The Sunday Poast

All the Views What's Fit to Print

Welcome to The Sunday Poast, a weekly round up of things I’ve been reading I’d like to share and highlight to help build up a picture of what the collective mission and purpose of conservatives should look like. That means explaining what road we’re on, how we got there and where we’re going - ideally, a conservative Britain fit for the 21st Century.

Post family policy

The argument around childcare in the Budget has really highlighted to me how out fundamental conception of the issue at hand is wrong; having children that need looking after isn’t an economic infrastructure problem.

Our focus on childcare policy is always on getting people back to work, not on what’s best for families. In The Critic, Ellen Pasternack argues this is the effect of ‘daycare ideology’, and argues parents deserve more:

Giving this help in the form of vouchers for formal childcare — as opposed to a cash equivalent which families could spend more flexibly — is a decidedly ideological position for the government to take: the lack of support for informal childcare or for stay-at-home parents isn’t incidental, it’s the point. And it’s all very well saying that you don’t have to use your free hours entitlement if you don’t want to. But if this is the only help available, and if employers expect you to take it rather than move to part-time or remote work, say, then many families will find the choice is made for them…

I’ve written before about “daycare ideology”: the assumption that getting babies and children institutionalised and women back to work as quickly as possible after giving birth is an end in itself, rather than just one of several possible solutions to the problem of keeping kids safe and happy during the working day until they are old enough to start school. Believers in daycare ideology think that parents should be “nudged” in this direction if it’s not what they’d otherwise choose, and even if a system that nudges parents towards daycare is a less efficient use of funds than other forms of support, such as cash subsidies…

The expansion of free childcare hours is a policy that explicitly rests on the logic of daycare ideology. The new policy, as explained in the budget, is premised on the false idea that parents looking after small children are economically “inactive”, and is thus presented as a way to boost employment and GDP. But as we all know, GDP and employment figures are only partial measures of productivity, because they don’t include the value of unpaid work.

Post Conservativism

One of the problems in modern debate is the bad faith of many opponents of conservativism, who try and characterise it as more of a personality disorder or defect than a belief system - either out of bad faith or genuine belief.

That’s a disingenuous debate when the facts of life support cultural conservativism, as Simon Cooke argues in his Substack The View from Culllingworth:

There is a lot more evidence about the positive impact of stable, two-parent families, about the value of strong communities, and about the value of hierarchy, authority and social stability. All of this evidence is, quite rightly, contested but it remains the case that much of the evidence from practical sociology supports many socially conservative tenets. Places with stable families have stronger communities with more social capital. And, as the Knight Foundation shows us, places with stronger social capital where people care for their neighbourhood are nearly always more economically successful.

Today a combination of the selfish but guilty rich and an elite class committed to pushing extreme hyperliberalism (even when much of that class lead essentially conservative  and conventional lives) is eroding the capacity of our economies to deliver the growth necessary to ensure better lives for all. Even when hyperliberals aren’t promoting far left ideas of economic order and accept the benefits of liberal economics, they are choosing at the same time to promote identity politics that reject the value of family and community in preference for an unalloyed, licentious individualism that is bad for society.

Post Journalism

It’s going to be a real challenge for Conservatives to both save institutions from being politicised by those who operate them and, at the same time, restore the damage already done to them.

One of the cases in point is the media and, on his substack Bad Apocalpyse, Fred Skulthop writes about the crisis of trust in the post-pandemic age, particularly focussing on the increasing political policing role media is trying to take in:

Worse, all too often they doubled down on their mistakes, or found themselves defending the controversial policies, even tainting opposition towards a government they should have been holding to account. The point is not whether lockdown was the right thing to do, or if masks were actually effective, or if vaccine mandates should have been used.

The point is we fully abandoned our long held principle that in a Democracy people can be trusted to make up their own minds about the world. You might laugh at that idea. Of course, it’s always been an illusion. But it’s also part of the mythos of democracy. Even in a time of crisis, we have to at least pretend to keep it intact. 

Post truth

But in dealing with that post-truth crisis in the media thank the Lord we have the experts at the Foreign Office who have wisely - as Steerpike reports in The Spectator - spent £2.6M on a ‘disinformation index’ that warns people not to read right-wing outlets:

The GDI is a (supposedly) non-partisan, non-profit which aims to provide ‘independent, neutral and transparent data and intelligence to advise policymakers and business leaders about how to combat disinformation.’ The British-based outfit recently hit the headlines on the other side of the pond after ranking leading American publishers among the ‘most risky’ sites in the United States. It published a 27-page risk assessment report in December in which the New York Post was found to have ‘frequently displayed bias, sensationalism and clickbait’, a view which, er, its staff understandably don’t share.

Another of the supposed worst offenders was the libertarian magazine Reason and the conservative magazine the American Spectator. All of the sites deemed the ‘ten riskiest online news outlets’ among the 69 studied by the GDI were right-leaning, prompting concerns of political bias. Funny that!

Post degree

A while back I wrote in a Substack that ‘thanks to the overprioritisation of university education and marginalisation of technical education, people looking to enter higher education are given only one high-status option – university. This teaches them socially liberal values which, thanks to the traditional better performance of graduates in employment and their higher visibility in public life, are paraded as a marker of high-status.’

I don’t just have a problem with the fact that prioritisation of university education has made people more left wing, but also because many of the jobs that demand degrees simply don’t require them in practice. But there is hope in America where, as Rachel Cohen writes in Vox, there is evidence of an emerging reset on the value of degrees:

Between 1980 and 2012, jobs requiring high levels of social interaction grew by nearly 12 percentage points as a share of the US labor force, according to Harvard education researcher David Deming. As a hiring proxy for this, companies started to turn to four-year college degrees.

These trends accelerated during the Great Recession, when employers had a labor surplus to choose from. Of the 11.6 million jobs created between 2010 and 2016, three out of four required at least a bachelor’s degree, and just one out of every 100 required a high school diploma or less.

The Sunday Papers

On his Substack Patrick English takes new YouGov polling on the potential impact the cost of living crisis has on voting groups, and the challenges it poses to Conservatives:

With inflation soaring, energy bills rocketing, and wages struggling to keep pace, public anger with the way the government has handled the economy in reference to their household finances - not just the nation’s - has only anchored the Conservatives down in their polling mire.

Not quite a paper, but this Freddie DeBoer Substack looks at the optimism bias that prevents us getting better educational outcomes:

The United Kingdom spends a third again per-student what South Korea does and gets far worse results. You can’t just dismiss these consistent findings.

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