"We begin by attempting to unpack some of the core images which seem to us to form central elements in the 'traditionalist' ideology of crime. Gouldner once argued that all social theories contain 'dominant assumptions' about society embedded in them. We would argue that all social ideologies contain powerful images of society at their heart. These images may be diffuse, quite untheorised in any elaborate sense; but they serve to condense and order the view of society in which the ideologies are active, and they constitute both the unquestioned substratum of truth - what carries conviction - and the source of its collective emotional force and appeal. Together, these images produce and sustain an uncodified but immensely powerful, conservative sense of Englishness, of an English 'way of life', of an 'English' viewpoint which - it also, by its very density of reference, asserts - everyone shares to some extent. We do not make any claim to offer here an exhaustive inventory of this traditional English ideology, only to have identified some of the major issues around which this traditionalist definition of 'Englishness' is constructed and organised. Our aim here is to open a discussion which we regard as of considerable importance, and to touch on two related but distinct aspects. First, can we begin to identify the social content which is being carried in these images, around which a traditionalist view of crime is organised? Second, can we begin to make sense of its power to generalise across social and class divisions - its claims to 'universality'? The traditionalist ideology is not the only active ideology in society by any means; but it is a dominant ideological field. And this dominance, and its claims to general representativeness, are connected. It is dominant because it appears to be able to catch up quite contradictory life and class experiences within its master framework. Ideologies are easier to understand when they seem, within their own logic, to reflect or adequately correspond to the experiences, positions and interests of those who hold them. But though ideologies do include this practical relation, they cannot wholly be explained in this way; indeed, when we speak of the practical social role of ideologies, we are speaking of the power of ideologies to translate into convincing ideological terms the outlook of classes and groups who are not, even in a collective sense, its 'authors'. So we are also concerned here with what it is in the social and material condition of subordinate classes which allows the dominant traditionalist ideologies to gain some real purchase, and to carry conviction, to win support. How is this traditionalist ideological 'unity' constructed out of disparate and contradictory class formations? How does this version of 'the English way of life' provide the basis of ideological consensus?

"We turn, first, to the notion of respectability - at once, so different for different social classes, and yet so 'universal' a social value. It is an extremely complex social idea. It touches on the fundamental notion of self-respect: men who do not respect themselves cannot expect respect from others. But respectability also touches the more 'protestant' values of our culture; it is connected with thrift, self-discipline, living the decent life, and thus with observance of what is commonly held to be upright, decent conduct. It is strongly connected with ideas of self-help and self-reliance, and of 'conformity' to established social standards - standards set and embodied by 'significant others'.

"The 'others' are always those who rank and stand above us in the social hierarchy: people we 'look up to', and in turn respect. The idea of respectability means that we have taken care not to fall into the abyss, not to lose out in the competitive struggle for existence. In the middle classes, the idea of 'respectability' carries with it the powerful overtones of competitive success; its token is the ability to 'keep up appearances', to secure a standard of life which enables you to afford those things which befit - and embody - your social station in life. But in the working classes, it is connected with three, different ideas: with work, with poverty, and with crime in the broad sense. It is work, above all, which is the guarantee of respectability; for work is the means - the only means - to the respectable life. The idea of the 'respectable working classes' is irretrievably associated with regular, often skilled, employment. It is labour which has disciplined the working class into respectability. Loss of respectability is therefore associated with loss of occupation and with poverty. Poverty is the trap which marks the slide away from respectability back into the 'lower depths'. The distinction between the 'respectable' and the 'rough' working class, though in no sense an accurate sociological or historical one, remains an extremely important moral distinction. If poverty is one route downwards out of the respectable life, crime or moral misconduct is another, broader and more certain route. Respectability is the collective internalisation, by the lower orders, of an image of the 'ideal life' held out for them by those who stand higher in the scheme of things; it disciplines society from end to end, rank by rank. Respectability is therefore one of the key values which dovetails and inserts one social class into the social image of another class. It is part of what Gramsci called the 'cement' of society.

"Work is not only the guarantee of working-class respectability, it is also a powerful image in its own right. We know how much our social and indeed personal identities are caught up with our work, and how men (especially men, given the sexual division of labour) who are without work, feel not only materially abandoned but spiritually decentred. We know in fact that this is the product of an extremely long an arduous process of historical acculturation: all that is involved in the erection, alongside the birth fo capitalism, of the Protestant Ethic, and all that was involved in the insertion of the labouring industrial masses into the rigorous disciplines of factory labour. Work has gradually come to be regarded more as 'instrumental' than as 'sacred', as manual labour under capitalism is disciplined by the wage contract; leisure, or rather all that is associated with non-work and with the private sphere, has come to rank even higher than once it did in the hierarchy of social goods, as family and home have been progressively distanced from work. Yet, for men above all, the workaday world of work, and the formal and informal values associated with it, seem in many ways coterminous with the definition of 'reality' itself. And this, though endowed with extremely powerful ideological content reflects a material fact: without work, the material basis of our lives would vanish overnight. What matters here, with respect to crime, however, is not so much the centrality of work, and our feelings about it, as what we might call the calculus of work. The calculus of work implies the belief that, though work may have few intrinsic rewards and is unlikely to lead to wealth, prosperity and riches for the vast majority, it provides one of the stable negotiated bases for our economic existence: a 'fair day's wage for a fair day's work'. It also entails the belief that the valued things - leisure, pleasure, security, free activity, play - are a reward for the diligent application to long-term productive goals through work. The former come after, and as the result of, or recompense for, the latter.

"Of course, some professional crime could, technically, be seen as 'work' of a kind, and there are certainly testimonies by professional criminals which would support such an interpretation. But few people would see it that way. The sharpest distinction is made between the professional or organised life of crime, and the petty pilfering and 'borrowing' from one's place of work, which is regarded as a customary way of setting a funamentally exploitative economic relation to right, and is thus not understood as 'crime' in the ordinary sense at all. Crime, in the proper sense, when involving robbery or rackets for gain, is set off against work in the public mind, precisely because it is an attempt to acquire by speed, stealth, fraudulent or shorthand methods what the great majority of law-abiding citizens can only come by through arduous toil, routine, expenditure of time, and the postponement of pleasure. It is through this contrast that some of the most powerful moral feelings come to be transferred against deviants who trhive and prosper, but do not work. One of the most familiar ways in which the moral calculus of work is recruited into attitudes to social problems is in the way people talk about 'scroungers', 'layabouts', those who 'don't do a stroke' or 'live off the Welfare'. The characterisations are often applied indiscriminately, and without much evidence, to various 'out-groups': the poor, the unemployed, the irresponsible and feckless - but also youth, students and black people. These are seen as getting something without 'putting anything into it'. The image implies instant moral condemnation. At the same time it is important to remember that again, a real, objective material reality is distortedly expressed in these negative images of the 'scrounger' and the layabout. For the vast majority of working people, there is absolutely no other route to a minimal degree of security and material comfort apart from the life-long commitment to 'hard graft'. It must be remembered that this feeling that 'everyone should earn what he gets by working for it' also informs working class feelings about the very wealthy, or those who live on unearned incomes, or accumulate large pieces of property, or about the unequal distribution of wealth. There is evidence that what is sometimes called a 'pragmatic acceptance' of the present unequal distribution of wealth is matched by an equally strong feeling that there is something intrinsically wrong and exploitative about it. So sentiments stemming from the prevailing 'work calculus' have their progressive aspect too, though they are often used to underpin root conservative attitudes to all who transgress it.

"Another social image with special importance for public ideologies of crime has to do with the need for social discipline - and with England as a disciplined society. Once again, there are different versions of this very general social idea across the different class cultures; the idea is interpreted and applied differently within different cultural systems of meaning, while retaining sufficient common elements to appear to carry a more universal validity. The idea of a 'disciplined society' is enshrined in popular mythology - the whole nation 'at prayer' having been long ago supplanted by the whole nation in an orderly queue. It is especially strong at those high points of popular history, like 'the War', where a country of free individuals 'pulled itself together' to defeat the enemy. The 'discipline' of English society is not the rigorously organised tyranny of the bureaucratic or regimented state, but that 'self-discipline', flexible yet tenacious, while holds the nation together from the inside when it is under stress. In the English ideology, 'discipline' is always linked and qualified by an opposing tendency which tempers its authoritarian harshness: in the upper classes, the idea of discipline and anarchism (as caricatured, for example, in the roles played by John Cleese in the television comedy series, Monty Python's Flying Circus). Lower down the social scale, discipline is often qualified by the image of a sort of petty-bourgeois 'anarchy' (as, for example, in post-war Ealing comedies or Dad's Army). However, the capacity of popular mythology to counter or qualify the respect for 'social discipline' in these ways does not mean that it is not a strong sentiment - only that it is held, like so many other traditional social values, in a peculiarly British way, and with a very special English sense of irony.

...

"The traditional idea of social discipline is closely linked, on the one hand, with notions about hierarchy and authority. Society is hierarchical, in the dominant view, by nature. Competitive success may promote individuals up through this hierarchy, but does not destroy the notion of a hierarchical order itself. But the hierarchy, in turn, depends upon the giving and taking of authority. And the exercise of authority, both on the part of those who exercise it, and of those who give obedience to it, requires discipline. This trinity - the hierarchical nature of society, the importance of authority and the acclimatisation of the people to both through self-discipline - forms a central complex of attitudes. In this version of the dominant social image, indiscipline is seen as a threat both to the hierarchical conception of the social order and to the exercise of 'due authority' and deference; it is thus the beginnings, the seed bed, of social anarchy.

...

"[T]he three social image clusters we have so far discussed - respectability, work and discipline - are inextricably connected with the fourth image: that of the family.

"In the traditionalist lexicon, the sphere of the family is of course where moral-social compulsions and inner controls are generated, as well as the sphere where the primary socialisation of the young is first tellingly and intimately carried through. The first aspect has to do with the repression and regulation of sexuality - the seat of pleasure - in the family nexus; and thus with authority. The second has to do with the power which the family has, through its intimate exchanges of love and anger, punishment and reward, and the structure of patriarchty, to prepare children for a competitive existence, work and the sexual division of labour. The family, too, is a complex social image; different forms, functions and habits may be found in the different social classes. Thus the structures of sexual identity and repression within the working-class family, though in some respects reproducing the dominant stuctures of sex roles in the organisation of the family, are also profoundly shaped by the material experiences of the class - the construction of practices and a definition of 'masculinity' and masculine work and values in the world of production which are transposed into the sexual organisation of the family. Similarly, the apparently cross-class conception of the family as 'refuge' carries a particular weight and intensity when the world from which the family froms a 'refuge' is the daily experience of class exploitation in production and work. But the 'sense of family' is a strong value because it is an absolutely pivotal social institution. Few would deny its central role in the construction of social identities, and in transmitting, at an extremely deep level, the basic ideological grid of society. Family ideology is undoubtedly also changing; and we have learned to think of the family, also, in more positive, less punitive terms. But, when we come 'right down to it', the dominant image of the family - perhaps across classes - still has more to do with the duty of instilling a basic understanding of fundamental 'do's and don'ts' than it does of providing a mutually sustaining and releasing framework. Love is what we hope and pray will emerge from the family, but disciplining, punishing, rewarding and controlling is what we seem actually to do in it a great deal of the time. Reich, with some justification, calls it a 'factory for creating submissive people'. And, as we have come to see, the fundamental images of authority, power and discipline, aloong with the primary origins of what Giles Playfair calls 'the punitive obsession', are experienced and internalise first within its tiny kingdom. The alignment of the sexual and the social - a fundamental task of the family - is just the homology of structures which creates inside us those repertoires of self-discipline and self-control for which, later, the wider world is to be so thankful. It is little wonder, then, that fears and pancis about the breakdown of social discipline - of which crime is one of the most powerful indices - centre on the indiscipline of 'youth', 'the young', and on those institutions whose task it is to help them internalise social discipline - the school, but above all, the family."

Why would be you be both working class and a Conservative? Is there something wrong with you? Are you a deviant? Or are you merely the victim of a 'false consciousness' which prohibits you from understanding your own class interests? What follows is the byproduct of some research I'm doing on the history of the Conservative Party for an article to follow. The following problem, which is subsidiary to the main line of my research, demanded a fuller explanation than I could give in the article, and it is this:

Throughout the 20th Century, the Tories could generally rely on the support of approximately a third of workers. Without this support, the Tories could never form a parliamentary majority. Further, without the active and voluntary participation of many workers in the Conservative Party apparatus, its ability to fund and sustain its operations would be seriously weakened. The Tories have been aware of this situation since workers first achieved the franchise. However, it was the emergence of a mass Labourism with stable support after WWII, and the emergence of modern polling, that led the Tories to adopt a focused electoral strategy of building support among the lower middle class and skilled workers. The fact that the Conservative Party is the single most successful electoral vehicle in the United Kingdom in the 20th Century, and specifically since 1945, is a direct result of the Tories targeting and cultivating working class votes. Yet the success of this strategy demands explanation, for it would seem that the Tories have little, materially, to offer the working class. Workers who directly benefited from the NHS, social security, council housing, etc., have nonetheless voted for the party that put up most resistance to these measures. It would be like urban workers backing the Tories of the 'Corn Laws'. So what gives? The following mainly discusses explanations focusing on deferential political attitudes.

Embourgeoisement or deference?
A great deal of left-wing academic work has been done to unpick and disentangle the motives that lead workers to vote for a party of the ruling class. A 1960 study by the marxist sociologist Raphael Samuel suggested that working class Tories were ‘deference voters’. Much mainstream analysis at this point in the postwar era hinged on the idea that workers were becoming more ‘middle class’. These workers, it was held, identified with the Tories as a party reflecting their changing status, and their ability to ‘get on’ in the world. This was not a new idea. Marxist theory at the turn of the 20th Century had focused on the impact of bourgeois culture on workers, and their concomitant aspiration to become middle class or ‘petit bourgeois’. Engels himself had been repulsed by “the bourgeois 'respectability' which has grown deep into the bones of the workers” of England. Lenin was of the view that ‘bourgeoisified’ workers constituted a ‘labour aristocracy’ who benefitted from the profits of imperialism and were thus in alliance “with the bourgeoisie against the mass of the proletariat” - a theory with more than a few gaping holes in it.

But this focus on ‘embourgoisement’, Samuel argued, was misleading. There were then, as there are now, a great many workers who thought of themselves as ‘middle class’, and whose support for the Tories reflected aspirations that they felt could be fulfilled within the system. But such aspirations were just as compatible with reformism as with conservatism. In the main, Samuel found, workers who voted Tory identified themselves as working class. They looked up to the Tories, and their support was more deferential than aspirational. This was as true among younger voters in urban environments as it was among older voters from more stable, hierarchical rural communities. Typical of the quotes assembled was this, from a 61 year old plumber: “The Conservative Party is the gentleman’s Party. They’re the people who have got the money. I always vote for them. I’m only a working man and they’re my guv’nors.”

This recalls John Stuart Mill's summary of deferential politics: “The relation between rich and poor, according to this theory (a theory also applied to the relation between men and women) should be only partly authoritative; it should be amiable, moral, and sentimental: affectionate tutelage on the one side, respectful and grateful deference on the other. The rich should be in loco parentis to the poor, guiding and restraining them like children.”

Tory voters believed that those with money knew how to handle it better than those without, that that they were made to rule. “Ruling,” the sentiment went, “should be left to the ruling class”. Another quote from a Clapton warehouseman ran: The Conservatives have got more idea of what they’re doing than the people who come up from the working class - the mines and such like. Working class people are not the sort to run the country, because I don’t think they understand it really. I’m sure I wouldn’t if I got up there.” Importantly, in the era of Butskellism, it was believed that the Tories looked after the poor: “A few years ago I would have said they stood for themselves—making money and getting rich. But now they’re certainly looking after us.” Lastly, Samuels argued, Labour itself was increasingly distant from its working class base, and declined to attack the prevailing nationalism and business ethic which the Tories were promoting.

The American social theorist Eric Nordlinger also emphasised the importance of deferential attitudes, arguing that conservative workers were influenced by a particularly English tradition of deference with roots in the Norman conquest and the creation of a centralised state – a claim that remains controversial, to put it no more strongly than that. Nonetheless, the prevalence of deferential attitudes driving working class Tory voters was one of the most commonplace findings of researchers working on this topic in the 1960s. Mackenzie and Silver, in contrast to Raphael Samuel, did detect a lower prevalence of ‘deference’ voting among younger conservatives. They also noted that ‘deference’ was negatively correlated to income: the higher up the income scale voters were, the more ‘secular’ and less ‘deferential’ their motivations were.

If it was true, however, that deferential attitudes underpinned conservatism among the working class, what could explain these attitudes? The sociologist Frank Parkin argued that the problem should be reversed: given that the dominant institutions of society were far more amenable to Conservative ideology than to socialist ideology – with exceptions being the Labour Party, the trade union movement, the cooperatives and the Methodist churches – the real question was how working class socialism proved to be so resilient. This was partially a satirical attack on the idea that there was something ‘deviant’ about conservative attitudes among the working class.

But by drawing attention to the effects of the dominant ideology in workplaces, schools, the armed forces, the monarchy, the established church, and the mass media, he offered a pluralist explanation of working class conservatism that is strikingly similar to that offered by some marxists. A study by the marxist sociologist Bob Jessop, for example, argued that deference in political culture resulted from the pressure exerted by dominant value systems produced by the public schools, private enterprise, the armed forces, the monarchy, etc. Through these institutions, Jessop argued, the ruling class socialised the subordinate classes to accept their domination. Subordinate value systems, those dissident cultures developed by the working class, were under constant pressure from the ruling culture to moderate themselves and internalise the logic of the capitalist system. The Tory Party was, as a party emerging from the aristocracy and committed to hierarchy, right at the centre of the dominant instutions producing this servile, deferential culture.

Or something completely different?
But deference of the type identified by Raphael Samuel cannot explain working class conservatism today. And while I stick to my point that the Tory base is narrowing over the long-term, and that the decline in support among workers has a lot to do with this, it still makes sense to speak of mass conservatism. Since the 1960s there have been enormous social changes associated specifically with an attack on deference toward elites and existing institutions. When Jessop was writing, the Conservative Party's long dominance was in serious trouble, its ability to operate as a hegemonic party of the ruling class endangered by the miners and the shop steward movements, by political radicalisation, by changing demographics and by a tremendous fall in the standing of the establishment. Thatcher's transformation of the Conservatives adapted to this. Though a 'traditionalist' in many ways, she was also noted for being hostile to many of the traditional objects of deference. And the more gauche 'estate agent' element in her support could hardly have been classified as 'deferential' in its social attitudes. Furthermore, the Tories under Thatcher abandoned the paternalistic Butskellite policies that attracted 'deferential' support in the Fifties and Sixties.

The most comprehensive study of the Conservative Party after the Thatcher era, by Paul Whiteley, Patrick Seyd and Jeremy Richardson, found that the existence of explicitly deferential attitudes among the Tory members, never mind the voters, was negligible. Asked to agree or disagree with the view that 'It is best to leave government to people from the upper class', only ten percent either agreed or strongly agreed, with 79% disagreeing. There is a slight class correlation with deferential attitudes being mildly more prevalent among petty bourgeois (12%) and working class members (15%) than among the 'salariat' (ie, professional middle classes, company bosses etc.). There is also a left-right distinction, with 20% of those on the hard right of the party either agreeing or strongly agreeing with such ideas, compared to only 6% on the party's left. And members over 65 tend to be more likely to endorse such sentiments. But these are trends within a minority subset of opinion among the most committed Conservative supporters, and it is not clear how decisive a factor such ideas would be. It's also worth saying that in the same period in which deferential values experienced secular decline, so did the Tory vote, and so did the strength of party identification, with the number of 'very strong' Conservative voters dropping sharply. This would suggest that there has been a 'secularization' in the motives of Conservative voters.

So, deference in the sense of accepting the benign dictatorship of an aristocratic elite is present in the Conservative Party, but not common enough to explain the bulk of working class conservatism. On the other hand, deference is a complex attitude and has many different registers. If we follow Jessop's lead, seeing political deference as one aspect of a wider commitment to the institutions of capitalist society, we can see how deference would survive in different ways in a post-aristocratic age. Working class conservatives, Whiteley et al found, tend to be more likely to hold socially authoritarian attitudes, and economically interventionist attitudes, than the salaried and petit bourgeois members of the Conservative Party. They tend, that is, toward statism.

This isn't necessarily 'progressive' or egalitarian in economic terms. While working class Tories are far less likely to support private medicine than the lower middle class and the salariat, they are also slightly less likely to support spending more money to alleviate poverty. More generally, despite Thatcher's attack on corporatist institutions, there is still a strongly interventionist attitude among a large number of Tory members, almost half of whom would favour an incomes and pricing policy to control inflation. The impact of socialisation is important here - younger Tories, who had been raised in the era of Thatcherism, who had never known the Macmillanite version of Conservatism, were far more likely to have internalised economically anti-statist views. But I think we can start to see a trend here for working class Tories in particular: if they are not deferential toward an aristocratic elite, they are deferential toward the national state. The nation-state, which the Tories are by way of vociferating about most stridently, is for them the best defence against trade unions, immigrants, wideboys and spivs, and the best guardian of a stable, cohesive, well kept society.

Lastly, there is no Platonic, essential 'working class conservative'. There are millions of working class voters whose support for the Conservative Party is 'secular' and thus highly changeable. For example, millions of skilled workers abandoned the Tories as the effects of Thatcherism made themselves felt, and David Cameron has only succeeded in winning a minority of these back. There are many working class Tories who, for example, are basically pro-market individualists with liberal social attitudes, and a sizeable minority who are 'progressive' in the sense of favouring some forms of redistribution, more grassroots democracy, less punitive social attitudes, and a more inclusive nationalism. Those are the folks, I suspect, whom Cameron won over. But the 'deference' voters, today those who vote Tory out of authoritarian patriotism, probably constitute the core Tory support among the working class.

Following on from a theme in The Meaning of David Cameron on the myth of conservatism as a pragmatic, traditionalist ideology (also see this and this):

"[T]he Conservative Party has held a steady commitment to the principle of ‘inequality’. Often this does not appear like an ideological commitment at all since there has been a varying degree of inequality present in British society – in terms of social stratifi cation and income and wealth distribution – since 1945. Therefore what could be seen as an objective of the Conservative Party has often been interpreted as pragmatism, the maintenance of the status quo or a rebuttal of the Labour Party’s (at times shaky) commitment to greater equality. However ... there has been a principled defence of inequality by the Conservative Party. This has taken various forms, from theological or ‘natural’ arguments for inequality to an argument that individual freedom and social and economic equality are incompatible objectives. Therefore, the Conservative Party has sought at different times and in different ways since 1945 to limit the impact of egalitarian policies or even to reverse them.

"One further point should be made at this point which is that if we see the Conservative Party as having a central commitment to inequality, that Conservative politics is about inequality, then it would be possible to see a greater degree of continuity in Conservative Party politics since 1945 than is often asserted. What would appear to be the very different stances taken by ‘One Nation’ and ‘New Right’ Conservatives towards economic and social policy broadly could in fact be similar in that they both have a commitment to ‘inequality’.

...

"Several Conservative politicians have described the non-ideological nature of their Party’s politics. ... This emphasis on pragmatism has led to a concern with power. This view has been stated by Francis Pym: ‘by combining a strong motive for unity with a fi rm refusal to let ideology threaten it … the Conservative Party has a strong instinct for power’. The most sophisticated statement of this approach has been made by Michael Oakeshott, who characterised Conservative politics as being ‘anti-rationalist’. Rationalism was an ideologically based politics. It was a politics based on an abstract concept such as equality or liberty. Instead, Oakeshott argued that since this approach was not capable of capturing the full complexity of the organic society and could not be understood outside of the tradition in which these ideas were formulated a more desirable approach to politics would be one rooted within a recognisable tradition, which would entail operating within national identities. Such an approach has led to a distinction between ‘ideological’ politics and ‘realist’ politics.

...

"[K]ey figures within the ‘One Nation’ approach to Conservatism were united in their opposition of equality as a political principle. They remained committed to hierarchical social and economic structures and saw ‘equality’ as something to which the Labour Party were committed. Hence, although it may be possible to see a broad-based consensus of policy after 1951, with the Conservatives accepting much of what the previous Labour administration had done, there remained no ideological consensus with the idea of ‘equality’ showing a fundamental dividing line between the two major parties. Hence, while the Labour Party ‘revisionists’ such as Hugh Gaitskell and Tony Crosland were busy arguing that socialism was about equality, several of those seen as being on the ‘left’ of the Conservative Party were rejecting the idea of equality as being fundamentally against the principles of Conservatism. Hence David Clark, a leading member of the post-war Research Department and a key ‘moderniser’ along ‘One Nation’ lines, argued that inequality was natural: ‘inequality of natural ability results in class. Some men will always rise superior to others. In a group of men pursuing common purpose, whether it be a nation or a family, a factory or a farm, there must always be those who exercise authority and those who obey.’ For post-war Conservatives therefore there was to be an acceptance of the state, much enlarged during the Second World War and by the Labour Government of 1945–51, but an explicit rejection of ‘equality’. This can be seen in the stance taken on policy by leading Conservative thinkers, so for example, Hogg made a categorical distinction between poverty and inequality much similar to those associated with the New Right during the 1970s and argued that equality should not be a factor in education reform, where Hogg defended both public schools and grammar schools.

"A similar stance towards equality can be seen in the writing of a later prominent Conservative ‘One Nation’ thinker, Ian Gilmour. Gilmour argued that a belief in inequality is a core tenet of Conservatism. He argues that since a basic Conservative belief is freedom and since equality is a threat to freedom then Conservatives must reject equality. Equality is an ideological abstraction and since it lacks precise meaning must be something which is arbitrarily imposed. Although Gilmour sees the elimination of poverty as a Conservative objective, equality is dismissed as something which is the concern of socialists. Gilmour also sees inequality as desirable and natural as an underpinning for the family and for economic activity. There is much in Gilmour’s view of equality that could be found in a traditionalist or New Right approach, although he would be accepting of much greater government involvement in the economy and society. Similarly, contemporary politicians who hold to the ‘One Nation’ position reject the idea of equality. For example, Alistair Burt argues that Conservative politics is concerned with freedom, markets, enterprise and choice, and so even those on the ‘left’ of the Party do not commit themselves to the value of equality.

...

The more populist approach also sees the need to defend economic and social inequalities explicitly. In so doing, the traditionalist approach uses all political arguments available to defend such inequalities. So Powell and the so-called Peterhouse Group associated with Maurice Cowling, John Casey and Edward Norman, drew on the neo-liberal arguments of Friedrich von Hayek in order to defend inequalities. This led to them being described as a ‘Conservative New Right’ since they combined traditionalist approaches with economic liberalism. ... This points to a further element of traditionalist Toryism, which is the ‘anti-rationalist’ nature of politics. Politics based on abstract principles should be rejected in favour of a politics derived from and respectful of political traditions. There were anti-rationalist arguments put forward in favour of English national identity, as seen in the anti-immigration
stances adopted during the 1960s and respect for traditional political institutions as seen in Powell’s rejection of House of Lords reform. For some this marked a major distinction between traditional Toryism and the politics of the New Right, which was seen as being based on abstract (liberal) principles.

"...Inequalities are not just sought by those who would ‘benefit from inequalities of wealth, rank and education but also by enormous numbers who, while not partaking in the benefi ts, recognise that inequalities exist and, in some obscure sense, assume that they ought to’. They assume that they ought to because ‘they are accustomed to inequalities, inequalities are things they associate with a properly functioning society and they do not need an ideological proclamation in order to accept them’. It was this appeal to custom, ‘common sense’ and natural order that should be at the heart of the Conservative appeal in its defence of inequality. Inequality and privilege did not need to be based on abstract principles and could not be refuted by rational politics since they were the natural way of things." (Kevin Hickson, 'Inequality', in Kevin Hickson ed., The Political Thought of the Conservative Party since 1945, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)

"Hobbes clearly opposed the “democraticals,” as he called the parliamentary forces and their followers. Quentin Skinner’s contention in Hobbes and Republican Liberty is that Hobbes expended a considerable sum of his philosophical energy in this opposition and that his greatest innovations derived from it. His specific target was the republicans’ conception of liberty, their notion that individual freedom entailed men collectively governing themselves. By unfastening the links between personal freedom and the nature of political power, Hobbes was able to argue that men could be free in an absolute monarchy—or at least no less free than they were in a republic or a democracy. It was “an epoch-making moment in the history of Anglophone political thought,” says Skinner, resulting in a novel account of liberty to which we remain indebted—unhappily, in Skinner’s view—to this day."