campaign against tariffs, it was to fight the protection it afforded to landowning aristocratic that drove up the price of bread. Keeping down the price of food was one a core group of goals for the free traders of mid-nineteenth century. They also saw in free trade the chance to build a lasting peace between European nations.

The Single Market, formerly known as the Common Market, was the realisation of a century of efforts by Europe's free traders to realise those possibilities - to bring Europe together in peace with a vast barrier-free trade area.

But building that barrier free area has required a massive regulatory reform process. Some on the Right have portrayed those efforts as a nightmare of expensive and restrictive bureaucratic red tape. Yet to the crafters of the free trade area it has been an essential effort to match up the trading standards, on everything from packaging to safety, in all of the member countries - so that no product or service is faced with expensive and restrictive internal barriers.

That process of taking barriers led one of the biggest, most profound and most controversial removals of internal barriers: free movement of labour. As of the vital resources of business, labour has received the same treatment as other barriers to trade, from the standardization of rights to free movement across traditional borders - allowing labour to be where it is needed most and rewarded best.

Freedom and Fear

It is also the change most provocative to what has become the established European order. Europe that went from being divided between lords to being divided rigidly between nations. It still does not seem ready for the prospect or reality of no dividing lines.

To be clear: it is absolutely right to review trade policy. The free traders of the nineteenth century sought to break open, for the general benefit, a state protected cartel of aristocratic landlords. But today's economy is very different and what might have broken one cartel could easily feed another.

The European system is certainly not without issues. The area itself was formed through technocratic standardization rather than purely through the removal of restrictions on business - enough alone to provoke an argument over the definition of 'free' trade.

However. Going back to a world of trade barriers, of tariffs and protectionist import taxes, opens again the box of vested interests being subsidised by the state and of endless trade treaties that it will take never ending public vigilance to keep in check. And pursuing any path motivated by fear, to throw up barriers and restrictions and take away liberties out of arbitrary discrimination, is dangerous.

The Path Ahead

Europe's social fabric is fraying and the walls between nations are going back up. Fears over living standards, paucity of secure housing and lack of opportunities - fueled by years of austerity's chronic denial of public investment - are closing off the EU's member states one by one and turning them inwards.

In the midst of this, Theresa May has bought into the Brexit cause. She has taken it on as her mandate. Her hero Chamberlain saw his efforts thwarted by free traders pointing out an inconvenient truth: that food was too expensive because of a grain cartel his policies supported.

May's Government has inherited a fragile economy in which food prices are just beginning to threaten a rise. Will the Prime Minister be able to act fast and head off the threat? Or will her government go the same way as the protectionist Conservative & Unionists of her idol?

Theresa May in Birmingham to set out her Conservative & Unionist agenda

Theresa May is setting out her agenda at the Conservative Party Conference at The ICC in Birmingham, city where her Unionist hero Joseph Chamberlain made his name. Image: ICC Birmingham by Bob Hall (License) (Cropped)

This weekend's Conservative Party conference in Birmingham became Theresa May's first attempt to set out a distinct policy platform. A chance to define her own approach to being head of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister, separate from that of the Cameron Government that she inherited.

At the conference some major policies positions were announcement, including setting of a date for the triggering of Article 50, that begins the two-year long process of the UK exiting the EU - for which the government's negotiating position was leaked - and the prioritising, by the Chancellor Phillip Hammond, of spending on housing over the budget deficit.

These policies together produce an image of Britain as the new Prime Minister wishes to see it. But before the larger picture can be assembled, let's look at the pieces themselves.

First, there is the Government's position on Article 50 negotiations. The main thrust of the official announcement was only to establish that the two-year Brexit process will be triggered by the end of March 2017 and that the government was set upon the course to make the UK no longer be part of a supranational institution (BBC, 2016).

From the Prime Minister's own statements, it was clear that she intended to pursue particular priorities, getting UK out of European Court of Justice jurisdiction and establishing new migration controls, that made Britain's continued membership of the Single Market no longer a red line in negotiations (Kuenssberg, 2016) - a huge deviation from the position of the Cameron Ministry and the Conservative Manifesto.

Second, but by no means of less importance, is the decision by the Chancellor to give priority to infrastructure spending over paying down the deficit (BBC, 2016{2}). Few shifts could more dramatically demonstrate that the Cameron-Osborne era is over than to decrease the priority of tackling the deficit, which has been held over all government spending decisions for six years.

Compared to the leanness of Chancellor Osborne's approach, the dropping of the 2019-2020 target for eliminating the deficit and now a plan to invest in the UK's housing and transport, and even new borrowing to do so, is a big leap. Chancellor Hammond has called the shift a pragmatic response to new circumstances (BBC, 2016{3}) - part of the more mundane, pragmatic attitude that has replaced the 'flash' of the Cameron-Osborne era (Kuenssberg, 2016).

Yet despite what the Chancellor says, expert opinion has for years now (Elliott, 2016) called on Osborne to change tack and reject austerity as damaging to economic prospects in the UK. For Labour, who have spent six years being crucified for its pro-spending attitude its hard to say whether they will feel vindicated or bitter at the change of direction in the Conservative Party.

So what kind of picture do these pieces make when assembled? What do these key policies add up to?

Earlier speeches from Theresa May's leadership mentioned her admiration for Joseph Chamberlain and expressed an intention to restore the place of Unionism in the Conservative & Unionist Party. Chamberlain's two most famous projects were to lead, as Mayor, the rebuilding and reordering of Birmingham and, as an MP, to lead the opposition to free trade and champion trade tariffs between the British Empire and the rest of the world.

Chamberlain's attitude made an us and them of the English-speaking British Empire and the rest of the world, putting 'British' priorities first. While the barriers he put up around Britain served to subsidise and protect domestic business, they did so mainly by hurting the poorest - as the Liberals of the day pointed out with cold facts (Marr, 2009). In its day Chamberlain's aggressively nationalist & imperial vision was ultimately defeated by the Liberal Party of Asquith, Lloyd George and Churchill.

That sense of national unity, in distinction between a British way and everyone else, seems present in May's vision - less individual and competitive than Cameron's, more social and corporate. So inspired by Chamberlain does Theresa May's own platform seem, that announcing her positions at a party conference in Birmingham seems not to be a coincidence but rather a purposeful statement. A symbol of the increased prominence of Unionism within the Conservative brand.

In her pursuing her independently British path, some sort of Chamberlain-esque increase in the will to use the proceeds to fund pragmatic interventions that improve the state in which workers live would be appreciated - especially compared to the austere whittling of front line services and civic spaces of her predecessors.

Yet May's own scepticism of 'supranational' institutions risks putting Britain behind a new set of barriers, with many of the same problems as those erected by her hero. Whatever her Government's slogan proclaims - "A Country That Works For Everyone" - Unionism, by its very nature, buys into the idea of exclusivity. The new Prime Minister will have to go a long way to convince progressives that those outside of the highest echelons will ultimately benefit from, and share in, the spoils of this British corporation.