Remaking One Nation. Nick Timothy
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I started conversations with people in business. I visited schools and universities, and talked to young people about how they feel about the world. I talked to intellectuals and thinkers. I became a visiting fellow at Wadham College, Oxford, and a visiting professor at Sheffield University. I spent more time in my home city, Birmingham. I spent more time with my family. I became a father to a beautiful little girl. I met my incredible partner, Martina, who challenges and inspires me every day, and became a stepfather to her wonderful daughters.
Gradually, as I reflected on my time in politics and government, and on the huge challenges facing Britain and all other Western countries, the idea of writing this book began to form. It is consistent with many of my long-held beliefs, of course, but it is also based on what I have learned since leaving government. I remain convinced, for example, that the Conservative Party must become a truly ‘One Nation’ party, capable of speaking for people across the whole country, and across the divides of race, religion, gender, sexuality and social class. I am equally sure that to achieve these things, and to rise to the challenges of the future, conservatives need to become more sceptical about the perfection of the market and rediscover the importance of active government.
But, of course, I have learned a lot from my experiences in government, and through the work I have done since leaving Downing Street in 2017. My studies have allowed me to step back from day-to-day political trench warfare and to think more deeply about the philosophical assumptions behind politicians’ beliefs and policies. I have reached new conclusions about the overreach of liberalism, and the reasons for its failures. I have realized – much more so than before – that the key question in our politics should not be about the balance between the state and the market, but how we reach a harmonious and healthy relationship between state, market and community. The decline of community and the failure of our political leaders to even notice – let alone produce a serious plan to revive it – is one of the great problems of our time. It is impossible to understand the economic and cultural crises we face without understanding how liberalism has grown ideological and overzealous.
Of course, over my years in politics I have made enemies, and I know my critics will mock me for even daring to write a book. But my mistakes do not delegitimize my arguments, just as my successes do not justify them. In fact, in many ways my mistakes inform the arguments I make. Throughout my time in Downing Street, for example, we neglected economic policy. In our defence, this was partly down to the personality of the Chancellor. Philip Hammond lacked an economic policy beyond the need to keep on cutting spending. Not for nothing did he relish being nicknamed ‘Fiscal Phil’. But we should have had a stronger and more coherent economic policy. For her part, Theresa was always far too reluctant to devolve powers to the nations and regions of the United Kingdom. And too much of what we tried to do was done abruptly, without an electoral mandate, intellectual bridge building, or even attempts to communicate what we were doing to the country.
I have tried throughout this book to learn from these mistakes. As President Theodore Roosevelt said in one of my favourite speeches, ‘there is no effort without error and shortcoming.’27 But as he also said, we must still ‘strive to do the deeds’. The botched election campaign does not invalidate the ideas I once promoted in government. This book is in large part an attempt to deepen the thinking behind those ideas, and where necessary to correct and go beyond them.
Inevitably, my perspective is shaped by my upbringing and background as much as my professional experience. Unusually for many people at the top of the Conservative Party, I grew up in a working-class family in a suburb of Birmingham. My parents were raised in Labour households, and only started voting Conservative in the 1980s. Dad worked in manufacturing, rising from the shop floor to sales positions that took him around the world. Mom worked at a school that served a nearby housing estate, first doing clerical work and later providing pastoral care for kids who needed additional support.
As I grew up myself, I needed little persuading that it was the Conservative Party, and not Labour, that shared my values and cared about people like me. Under Margaret Thatcher, the Conservatives were restoring Britain’s competitiveness and prosperity, and helping working families like mine to get on. They were the party of law and order, controlled immigration and, during the Cold War, a strong defence. Perhaps the defining political moment for me came at the end of my first year at my secondary school, a grammar school full of working-class boys like me. That year, there was a general election in which Labour threatened to close down all remaining selective schools. The Conservatives, by then led by John Major, wanted me to go as far as I could. Labour seemed to want to keep me in my place.
With my background, I could never have been an ideological liberal or libertarian. Working in the Conservative Research Department after university, I was encouraged to read Ayn Rand, whose selfish individualism left me cold. Later, still in opposition but under the leadership of David Cameron, I remember making the case for firmer immigration policies. One of David’s advisers dismissed my arguments, calling me ‘a typical West Midlands Conservative’.
I suppose I was a fairly conventional conservative until my thirties. But then I started to reflect on the hostility many Conservatives feel towards the state. And I thought about my own experience. I knew I was doing fairly well. I had been the first person in my family to go to university. From my early twenties, I had been working closely with senior politicians and briefing the Leader of the Opposition. As my Mom often said, my grandparents would never have believed it. But I knew I had not made this journey on my own. I owed everything to my parents, who had given me love and security, and made so many sacrifices to give my brother and me the chances they had never had. I had been to one of the best state schools in the country. The NHS had saved my brother’s life as a baby, and treated my grandparents as their health faltered in later life. Mom still worked in a school serving a deprived council estate. Not everything had gone right – Dad was made redundant and lost his entire pension savings as manufacturing declined, and my beloved Nan died after contracting MRSA in a dirty hospital – but even these experiences taught me about the power of political decisions and the importance of good government.
I listened to the way some politicians talk about social mobility – about ‘escaping’ the communities we grew up in and kids who were looking for ‘something better’ – and realized it did not reflect my own experience at all. I felt a sense of achievement, yes, but I also felt a sense of loss. I no longer lived in the community in which I had been proud to grow up, and which had given me so much. I lived further away from my parents and extended family. Far from feeling I had escaped from my old world, I missed it, and I realized that many people in positions of power rarely understood anything about the way families like mine lived their lives.
I started to apply these lessons to the lives of people who had had different experiences to mine. As I worked on policy, I made a conscious effort to seek out the views of people from different racial and religious backgrounds, and those who represent them. Working with the likes of Sir Simon Woolley, from Operation Black Vote, and Matilda MacAttram, from Black Mental Health UK, I led efforts in the Home Office to reduce deaths in police custody, handle mental health issues better in the criminal justice system, and make sure stop and search powers were only used in full compliance with the law. The latter issue was brought home to me in particular by the experiences of Alexander Paul, a brilliant young black student I mentored who later died tragically young after suffering brain cancer.
And the way I thought about policy became more unorthodox. Unorthodox, that is, to those modern Conservatives who have been enticed by liberal and libertarian ideology. In fact, my beliefs are entirely consistent with the long tradition of conservative philosophy. They are influenced by Burke, Hume, Smith, Disraeli, Oakeshott, Churchill, Macmillan and Thatcher. They are influenced by many others outside the conservative tradition, from my political hero Joseph Chamberlain to modern psychologists like Jonathan Haidt.
Few things matter more than political ideas. They have the power to change – for better or worse – the fates of individuals, families and nations. Yet it is striking how little political ideas are really debated and discussed. It is true, many politicians are ideological and zealous about their beliefs. But often this ideology is skin deep. For some, it is a handy signal to supporters, a means by which they can fill a political space,