Since the demise of Boris Johnson’s premiership, the promise of working-class conservatism has been dormant. During the Conservative leadership campaign there was Robert Jenrick’s call to turn the party into the “trade union for working people”. But otherwise the most successful Conservative positioning of modern times – the electoral coalition that won the 2019 election – has been abandoned, with Reform gleefully collecting the lost voters. Indeed, Reform’s membership now outnumbers the Conservatives’, the fruit of its relentless focus on connecting with the silent majority of the country. Kemi Badenoch must correct course. And while much has been made of the influence of Roger Scruton over her thinking, it is to a Victorian thinker she should look to refresh her project: John Ruskin.
In his own bid to realign the politics of Victorian England, Ruskin evaded simple categories. Instead, he was a Blue Labourite or Red Tory avant la lettre: as well as a self-professed “violent Tory of the old school”, he also claimed to be “a communist of the old school – reddest also of the red”. And though now best known for his writing on art, Ruskin’s social and political criticism took in a smorgasbord of welfarism, elitism, communitarianism, and (despite his own alleged sexual impotency) pronatalism. But Ruskin also made the right enemies, just the kind that Badenoch should take aim at if she is to appeal to everyday working people: the economic establishment.
Strangely, this gap in the political market remains wide open despite the Labour Chancellor’s own brush with Ruskin. In 2018, with the help of former Labour MP Jon Cruddas and political theorist Jonathan Rutherford (of this parish), Rachel Reeves published “The Everyday Economy” – a cogent companion of ideas that are ripe for revival, such as recognising the household as an economic unit and reindustrialisation of both town and country. Flick to the bibliography and you will find that among the Christian Socialists like Tawney and Carlyle lurks Ruskin.
With Reeves having abandoned the mantle – spearheading a budget that was more Fabian than Victorian – the way is open for Ruskin to shape a new Conservative politics aimed at the “working people” Labour still struggle to define. They were, after all, much on his mind: between 1871 and 1884, he wrote 96 letters to the “Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain” – those who live off the product of their labour. And throughout his life, Ruskin feverishly defended workers of all stripes, not just for their productive value in pounds and pence, but for deploying their natural talents, “adding continually to the riches and well-being of the nation to which they belong”. He makes a particular example of the farmer and the “housewife” (I think we should forgive his Victorian slang) who produce, preserve and distribute “useful or pleasurable things”.
So evangelical was Ruskin about work, he was in favour of a version of state-subsidised public works projects decades before they became Keynesian fashion. This was not, however, for straightforward fiscal stimulus, but for more spiritual reasons: investing the population with the gratification of doing something “that matters”. As the wife of a cleric-in-training, soon to be living off a stipend and about to go on maternity leave, I find Ruskin’s generous appreciation of work in its vast array of forms beyond the purely economic deeply enfranchising. Because, more fundamentally, he believed that mankind and its particular business – to steward nature, procreate, and make art – is too important, too integral to human anthropology, to be subject to economics.
Ruskin would therefore be shocked by the 21st-century obeisance to the mythical homo economicus. Today, we live in a political economy defined by its devotion to the laws of demand and supply (to the neglect of all other human interest) – the neoliberalism adopted by the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher, and then by the Labour party by Tony Blair. But, eluding even the primitive party categorisations of the 19th century, Ruskin was neither a capitalist nor a socialist, but something more like an economic aestheticist. If there was one thing he loved, it was England and the sheer abundance and gratuity of the natural landscape; a bottomless source of joy, admiration and true riches. And if there was one thing he hated, it was the “Money theory” of everything. In a letter to his contemporary, Dr John Brown, dated 1862, Ruskin raged (as he often did): “To this ‘science,’ and to this alone (the professed and organised pursuit of Money) is owing All the evil of modern days… It is the Death incarnate of Modernism, and the so-called science of its pursuit is the most cretinous, speechless, paralysing plague that has yet touched the brains of mankind.”
This social and economic critique is an extension of Ruskin’s broader beef with modernism – or modernity. He was distressed at the slow but sure succession of new scientific and materialistic rules and tools for governing life, replacing ancient, sacred instinct. What would science have to say about the value of art, inspired by the ineffable sublimity of the created world? For Ruskin, this was not only a religious offence, but – more concretely – improperly inhumane. He found something uniquely undignified about economic calculation, for it is “the privilege of the fishes, as it is of rats and wolves, to live by the laws of demand and supply; but the distinction of humanity, to live by those of right”.
Ruskin’s economic outlook therefore differed considerably from the neoliberal order responsible for deindustrialisation under Thatcher and centralisation under Blair. His contrary approach might be summed up in this typically lofty, imprecise and magniloquent maxim: “That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.” The Labour party was called “the party of Mammon” as early as 1998 for its proximity to corporate interests; Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer have made an active effort to court the City since they seized control of the party. The Conservatives too have been guilty of their own crimes against Romantic humanity over the past two generations. But – as the late Roger Scruton wrote – “a concern for the priceless and the non-exchangeable is exactly what defines the conservative view of society”.
It’s within the gift of a modern Conservative Party to adopt a simultaneously pro-worker and Romantic political agenda. Badenoch should start by honouring occupations that fall outside the bounds of an economic order that registers – in the words of Oscar Wilde – the “price of everything and the value of nothing”. And there are two distinctly Romantic occupations that Ruskin paid particular regard to, but which have failed to arouse the sympathies of the Labour Chancellor: care-givers and farmers.
The market economy is impatient and greedy for GDP-contributing workers. It too readily discredits the legitimate labour of those caring for others. Instead of writing off child-rearing as a costly departure from the market economy, Ruskin maintained that it was “the most directly positive” labour, for it produces life. Again, with typical rococo rhetoric, he wrote: “so that in the precise degree in which murder is hateful, on the negative side of idleness, in that exact degree child-rearing is admirable, on the positive side of idleness”. Badenoch must back the household economy. She should support – and subsidise if necessary – the labour of those who nurture children, care for the elderly, maintain social infrastructure, and unknowingly safeguard our cultural inheritance.
But inheritance is exactly what Britain’s farmers argue is under threat with the government’s tax changes – both economic and cultural. The move would surely have Ruskin, an owner of productive agrarian land himself, spinning in his grave. Despite Ruskin’s fervour for the blood, sweat and tears of daily toil, he did not resent those with other means of earning a living. He believed in the right to private property and was not an egalitarian by any stretch, declaring, “the poor have no right to the property of the rich”. He did not decry the class system. Instead, he welcomed the “fullest expression” of the “relations and duties of human beings, one to another”. This, for Ruskin, was a perfectly ethical product of the class system. And in this sense Ruskin combined one-nation instincts of solidarity with a form of elitism. He pronounced that “inequalities of wealth, justly established, benefit the nation in the course of their establishment”. What is more justly established and beneficial to the nation than the rural economy – food production – and the perseverance of the trade under faithful farming custodians?
Especially unhelpful in the aftermath of Labour’s budget was a wildly off-script intervention from a former Labour advisor. In a bid to reassure GB News viewers that withdrawing tax relief from farmers is not remotely controversial, John McTernan argued that such reforms have precedent, because Margaret Thatcher did the same to miners. But, though a laughable gaffe, the comparison does expose the political costs of a romantic-conservative turn for the Tories. A Ruskinian defence of family farms will necessarily come at the cost of economic efficiency. If the Conservative Party is to oppose the free-market liberalism that devalues domestic and rural economies, then that is the philosophy it must retire.
And this is the turn Badenoch must make: a movement beyond Thatcherism, the governing ideology of the Conservative for almost half a century. Thatcher’s figure is still fetishised by the Conservative party. At this year’s party conference, “What would Maggie do?” events drew eager crowds and a cardboard cutout of the Iron Lady stalked the corridors of the International Convention Centre in Birmingham. Badenoch herself has been favourably compared to Mrs Thatcher. But did she not promise to “renew” her party? She should take that promise seriously. She has a mandate from party members, if she dares.
We can now see the economic liberalism imposed by Thatcher as a historically contingent aberration, making a break from a conservative tradition that includes Ruskin. Thatcher’s ruthless regime did shift the stagnation of the 1970s. But the rush to secure economic gain through a blanket application of market principles came at some cost to Britain’s cultural and social fabric. Working voters in Britain feel this, and would vote for a party whose philosophy coheres around a dignity and respect that extends beyond considerations around GDP. That is why it is time for the Conservative party to adopt a new patron saint and mascot, exchanging the stern glare of Mother Maggie for a very different character: the sideburned Romantic, John Ruskin.
[See also: Kemi Badenoch is no philosopher-queen]
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