The Conservative Party as a progressive party
How economic expansion trumps conservation in the Tory world view
The biggest problem with progressive identity politics or ‘wokeness’ is that it is, seemingly everywhere, embedded into our institutions. In a lot of talk lately, contemporary conservatives seem to be re-gathering around a similar sort of vision via their own favourite progressive belief: that in economic growth as a good in itself.
Liz Truss showed this off during her brief time in Number Ten, telling senior staff there, “The first question we should be asking of any policy proposed by departments is: does it boost economic growth? If it doesn’t, why are we doing it?” Among the things she proposed was suspending habitat regulations protecting endangered species to encourage house building in ‘new enterprise zones’.
This sort of thing is by no means a preserve of the explicitly neoliberal tendency however. Hardly a day goes by without a leading Conservative or Conservative-inclined commentator demanding a bonfire of regulations to ‘get the country moving’, ‘get Britain building’ or the like.
Michael Gove is to make a speech on housing today in which he is set to commit once more to a massive housebuilding programme, one which would among other things expand the city of Cambridge several times over. Furthermore, Gove wrote recently, “We need to reform to ensure our national regulators, from Ofcom to Ofgem, Ofwat to Natural England, have an imperative to put growth first.”
This is to say that, rather than providing effective regulation, he thinks regulators, from media to energy and water to the natural environment – should be directed away from providing effective regulation to boosting the economy, so supporting the companies they are meant to be supervising.