Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Britain’s Conservatives have always had a complex relationship with civil liberties. On the one hand they talk loudly about individual freedom and rail against the nanny state. On the other, they cheerfully wave through intrusive or illiberal policies.
Thus the party of personal freedom has in recent years introduced sweeping restrictions on the right to protest and a progressive ban on adult smoking.
In part this reflects a deeper divide between what was once described as traditional liberalism and the more paternalistic or authoritarian Toryism. A happy compromise has tended to be that Conservatives are comfortable banning or regulating activities that are unlikely to involve them but take a dim view of bureaucrats intruding into their own lives. They do not mind curbs on eco-protests they are unlikely to attend but do not wish to be ordered to lose weight or buy an electric car.
For many critics, the Covid lockdowns destroyed any Tory reputation on civil liberties. But regardless of whether one shares that critique of the response to an exceptional crisis, the pandemic cast a long shadow on the balance between the individual and the state nudging the dial towards those who look to government to tackle social problems. This has reinforced those figures on both sides of the political divide, such as Tony Blair and Michael Gove, who talk about the need for a strategic or active state. One example is the way the pandemic is used to justify greater NHS harvesting of patient data. Other former ministers demand action to tackle obesity.
The coalition of Brexit Tories assembled by Boris Johnson was not built on the promises of a smaller state, for all the free-market dreams of a Singapore-on-Thames. Johnson’s core promises were to spend more on policing, hospitals and schools and on a regional policy to foster growth in the north. More recently, some Tories have called for action to boost the birth rate. Liberal Tories have watched the party slip its moorings and often unwittingly play handmaiden to statism.
Nowhere are the tensions and contradictions more perfectly highlighted than in the issue of national identity cards, which many Tories viscerally oppose on civil liberties grounds.
Public backing for ID cards has fluctuated, but supporters are encouraged by blithe acceptance of the tech companies’ harvesting of personal data, as well as by potential practical benefits such as those shown by the Covid vaccine app. Blair, a long advocate of such cards, now calls (with a former Tory leader, William Hague) for a digital ID instead, which could be accessed via your phone and link you to a range of public services while also allowing the government better use of data.
Yet whatever the arguments for or against, what is striking is just how much a government that is publicly and definitively opposed to a national ID card scheme has done to ease the country towards its introduction.
Recent Tory measures have included compulsory voter ID at polling stations and immigration laws that demand employers complete onerous checks on entitlement to work, a requirement which would be instantly eased by a national ID scheme. The plan by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to progressively ban smoking means even middle-aged adults will eventually need to prove their age when buying cigarettes. More rigorous age verification for online sites looms. Throw in the desire to clamp down on illegal migrants and the argument becomes stronger.
The pros and cons of these plans can be debated. The point, however, is that the Conservatives are steadily and unintentionally eroding their own arguments against a single recognised form of ID available to all.
Whether by physical card or digital format, a national ID scheme seems increasingly inevitable. Labour’s Yvette Cooper has previously ruled out an ID card as part of the party’s immigration policy, but more recently the party has been non-committal.
Similarly on health, if a Tory leader can ban adults from smoking it is not hard to see Labour pushing forward with sugar taxes or bans on special deals on junk food.
Such erosion of small-state ideals is one reason why the otherwise comical launch of Liz Truss’s Popular Conservatism group matters more than might appear. We are watching the real-time realignment of the Tory party as economic liberals try to find common ground with the resurgent interventionist, protectionist and socially conservative forces in their party. This is the high priestess of economic growth seeking a deal with her own party’s anti-growth coalition. Truss’s unifying umbrella is immigration crackdowns and resistance to big government liberals pushing “woke” social attitudes, net zero and nanny-state health policies.
That her agenda is seen as inimical to the Tory leadership is indicative of how policy has shifted. The upshot is that for good or ill and from ID cards to health policy, law and order and even spending, Tories have let the pendulum swing away from the freedom caucus.
Conservatives may still dream of rolling back the frontiers of the state and cutting public spending, but their direction of travel has been steadily in the opposite direction. So when in the next parliament they find themselves railing against the overweening “strategic” state, someone should remind them of their part in building it.