The Tories' structural weakness

As a lefty, the disarray in the Tory party provides a lovely schadenfreudic coincidence – that the same intellectual failing that causes the party’s bad government also causes it to elect unsuitable leaders.

This failing is an inability to see failures of collective action – to see that what is rational for each individual is often bad for everybody.

An obvious example of this came in 2012 when Cameron advised people to top up their petrol tanks in advance of a strike by lorry drivers. He failed to see that whilst this might have been sensible for any individual, its aggregate result was to trigger panic buying and fuel shortages.

There are, though, other examples. Collective action problems mean that public goods such as infrastructure are under-supplied and public bads such as pollution are over-supplied: each individual thinks it won’t make any difference to the climate if he gets on a plane, with the result that too many do so. If everybody – especially the government - tries to cut their borrowing the result is not lower debt but lower incomes for us all. Similarly, whilst you might be able to incentivize any one person to find work by cutting benefits, you cannot incentivize everybody this way: the result is just misery for those out of work. And we cannot rely upon shareholders to control company managers because the hard work of doing so is borne by the individual shareholder whilst the benefits are spread widely over all, with the result that we have inadequate corporate governance. And so on.

The point of politics is to solve collective action problems such as these. The Tory party has, however, under-rated the importance of such problems and so have given us austerity, economic stagnation and an inadequate response to the climate emergency,

Here, though, is the nice irony. The same blindness to collective action problems that caused the Tory party to wreck the economy is now causing it to destroy itself.

What I mean is that its choice of leader suffers the same problem. Each individual considering who should be leader thinks of his personal perspective: who personally do I find simpatico? Whose ideology is closest to mine? And, for MPs, who will give me a job?

These considerations of private gain, however, neglect the collective good (from Tories point of view) of the health of the party. What matters for the party is not that it has the leader closest to your own ideology, but that it has the right leader – that a round hole be filled by a round peg.

This is true in business. As Boris Groysberg and colleagues have shown (pdf) If a company needs a marketing man as CEO but hires an engineer, things go wrong. But if it needs a marketer and gets one, it does well.

And it’s true in politics too. For example, Churchill was a man of massive flaws. But in 1940 many of these faults, such as bombast and belligerence, became virtues. And other failings – such as his racism and ignorance of domestic economic and social matters – weren’t important. In 1940-45, Churchill was a round peg in a round hole. Before and after then, he was not.

Or consider Cameron. He was the right man to detoxify the Tory party in 2005. But the same overconfidence that led him to stand for leadership despite a lack of experience also caused him to call the Brexit referendum. What was a strength in 2005 was a catastrophic weakness in 2016. He stayed the same shape, but the hole changed.

Or consider May. One can imagine circumstances in which her stubbornness would be a strength – if the party had a good strategy which needed sticking to. But these are not the circumstances we’ve had recently. We’ve needed a negotiator – someone with intellectual flexibility and interpersonal skills. And May is wholly lacking such skills.

What matters, then, is the match between the requirements of the job of party leader, which vary from time to time, and the qualities of individual. Sometimes, as in Churchill’s case, the match is good: the man’s vices can either become strengths or be easily overlooked. What we have now, though, is a terrible match: May’s weaknesses are horribly exposed.

If Tory members and MPS consider only their private gain – “who most agrees with me?” – they’ll not ask who is the best match. It is only by accident then that they’ll elect the most suitable leader. And it’s a long time since this accident happened: the party’s last five leaders – Hague, Duncan-Smith, Howard, Cameron and May – have all left something to be desired.

But it was not always thus. Before 1965 Tory leaders were not elected but rather chosen by grandees. Because they were often old enough to have sloughed off ambition, such men put a higher weight upon the good of the party and less upon their private gain. They solved the collective action problem, and the Tory party was much stronger for it. The party has, however, now lost this solution. And the delightful irony is that the same blind spot that has caused it to wreck the country is now causing it to wreck itself.

Comments

[Dave Timoney]

One of the ironies of May's tenure is that she garnered a lot of support among Tory MPs, despite being a remainer, precisely because they thought she would put the interests of the party first.

A further irony is that the Tories' best hope now may well be to elect Johnson as leader precisely because he is a lying opportunist. He is probably the only candidate who stands a chance of getting away with a reverse ferret and thus preventing a split that would put them out of power for a generation.

[JohnM]

Shhhhh !

[Keith]

a reverse ferret means ditch the whole idea of Brexit?

[Guano]

Theresa May did try to put the interests of the Conservative Party first. She made the speech at the Tory Party conference in late 2016, and then the Lancaster House speech, with the intention of calling a General Election. Those speeches are full of Brexity sound bites: the aim was to make all those voters who like those Brexity sound bites into Tory voters - and then she thought that she would have a big majority in parliament and would be able to get any kind of deal negotiated with the EU through parliament.

When it came to it, she didn't draw in enough Brexity voters to compensate for the voters lost through her wooden performance in the election campaign. She lost her majority, but left in the minds of too many people the erroneous idea that the UK could have frictionless trade and cooperation with the rest of Europe while opting out of the institutions that were created to facilitate frictionless trade and cooperation in Europe.

Europe and it various institutions are vehicles for collective action. The slogan "Europe Yes, EU no" makes little sense when all of Europe has agreed to trade and cooperate through a set of collective action institutions. The Tories should know this because they were The Party of Europe and played a big part in building those institutions. A lot of the Brexit discourse is based on pretending that rules and processes that the UK helped to create are an outside imposition and aren't necessary for achieving collective benefits.

[Eminent emigrant]

This is a bit cheeky, but the argument about older disinterested people looking out for the common good rather than personal gain could also be applied to listening to older people on Brexit :)

[Ralph Musgrave]

Chris trotts out the tired old leftie claim that the Tories gave us "austerity".

The first problem with that claim is that the word austerity has two quite distinct meanings: first, lack of aggregate demand, and second, inadequate public spending. Unless those who complain about "Tory austerity" specify which meaning they're on about, they might as well set out words chosen at random from a dictionary.

Second, autsterity (in the inadequate demand sense) did not come about just because of Tory politicians: a sizeable proportion of the economics profession were pro-austerity as well. See:

https://www.project-syndicate.org/blog/unrepentant-economists-by-robert-skidelsky

Third, as Bill Mitchell (Australian economics prof who himself is left of centre) has pointed out over and over, while right wing politicians are useless, left wing ones are not a whole lot better.

[Dipper]

@ Guano. When that collective action means collectively dumping a medium-sized European nation on the UK in a generation without any external help, then I'm out.

[Guano]

Dipper - what are you talking about?

[George Carty]

Guano,

Dipper is talking about the European Commission population projections which predicted a UK population of 80 million by 2050. He (like most Brexiters, I suspect) sees Brexit primarily as a means of curbing excessive population growth resulting from immigration.

[Guano]

I guessed that Dipper was talking about FoM (because he often is). I am fascinated by the way that, like most Brexiteers, he frames such issues as the UK being the victim of something that the EU does and forgets the UK's agency in all this.

FoM is part and parcel of the Single Market that the UK government was at the forefront in creating (with Thatcher in the lead). FoM is an issue because of the accession of southern and eastern European states (that Tory UK governments were very much in favour of). FoM didn't come about because it was forced on us by unaccountable European elites or because Blair/Brown opened up our borders (which is the kind of thing that Brexiteers say) - FoM is one of the pillars of the Single Market that Tory UK governments took the lead in developing and which the UK press was very much in favour of at the time. It was a form of collective action among European states to develop the institutional structure of a Europe-wide market, and like all collective action it has rules and procedures that build trust and help to achieve a collective benefit. Some of it may be irksome but it is worthwhile if all the parties gain from it overall. The time to deal with the irksome bits was in the original negotiations and not 30 years later.

I agree that Tories have a problem with collective action and this is part of the Brexit crisis. The vision of Global Britain appears to rest on the assumption that the UK will be better off if it casts off the shackles of rules and procedures and becomes "buccaneering" - in reality a more inter-connected world is going to require more rules and procedures

[z]

You could say the same about the leadership of the Labour party. If party members had chosen a leader with popular appeal, it might well be in government.

[cjcjc]

Isn't austerity supposed to be the correct response to the "climate emergency"...?