"Right-wing on economics, left-wing on social issues": on the breakdown of a political heuristic (2024)

It is still early days for the Starmer Government, and at this stage, we can only really judge it on the basis of vibes rather than specific policies. But with that caveat in mind, it already looks as though, from a classical liberal perspective, this administration is going to be very much a mixed bag.

There have been some encouraging signs on economic policy. Labour seem relatively serious about weakening the Nimby stranglehold that is paralysing the British economy. But they have also shown some worrying authoritarian impulses on civil liberties, especially when it comes to regulating political speech.

I realise that this does not sound like a groundbreaking analysis (and I am indeed not expecting a Pulitzer Prize for it). Most people will see most governments as mixed bags, approving of some of the things they do, while disapproving of others.

The reason why I bother writing this at all is that there is something a bit unusual about the pattern described above. For over half a century, it used to be a decent rule of thumb that a classical liberal is someone who sides with the political Right on economic issues, and with the political Left on social issues. That was never exactly right, and it was always easy to think of counter-examples. But for a long time, it used to be about as accurate as any political rule of thumb can realistically get.

I am currently reading the bookThe New Right Enlightenment, published in 1985, which is a collection of essays by people who were then the up-and-coming thinkers of the so-called ‘New Right’. The New Right was, essentially, a rediscovery of classical liberalism after several decades in the postwar wilderness. At least in the economic sphere, it was a major influence on Thatcherism. It is noteworthy how often the above-mentioned formula comes up in that book, in different forms.

For example, Steve Davies, who would become my colleague at the Institute of Economic Affairs 25 years later, describes how he developed his political views:

“[T]he events of the 1960s and early 1970s, such as the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, all pushed me away from any commitment to socialism. I was also repelled by the ‘Right’, both by its support for the Vietnam War and by its repressive attitudes to personal morality. By the age of 17, I had already decided that I had ‘Right’ views on economics, ‘Left’ views on social issues.”

Similarly, Nigel Ashford, who is nowSenior Programs Officer at the Institute for Humane Studies, wrote:

What changed?

Some liberals argue that the political Right has given up on Thatcherite economics, and reverted to the more statist, corporatist conservatism of the postwar era. There may well be some truth in that, but it implies a level of consistency that does not really exist. It is not that the Right has consistently replaced Thatcherism with the economics of Edward Heath or Harold Macmillan. It’s more that the Right has given up on economic dynamism in general. The only consistent economic policy theme they have left is a nihilistic Nimbyism. This is hard to pin down exactly, because Nimbyism is a revealed ideology rather than a stated ideology. A Nimby is not someone who literally says ‘I am a Nimby’; it is someone who claims to be in favour of ‘the right kind of development’ in ‘the right places’, and then opposes every actual development.

This is probably more a matter of demographics than ideology. Over the course of the past decade, we have seen an increasing political sorting along generational lines, which did not exist yet in 2010. The political Right has increasingly put all of its electoral eggs into one generational basket: the Baby Boomers. Atthe last general election, 57% of voters over the age of 65 voted for right-wing parties, but only 18% of voters under the age of 25 did. Quite understandably, retired voters tend to be less interested in economic dynamism, and more interested in stability, familiarity and tranquillity. But whether understandable or not – you cannot run a prosperous economy on the basis of pandering to those voters alone. Economic activity has to take place somewhere. It needs premises, infrastructure, and housing nearby.

The reaction against Nimbyism –Yimbyism– is not necessarily aligned with classical liberalism: after all, the Soviets also believed in building things. But what you cannot be is a ‘liberal Nimby’, or at least not in an economy where a shortage of housing, business premises and infrastructure is the main bottleneck. As long as political Right is so attached to Nimbyism, a classical liberal cannot be ‘right-wing on economics’.

But to complicate matters further, I don’t think that in this day and age, a classical liberal can be ‘left-wing on social issues’ either. That association comes from a time when the Left stood for permissiveness in the social sphere, rather than a woke authoritarianism. When the 1980s Left opposed the idea that the state should force moral values on people, they assumed that that state would always be a conservative state, and that its moral values would always be conservative values. It did not even occur to them that one day, the major state institutions might have a progressive bent, and that the state could be used as a tool to force progressive moral values on people.

This does not mean that classical liberals now have to align themselves with the populist, anti-woke Right, which can be quite anti-liberal in its own way. However, you cannot meaningfully call yourself ‘socially liberal’ if you are only prepared to defend people’s freedoms to do things they can already easily do. It must also mean defending the unpopular, and the unfashionable. And nowadays, that mostly means defending the freedom to deviate from progressive orthodoxy.

In short, the old rule of thumb that classical liberals are ‘economically right-wing and socially left-wing’ has broken down, and it does not have an obvious replacement. Classical liberals no longer have obvious allies across large policy packages. We have to pick our alliances more selectively, on a case-by-case basis. And more often than in earlier decades, we may simply be on our own.

This article was first published on CapX.