HTR(11): On the need to do better than Nigel Farage

The case for a British Christian Democratic Party

There is much chatter about the need to replace the Conservative Party – see in particular Matthew Goodwin and Dominic Cummings (who don't agree with each other, of course). Peter Hitchens takes the credit for first seeing that the Conservative party must be destroyed if a genuinely conservative option is to become available within the British body politic, although he has changed his tune somewhat.

The organisation that would be in the best position at the moment to bring forward a renewal of the right in the UK is the Reform group. I hesitate to call it a 'party' as it isn't one, despite seeming to offer the same sort of thing as other political parties – and that is why, in the end, it will fail. I have some history with them, as I was a PPC for the Brexit Party in 2019, which was a small but healing act of prophetic drama on my part (and very costly personally). Whilst I am happy that making a stand on the issue of implementing the Brexit referendum justified all sorts of compromises, I have not been able to continue supporting Reform. I want to explain why.

I can't remember where I first came across this trilemma, but I think there is much truth in this: wealth, democracy, culture – choose any two, at the expense of the third. For me it has to be culture and democracy (in that order), whereas for much of the West, especially the secular West, it is the first of those three that is prioritised, and the other two are left to sort themselves out. In British terms I have tended to see the Conservative party as locked into a struggle between homeowners and estate agents, with the estate agents representing the priority of wealth, and the homeowners representing the priority of culture. The estate agents won – they are what is captured with the criticism 'Thatcherite’ (although in many ways Thatcher was less of a Thatcherite than later thought believed).

Reform is a Thatcherite institution, it is structured by the norms of wealth, a private company, majority owned by Farage, part owned by Tice and some others. I understand that Farage developed this model in order to retain control against the 'nutters' of UKIP, having had his fingers burnt by his involvement there. It means that Tice is not in fact in charge of the organisation, which is a little awkward. However, the real problem is that the ethos of Reform is Thatcherite. This is why it emphasises some economic reforms, and why it trims its sails to the prevailing cultural winds on other matters.

If there is to be a genuinely conservative option available in the future, it needs to be one that de-emphasises the wealth corner of the trilemma, and emphasises instead the culture and democracy corners. In particular, the political vehicle itself needs to embody that difference, in just the same way that the political vehicle of Reform embodies the embrace of Thatcherite values. There have been voices in the Conservative party arguing for more democracy there for some time, so there is an appetite amongst the grass-roots of the right for this.

Most especially, however, such a culture/democracy sort of party must explicitly reject the secular. It is the secular mind-set, which doesn't see nations and cultures as real things, which idolises the values of the market, which is the enemy of those that wish to preserve culture and democracy. The inability to see and distinguish such questions is a major part of the problem. In times of affluence the cultural challenge of foreign religion can be glossed over; in times of hardship they come to the fore. Secularity is the problem, not the solution.

So such a culture/democracy type of party, in the British context, needs to draw from the Christian inheritance, for that is the essential part of our culture, it is what has formed us into the people that we are. This is particularly challenging here because the process of secularism has been so far-reaching. It is why Kate Forbes runs into such criticism and flak. Yet there are grounds for hope, if even Professor Dawkins identifies with Christian culture.

Fortunately we do not have to invent such a party out of whole cloth. There is a long tradition of Christian democratic politics in Europe, that is rooted in Catholic social teaching and has often formed governments in Western Europe. It is committed to social solidarity, it recognises the reality and importance of culture, nation and family... it is, in short, exactly what the UK needs right now.

The Conservative Party is demonstrably entirely secular; so is Reform (despite the vast numbers of Christians involved in both organisations); I have no expectation that the projects that Cummings and Goodwin get involved in will be anything else. Yet if my thinking is right, all those projects will progressively fail as reality asserts the primacy of spiritual questions. We are going to be forced to choose – and choose not between secularism and faith, but between Islam and Christianity. The secular voice simply doesn't have the resources to engage with our present issues. If there isn't a vehicle for that choice in the political realm then the breakdown of community relations will be much more severe.

So a British Christian Democratic Party is what is needed. One that knows what it believes in and why, and which can turn the market into a servant again, in order to protect the human from all that encroaches upon it.

Will it happen? Not without a much greater cultural crisis than we have seen thus far, but which I also think is coming quite soon. It would be good for us to be prepared for what comes after the crisis.