My “right wing” credentials are obscure but impeccable. I did not join the Oxford Union because I had better things to do. I believe I did join the Oxford University Conservative Association but only because someone paid my subscription so I could vote for him (undergraduate politics in those days was pure banana republic). I certainly didn’t go to any meetings. In adult life I did not join a Conservative association, though I did once stand as a candidate in a local election having been persuaded to do so in a pub late in the evening. Like all true Tories I am in many respects anti-political with an instinctive dislike of protestors, reformers, radicals and ideologues including Tory versions of same. One consequence of this is that for me is that the personal is not political: neither my wife nor any of my relatives nor many of my friends agrees with me about anything and I couldn’t care less. My view of their views follows the Mandy Rice-Davies formula: “They would believe that, wouldn’t they?”.

Yet I have never wavered from my contempt for the things I have contempt for and am remembered by some as a very young undergraduate shouting abuse against Harold Wilson in the Oxford High Street on the night of the 1964 General Election. Whilst still fairly young I published a book called Right Principles; a conservative philosophy of politics which argued for conceptual scepticism about what I regarded as the religiose doctrines of the degenerate enlightenment including equality, “natural” rights and the millenarian belief that we can construct a form of society radically different and better than the one we already have. In my rejection of these principles from an early age I avoided the idealism and radicalism that is often thought to be a normal part of human development. If I was ever a rebel it was against bullshit and modernity (we hadn’t heard of postmodernity).

This makes me extremely “right wing” if you accept that the simple geography of the French revolutionary assembly is useful in understanding the variety of human beliefs. I don’t (accept). When my undergraduate contemporary Polly Toynbee (we acted together – she had a much bigger part than me) wrote that Boris Johnson was “the most right-wing” prime minister we have ever had I am left genuinely baffled as to what she could possibly mean. And did she know about Lord Salisbury and the Duke of Wellington? When they say I’m right-wing whose views are imagined to coincide with mine? Hitler’s? Louis XIV’s? Genghis Khan’s? Milton Friedman’s? Actually, none of the above: the writers I would pay homage to all fall under my heading of the sceptical enlightenment: David Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham.

In short there isn’t a “right” in politics except as a vast space occupied by the not-left where the left is defined as adherents to the theology of the degenerate enlightenment. But you can oppose equality and utopianism from any one of an indefinitely large number of number of positions including opposites. I regard my “right-wing” beliefs as the purest form of agnosticism, but others reject leftism on theistic grounds. It’s as simple as saying that you can reject the view that the earth is the centre of the universe (a predecessor of modern leftism in several respects) but still believe an indefinitely large number of propositions – though not all at once.

What follows is that there are no pre-determinate policies which you must believe in because you are “conservative” or “right-wing” and no absolute commitment to opposing “left-wing” policies even if the left believe in them for the wrong reasons. The issues where I have some sympathy with the left on are mainly to do with property and money. Don’t get me wrong! My views on these things are recognisably “right wing” in many ways. I believe a system of ownership which allows individuals and families to accumulate wealth is essential to a good society. Therefore I think that wealth and inheritance taxes are essentially evil. When John McDonnell as deputy leader of the Labour Party said he would like to live in a world with no billionaires I screamed internally with scorn. There is every chance that the Medicis or Rothschilds or Rockefellers will do something interesting with their money whereas modern states will fritter it away buying votes and paying salaries or through sheer inefficiency. But what I am not is a fundamentalist about property. I do not believe as John Locke did or Robert Nozick more recently argued that there are rights to property which somehow predate or pre-empt actual states and societies. And nor do I believe that there is a particular set of property rules or balance between public and private which should always be the case. Not believing these things opens up the possibility for a conservative to support aspects of the Labour tradition.

One of these is state medical care. I have written elsewhere about how the supposedly “right wing” Nobel economics laureate Jim Buchanan told me that he had changed his mind about the National Health Service. He argued that however flawed and wasteful the NHS is the parasitic rent-seeking and litigiousness of American private medicine was much inferior measured in terms of public welfare. There’s not much point in dwelling on this as the facts are well known and so is public opinion.

Another main legacy of the Atlee government which I support as a Tory is the principle of development control incorporated in the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act; it says in effect that just because you own a piece of land you do not have the right to build on it or change its use. I believe that landscape and townscape are enormously valuable public goods and that though our system of development control in its three quarters of a century of existence has experienced plenty of unfairness and corruption like the NHS it is still of enormous benefit overall. It has always divided Tories because elements of the actual party believes that free market principles should be applied to land and they will always have allies among property developers and these two groups are bound to clash with the essential conservatism of actual Conservatives who dominate all the well-preserved parts of the country. In 1981 the lady who was not for turning turned massively on the question of abolishing green belts.

An erosion of public goods diminishes something I can only vaguely and traditionally call the fabric of society. So does inequality. All of the four eighteenth century philosophers I paid homage to above were, if you read them carefully (not necessary in the case of Bentham), utilitarians who accepted that the general, aggregate well-being was the justification of policy and institutions. From this point of view it cannot be denied that a degree of redistributive taxation can demonstrably in many circumstances enhance the general good. The question is what kind of taxation and how much. I think the idea of wealth tax is fundamentally wrong and it is almost universally accepted that income tax can be self defeating: if you tax people too much they cheat more, go abroad, stop working etc. This is now associated with the “Laffer curve”, but as Arthur Laffer himself modestly pointed out the observation is older than even the idea of economics. Which leaves carefully chosen forms of sales tax as the most viable route to redistribution.

What you can get away with in terms of taxation clearly varies with cultural context. In a country with a strong sense of solidarity or during a war more can be done than in normal circumstances. The same is true of my most radical application of utilitarian principles. I believe that second homes should be heavily penalised and that also applies to any form of “holiday home” for rent. I get in touch with my revolutionary side when I see charming villages in beautiful areas without a light on at night out of season because their owners live in London. I regard the “Chelsea tractor” as a direct assault on the fabric of society which Tories should seek to preserve. This is also contextual: it applies to England with its high density of population and endemic housing crisis and not to our French neighbours with their abundance of redundant farmhouses. It’s also very difficult as tax avoidance is one of the most sophisticated intellectual activities on the planet. But I’m sure it can be done.

I confess to having little affection for the contemporary Tory Party. When I was shouting my affection for the party in 1964 it was led by a fourteenth earl who had played first class cricket and been awarded a fourth class degree. (I never met Sir Alec Douglas-Home, but I did serve on a board with his son David who was jolly similar.) Tory MPs at that time included war heroes like Sir Fitzroy Maclean, supposedly the model for James Bond, and William (“Big Bill”) Anstruther-Gray who had little interest in politics. It is now just like other political parties dominated by the chattergerial salariat coming out of student union politics followed by law, journalism, banking and the like. Nevertheless I will continue to vote Tory simply because I regard all alternatives as clearly even more ridiculous. But when and if Labour get into power for the fifth time in my lifetime there will be some of their traditional policy themes which I actually welcome.

Lincoln Allison June 2024