Why Farage is a Burkean Prepare for the counter-revolution

If America’s Right-wing counter-revolution is proceeding at full swing, while Trump enjoys the pomp of the state visit, that of his unhappy mother country is only just beginning to take shape. The proof, perhaps, can be seen in the laments over the “Americanisation” of British politics now coming from those who eagerly adopted every one of their liberal fads from the past decade: in British politics, insular patriotism has become the last refuge of the losing faction. If the Government views Trump’s administration with thinly-veiled panic, Reform sees in it not just an ideological ally but also a table-scattering model to follow.

But such things are anathema to a dying Conservative party, until lately presenting itself as the guardian of Burkean tradition, with a patrician attitude to political contest so leisurely as to be indistinguishable from surrender. Yet if “Burkean” may not be the first adjective to strike the observer of Reform’s recent party conference, in all its Trumpian campness and glitzy bad taste, the shock defection of Danny Kruger, until last week one of the Conservative Party’s few serious thinkers, signals a new and counter-revolutionary mood on the British Right.

For all that Farage styles his party as “radical but not revolutionaries”, Kruger’s vow to undertake “change on a scale that the system has not seen since the modern civil service was created in the 19th century” is a pledge far beyond the Tory comfort zone. The Conservatives have, in recent decades, settled into an intellectual stupor of grouching against liberal innovations, while pledging fealty to supposedly Burkean values of only incremental reform, with a certain effete and cosmetic appeal to tradition unevidenced by their record in power. Yet, like reproaching Reform, now the default party of the British Right, for its “unconservativeness”, this may say more about how we misunderstand Burke, a figure more often invoked than read by conservatives, than it does anything about conservatism itself.

During the Cold War, Burke was reshaped primarily by American conservatives into what the Irish critic Seamus Deane later mocked as “the Disney versions” of his thought. He was reduced to a now hackneyed checklist of banal precepts — revolutions are bad, little platoons are good, timeworn customs are better than radical new innovations — which have functioned, as the great historian J.G.A. Pocock later observed, as a taboo against conservatives taking any concerted or radical course of action at all, ceding the ground for liberal hegemony.

Yet taking Reform, and now Kruger, at their word allows us to rescue Burke from the tweedy hesitancy of the latter-day Burkeans: for first we must recognise that he was less a conservative, voicing support for only slow and incremental reform, than he was an explicit counter-revolutionary, who in his Letters on a Regicide Peace excoriated Fox’s “New Whigs” for making peace with France’s revolutionary government, and instead urged the prosecution of what he correctly foresaw would be a long and bloody Continental war to overthrow the new regime.

For the Burke of Regicide Peace, and of Thoughts on French Affairs, the new order established by the French revolutionaries was “a general evil” brought about by a “cabal” of ambitious and ideological lawyers and journalists. These were “the creatures of the desk, and the creatures of favour”, who undertook to overthrow the time-worn social order and replace it with their “theoretick dogmas”. Their idealist doctrines worked against both custom and human nature, which bore “a much greater resemblance to those changes which have been made upon religious grounds, in which a spirit of proselytism makes an essential part”, than to politics as previously understood. As Burke declared, “All their new institutions, (and with them every thing is new) strike at the root of our social nature.” The central task of politics, for Burke, is not to draw a line in the sand against future revolution, but to overthrow in its entirety the new revolutionary order: for “He who does not stay the hand of suicide, is guilty of murder.” In the actual Burke of the late 18th century, and not the neutered Burke of the mid-20th, we see the aggrieved and combative conservative mindset of today.

With this in mind, we may understand Reform better through considering the political thought of the party’s court historian, Sir David Starkey, than we do by mocking Dame Andrea Jenkyns’ sequinned conference sing-along. As summarised by Nicholas Harris in the New Statesman: David Starkey at conference “lectured on the Blairite coup of 1997, which he compared to a ‘slow burn French Revolution’… condemning ‘the catastrophe of human rights’, the Supreme Court and the ECHR… while musing on historical analogies for the coming Reform takeover: the 1832 Reform Act, the Glorious Revolution, the Stuart Restoration”. This is not conservatism as we have come to understand it, but counter-revolution: a swift and total toppling, through packing the Lords with sympathetic new peers, and a bonfire of Blairite legislation, of New Labour’s unloved and malignant constitutional order, the “theoretick dogmas” of our own revolutionary lawyers.

Indeed, Burke’s thundering and apocalyptic discourse against the Révolutionnaires may be more accurately compared to the “divisive” rhetoric of today’s radical Right than to the empty platitudes of the Conservative wets. As Burke’s fellow Irish essayist Seamus Deane would later observe, Burke’s chosen enemy “belongs to no state, is beyond loyalties and affections. He is the first cosmopolitan.” This was an early evocation of a recognisable modern type, who in Burke’s words “broke the locality of public affections, and united descriptions of citizens more with strangers, than with their countrymen of different opinions”.

Deane encapsulates Burke’s view of his opponents: “Those who yearn for abstract principle are those who belong to no community; they live in a state of psychic anarchy and therefore seek justification for themselves in the promulgation of doctrines which would annihilate the very idea of historical community and continuity.” What is remarkable now is how current this discourse sounds, and not how time-worn and safe an expression of staid conservative principles. Burke’s cabal of lawyerly malcontents and insidious revolutionaries, upturning both age-old custom and the bonds of familial and national affection in pursuit of their new order, is little different, in terms of the rhetoric employed against it, to today’s Matrix Chambers set and its Grub Street hangers-on.

And so, for Starkey as for Burke before him, “the New Labour government of 1997 right up to the present is effectively 25 years of quasi-Revolution which has effectively demolished and deliberately disintegrated the historic constitution of Britain as it was reformulated first in 1660 with the Restoration and again in 1689 with the Glorious Revolution”. The aspiration, for Starkey, “should be for a new Restoration, a second Restoration”.

In just the same way, in his book Covenant, Kruger proposes “a new Elizabethan (or indeed Restoration or Hanoverian)… settlement, a new version of that peculiarly English compromise that accommodates the defeated opponent and involves them in the task of creating the peace that follows” the coming dismantling of the legal architecture imposed by New Labour, which frustrates British governance and democracy alike. The enemy is to be allowed back into the political order only after his total defeat. These explicit calls for counter-revolution are, in their appeal to the age-old constitution, a directly Burkean framing, highlighting the ambiguities and ironies of conservative counter-revolution then as much as now.

For rather than a Tory — he abjured the term, not least for its Irish and Jacobite connotations — Burke was a Whig, whose fundamental loyalty was to the political order installed by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. How, then, could Burke condemn revolution when his own loyalty was to a mere century-old revolutionary regime? The answer lay in denying that the Glorious Revolution was any revolution at all, but was instead merely a course-correction back to England’s age-old constitutional order, bringing to an end an aberrant period of Continental-influenced despotism.

As Burke insisted in his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, “the fundamental subversion of this ancient constitution… justified the Revolution”, a political coup justified “as the only means left for the recovery of that ancient constitution formed by the original contract of the British state, as well as for the future preservation of the same government”. The revolution was no revolution but merely a restoration to the natural order of things, a great reset in line with the country’s hard-won and ancient freedoms.

Just as Burke declared of England’s constitution that “it was formed and grew up among ourselves; that it is in every respect peculiar to this island; and that if the Roman or any foreign laws attempted to intrude into its composition, it has always had the vigour to shake them off, and return to the purity of its primitive constitution”, so can and will today’s conservative Reformists shake off the ECHR as a foreign imposition on parliamentary sovereignty. As Deane, cataloguing Westminster’s quixotic ways, observes with Irish nationalist detachment, “All [Burke’s] citations of Magna Carta, Coke, Bracton, the men of 1688, are designed to convey an essential point about the English character — that the English have always chosen the appeal to precedent and to history over the appeal to abstract principle and universal rights.”

There is no revolution that the English mind cannot derive from ancient precedent, justifying total political change as a reversion to the ancient, hallowed norm. Indeed, Pocock’s wry observation that “there was no reason why that realm’s history, and that of its Burkean capacity for self-reform, should not be traced back to the folkmoots of a Teutonic dawn” today finds uncanny echoes in Liz Truss’s recent claim that “The USA is arguably today the most unadulterated iteration of ancient British liberties that would still be recognized by our Saxon forefathers”, an appeal to America’s tradition of free speech perhaps more convincing a fortnight ago than today.

Whether Tacitus’s Germans, in their gloomy Nordic forests, would have recognised Trump, let alone Truss, as modern avatars of their rude democracy may be doubtful. Yet there is more than a hint here of an appeal to American intervention as a Glorious Revolution 2.0: America as the repository of age-old Anglo-Saxon freedoms, preserved by their own very English revolution, returning to the motherland in her hour of need. For what the Glorious Revolution was, in truth, was the dismantling of an unpopular government at the behest of Westminster political elites through the intervention of a foreign ruler. A revolution is, as Burke warns, “the very last resource of the thinking and the good”, for “Governments must be abused and deranged, indeed, before it can be thought of; and the prospect of the future must be as bad as the experience of the past”.

What are we to make, then, of Farage’s repeated claims that Reform should plan to enter government in 2027, before the conclusion of Labour’s allotted term? It does not take a great prophet to foresee the already-struggling Labour government entering a period of terminal crisis before 2029: yet the mechanism through which Reform might enter power before then, the nature of the crisis that may supersede custom, is, for now, obscure.

And there are other, so far unasked questions to be raised about the coming, promised Restoration: if the Glorious Revolution was bloodless in England, it was not so in Ireland, as Burke knew well. In a less dramatic way, if the constitutional architecture of the Blair regime is to be overturned through the revival of Westminster’s sovereignty, what is to be done with devolution, in a context where a Reform government adopts the mantle of British Unionism against the peripheral nationalisms of Scotland and Wales? As Deane rightly observes, “Counter-revolution or national resistance could succeed in one sense against their enemy, but they could not reinstate the world that was lost; they could only pretend to do so, while actually inaugurating a new world.”

Reform’s coming Burkean counter-revolution may promise a return to Westminster’s ancient constitutional order, interrupted by the failed experiments of the revolutionaries: but what we will get is something entirely new, perhaps more American than European, and likely more English than British. “The revolutionary is in love with risk; the conservative is in love with precedent,” Deane notes. For now this principle has been inverted, as conservatives set themselves the task of a revolution that, as in 1688, does not quite dare speak its name.

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