Remaking conservatism with Adam Hawksbee

This interview appears in UCL Policy Lab magazine, out March 21st. 

Adam Hawksbee has spent his career arguing for a conservatism which takes human relationships, belonging and place seriously. In our discission, we wanted to know how successful he thinks he has been and what he thinks the future includes.

Policy Lab: You have written a lot about the need for politics to recognise the power of communities, beyond a simple reliance on the traditional mechanisms of the state and the market. Why do you see these ideas as so important?

Adam Hawksbee: I think there are two reasons, one intrinsic and one instrumental; one as a means and one as an end. The intrinsic reason is that these community ties are the foundation of our democracy. Democracies are only as strong as the solidarity between strangers that share citizenship. They rely on me being willing to pay taxes that help someone who I’ve never met in, say, the Orkney Islands or Land’s End, and for them to do the same for me if I fall into hardship. Those ties are built over generations by a shared sense of history, and sometimes by shared institutions and common values and characteristics.

But even though those connections are very macro, they begin at a hyperlocal level: with the people we bump into in the supermarket, at the school gates, while we’re walking down the street, waiting for a bus, and so on. And those shared connections underpin our willingness to make sacrifices for one another. So, the intrinsic reason politics should mobilise the power of communities is that it is these ties that build the generalised reciprocity which is an important foundation for democracy.

But it also matters in the instrumental sense, as a means. There’s a basic bargain involved in democracy that we don’t talk about much: that it just makes things better in a practical way. Right now, if we asked someone in China or Russia how they tolerate living in an autocracy, they might give all sorts of arguments, but one would be that for them, things around them are just getting better. For example, if you’ve lived in China for the last decade or so, you’re likely to have got massively richer. So, democracy needs to deliver a good economy, health and education system, access to leisure and culture, and so on to maintain public support.

But if you want to do all that, then as a practical matter, those things are just best delivered from the bottom up instead of from the top down. So the instrumental reason to harness communities is that they are a much better way to deliver services and to help make people’s lives better. And over the last two decades, we saw both Labour and Conservative governments realise that after a few years in office. So for those two reasons, I see a communitarian slant on politics as pretty essential for democratic renewal.

Policy Lab: Do you see that agenda as key to the revival of the Conservative tradition?

Adam Hawksbee: I do see communities and communitarianism as a really important part of where the Conservative Party needs to go next. David Willetts used to talk about the Conservative Party as being about both ‘roots’ - security, family, and belonging - and ‘wings’ - a sense of liberty and opportunity. Any parent will say that they both want their child to feel like they are completely rooted in a particular home but also have the ability to go out, succeed, and achieve whatever they want to do. And, of course those things are linked; you can’t really seize opportunities unless you’ve got a foundation of security.

But over the last thirty years or so, the Conservative Party has been much more focused on the ‘wings’ side - on liberty and individual freedom - and not as much on security and belonging. In a world that’s becoming much more unstable, particularly economically, with old forms of labour pulling apart, the rise of China, all sorts of things that lead to instability are making it understandable that people want more of that security and that belonging. So, I think that over the next five to ten years, the Conservative Party needs to rediscover the sense of security it’s famous for.

Policy Lab: Let’s reflect on what all of this might mean practically, for public policy. What might a modern policy for “neighbourhood renewal” look like, for example?

Adam Hawksbee: Onward did a report a few years ago called ‘Turnaround,’ supported by Local Trust, where we looked at Neighbourhood Regeneration policy from Wilson’s Urban Aid Programme all the way up to Levelling Up. We found that three things really matter: that you get money down to the lowest possible level; that it is flexible enough to respond to local dynamics; and that it’s there for the long term. The programmes that have worked, like the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal, all combined those three elements.

In the past few months, I’ve started a role supporting the government on their long-term plan for towns, which sits squarely in that Neighbourhood Renewal tradition. It combines those three elements: it’s at the Town level rather than the Local Authority level. It has Town Boards guiding it made up of local people and an independent chair. And the funding includes revenue as well as capital. One of the problems with a lot of previous levelling up programmes was that they were all about the shiny buildings and not the people that maintain them, bring them to life, and make them work.

So, this new programme is a long term plan for towns over ten years, with funding coming through at regular intervals over ten years, which means that people can build a plan over time. So it’s £1.5 billion for 75 towns over that period - similar to the funding that would go to a Metro Mayor. I think that’s the beginning of a new approach that a future government, regardless of political party, will build from, that learns from what has and hasn’t worked in the past.

Policy Lab: All of this, of course, depends on strong bonds in our politics. But this is a fractious time. You’ve spoken in public in the past about “disagreeing well”, a theme the President and Provost of UCL, Michael Spence has also often spoken about. Why do you feel it’s important to reaffirm this right now?

Adam Hawksbee: Given the scale of the challenges we’ve got, economically, environmentally, and internationally, there are some real trade-offs that haven’t really been discussed domestically yet. For example, we might want to respond to the rise of China by onshoring supply chains so we’re more selfreliant, but that means some goods are going to cost more, which of course adds to the cost of the weekly shop. There are many big debates like that that we need to have.

But we have to make sure that where there are people seeking to remove someone from the debate or change the way we debate through threats and intimidation, we’re clear that that’s just not appropriate. In recent weeks we’ve seen intimidation of individual MPs, for example by standing outside their home. I was really worried about the Speaker’s decision to change Parliamentary procedure to not allow the SNP their Opposition Day motion, and even more worried by Harriet Harman’s suggestion that we should go back to some elements of the covid-era remote Parliament.

We also have to be extraordinarily careful with the language that we use and the tone of those debates. That applies just as much to people on the Conservative side who can be very unconsidered with their language about debates on things like Israel and Gaza and trans rights. These are issues on which, even though I may agree with their underlying points, some have often chosen to conduct themselves in a way that makes it less likely that we can have a productive conversation on that topic.

For me, “disagreeing agreeably” is about being extremely clear where the lines are on threats and intimidation, but also about recognising that we can have really difficult debates in ways that are respectful and generous. That doesn’t mean pretending to agree by going to a level of abstraction where we seem to be on the same page even when we’re probably not. It means learning how to disagree profoundly while still being respectful.