A lesson from Tory history calls for ‘fair play between all classes’ (The Times 17-7-2010)
July 19, 2010 by David Torrance
POLITICAL parties often lose sight of their own histories. The beleaguered Scottish Tory Party, for example, would do well to revisit the writings of a largely forgotten Conservative thinker. “Until our educated and politically minded democracy has become predominantly a property-owning democracy,” declared Noel Skelton in 1923, “neither the national equilibrium nor the balance of the life of the individual will be restored.”
With that paragraph Skelton – an obscure but nevertheless significant figure – contributed a memorable phrase and an enduring concept to the modern political lexicon. For Skelton, the Unionist MP for Perth in the 1920s and early ‘30s, the “property-owning democracy” was the cornerstone of what he called “Constructive Conservatism”, the most important component of the party’s “view of life”.
Later, this was interpreted to mean simply home ownership, characterised by Margaret Thatcher’s promotion of council house sales, although Skelton intended it to mean much more than that. He wanted individuals to have a stake in every layer of society, in government and industry as well as individual property. It was a remarkably influential idea. A trio of prime ministers – Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan and Sir Alec Douglas-Home – all pay homage to Skelton in their memoirs, while David Cameron is familiar with the phraseology, if not the man himself.
Skelton’s shrewd analysis of his political era also has much to teach the contemporary Conservative Party, not least its moribund northern outpost. Winning Perth for the first time in 1922, he told his constituents that the “future duty of Conservatives was clear”. “In a democracy their politics must be all pervading,” he said. “They must not only be Unionists on polling day but every day, and all the day.”
Skelton also realised that the party could not regard any system of government “as necessarily permanent or final”. If there was to be “some devolution, some alteration in the present system”, he said in the early 1930s, Scotland would “come to that new duty and that new responsibility not as a minor member, not as inferior to England; she will come to it with a full knowledge of Parliamentary life, and she will come because she is ready.”
He was, therefore, a Nationalist and a Unionist, Scottish and British, a useful political balancing act his successors have lost sight of, and much to their cost. “If Conservatives are not to fight with one hand tied behind their backs,” Skelton also proclaimed, “the active principles of Conservatism must be felt anew, thought anew, promulgated anew.” Not a bad mission statement for the modern Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party.
Skelton believed in a holistic approach to politics, or a coherent “view of life”. That means Messrs Sanderson and Brownlee need to think beyond organisational tinkering and a new policy initiative here and there. The Scottish Conservative “view of life” has to permeate everything the party does, both politically and in terms of presentation.
What does that mean in practice? Skelton was the first to recognise the need for Conservatives to move beyond their traditional association with privilege and wealth, and although the party has made great strides in achieving this since the 1920s the perception, particularly in Scotland, is very different. The next Scottish Tory manifesto should, therefore, emphasise what Skelton characterised as “fair play between all classes and the desire of each to farther the common weal”. Skelton’s progressive Conservatism worked in the inter-war era and can, with a little refreshment, work again.
David Torrance’s biography, Noel Skelton and the Property-Owning Democracy, is available now from Biteback Publishing.
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