Why Do Abject Westminster-Bubble Tory Boys Support The Fabian Society?

Recently, the abject Westminster-Bubble Tory Boy outlet, Pimlico Journal, launched a surprising defence of the Fabian Society, which doubled as a scathing attack on The Lotus Eaters who stand accused of “peasant conspiratorialism”. Much of their anger, of course, comes from the fact that Carl Benjamin and his team are supporting Restore Britain, like any good patriot should, and not the disgusting regime-containment operation known as Reform UK. If you’re not familiar with Pimlico, it’s a minor-league think-tank-adjacent space for would-be Tory (or now Reform) spads to practice their empty wonk-speak until they get jobs serving some risible MP for £42k a year. In this article, I seek to answer one question: why does the modern aspiring M25-Tory Boy support the Fabians? For the answer, I turned to a volume called New Fabian Essays (1952), written at a time when Labour was in a downbeat mood after Winston Churchill had defeated Clement Attlee in the general election of 1951.

A typical Tory Boy

This book starts with the admission that the “reactionary” pessimist, Arnold Toynbee, had been right about “progress” and that the Fabians, the liberals and the Marxists had been wrong. You can read about Toynbee in my chapter on him in The Prophets of Doom (2023). In the pre-war period, one of the leading Fabians – a hero to the Pimlico Journal – was H.G. Wells. However, the course of history left Wells feeling that he had been wrong and Toynbee right:

Towards the end of his life Wells began to despair, because he realised the failure of his implicit principle, that the enlargement of scientific knowledge, i.e. power to control nature and men, necessarily increases freedom. Faced by the obvious failure of rationalism to rationalise human nature, he moved very near to the pessimistic position of Arnold Toynbee. (R.H.S. Crossman, ‘Towards a Philosophy of Socialism’, in New Fabian Essays, p. 7)

Next comes a startling admission, the author agrees that Toynbee was right:

Most of us would now agree that Toynbee’s sense of direction was better than that of the early Wells. Yet until the 1930s Wells’s illusions were shared by Liberals, Marxists and early Fabians; they were, indeed, the climate of all progressive public opinion.

This materialist conception of progress was based on assumptions about human behaviour which psychological research has shown to have no basis in reality, and on a theory of democratic politics which has been confuted by the facts of the last thirty years. There is neither a natural identity of interests nor yet an inherent contradiction in the economic system. The growth of science and popular education does not automatically produce an ‘upward’ evolution in society, if by ‘upward’ is meant from servile to democratic forms; and the apocalyptic assumption that, after a period of dictatorship, a proletarian revolution must achieve a free and equal society is equally invalid. The evolutionary and the revolutionary philosophies of progress have both proved false. Judging by the facts, there is far more to be said for the Christian doctrine of original sin than for Rousseau’s fantasy of the noble savage, or Marx’s vision of the classless society. Our first task, therefore, is to re-define progress. (ibid., p. 8, emphasis mine)

This is a typically Fabian (and also Blairite) move: concede the point, then re-define the frame. Much of the rest of the book tries to solve the puzzle of how to move towards the socialist end-goal while accepting these basic truths.

It is worth mentioning that the cartoon caricature of the Fabian, as peddled by those pesky peasants so sneered at by Pimlico, is that of a sneaky operator who engages in a strategy of ‘boiling the frog slowly’, so that the masses are sleep-walked into socialism as opposed to jolted by revolution. The thing about that cartoon caricature is that it happens to be true. Let us hear it from the horse’s mouth:

The temper of the people will be more contented and therefore more conservative, and public opinion will take time to acclimatise itself to the prospect of each further radical advance. (C.A.R. Crossland, ‘The Transition from Capitalism’, in New Fabian Essays, p. 68)

The Fabian understands that the revolution isn’t happening, and more to the point, they don’t want it to happen, because it brings too much upheaval. Fortunately for them, they have been gifted with the most cowardly, snivelling, spineless and downright traitorous opposition God might have granted them: the Tories.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, throughout the book, the Tories are not an enemy to smite – as one might expect from Labour intellectuals – but rather a built-in feature of their plans. Here is the same author just quoted, counting on Tory cowardice for the advancement of the Fabian vision:

For these reasons, each Tory government will certainly beat a retreat (in particular toward greater inequality) from the position reached under the previous Labour administration. But the retreat will be half-hearted. The pressures making for statism are far too strong to be held back, and the Tories too intuitive a party indefinitely to play Canute. The right-wing sabotage of Labour’s programme, which every Left Book Club member expected before the war, never in fact materialised. For precisely the same reason, the Conservatives now cannot and will not restore completely the pre-war status quo. However, these partial retreats will provide plenty of material for Labour speeches and election programmes. So also, indeed, quite apart from Tory retreats, will reforms demanding to be accomplished within the broad framework of statism. (ibid. p. 59)

Of course, the stupid peasants so lamented by Pimlico know all this because it’s summed up by the old internet meme of the ‘ratchet effect’ and even discussed by writers as pedestrian as Curtis Yarvin.

What’s more interesting to me, however, is another passage in the book, by the deeply subversive Roy Jenkins, an arch-villain responsible more than most for wrecking this country, but apparently a hero to Pimlico:

The party system, which is and has been so much the essence of British political democracy that it is difficult to believe that it is not a sine qua non, may also be thought to be endangered by a substantial move towards egalitarianism. Must not the one class state also be the one-party state? Certainly the rigid Marxist, to whom this development would not in any event appear a very dreadful calamity, would have to answer the question with a clear affirmative. And even those who are a good deal less rigid but who none the less believe in the dominance of the economic motive as a spring to political action, could only escape from such an answer by postulating a new party grouping arising out of conflicts between those in one productive or geographical group and those in another — not a very likely development in a country so closely integrated and so impregnated by a common tradition as the United Kingdom.

A more realistic answer is that the move towards and even the attainment of a classless society might well leave largely undisturbed the present party basis. Certainly the immensely resilient Conservative Party, which has survived so skilfully the social changes of the past 150 years, would not collapse under the disappearance of the bourgeoisie. There is always room in British politics for a party of consolidation, and provided there are leaders prepared to play the role of a Sir Robert Peel or a Mr. R. A. Butler, and ensure that it is merely no advance and not positive reaction which is attempted, the future of conservatism is assured. Its basis of support is not only or even principally those who feel that their economic class interests would be endangered by the reformers. It comes from the much more numerous class of those who, without particular regard for their own economic interests, shrink from the intellectual adventure of supporting a government of advance. They are the sceptics, the pessimists about man’s ability to improve his own lot, who reject not so much this or that aspect of the reforming party’s programme as the whole concept that changes wrought by government can make a better society. They will always exist, and in great numbers, in a classless society as much as in a hierarchical one, and they will always offer a solid basis of support for a party of the right. (Roy Jenkins, ‘Equality’, in New Fabian Essays, pp. 88-9)

What is important here is that Jenkins, in his vision of the classless socialist state, factors-in and then bakes-in the Tories. He rejects a one-party state and instead rolls with the notion that this feckless band of losers – The Tories – will always be there, make a convenient whipping boy, and in any case, as per Crossland earlier, will serve to lock in Fabian wins. Cast your mind back to my original essay on Zero Seats. Recall the comments of Tony Blair who, in 1997, was anxious that he would destroy the Tory Party. He did not want the Tories gone because they were useful to him. Many similar comments have since been made by Labour grandees when it looked like the Conservative Party would become ex-parrots. In other words, to the Fabian mind, the Tories are not just a minor inconvenience to the smooth path of progress, they are structurally necessary.

Now, of course, the system hopes to reform T-1000 in Reform UK who – as long as they are basically Tories – can fulfil the same structural function as the old rotten party did for 200 years. Let us return now to the original question: why would the Tory Boy today defend the Fabians? It is because, in a strange way, the Fabians are the only people who truly love the Tories and think they deserve to exist. The relationship is best embodied as that between Tony Blair and his gimp, William Hague. Blair must regard Hague as a pathetic creature, pitiable almost, since he has become such a faithful Blairite dog, rolling over on his back for the master to stroke his belly. And yet also, for Blair, it is more useful to have a weak cretin like Hague occupying the space that says ‘right-wing’ or ‘Tory’ than genuine opposition. Hague knows this and that is why he loves Blair. I posit that, at the much lower Pimlico-wannabe-spad level of Tory Boy, the logic works in the same way. At some depth of their cuckolded unloved not-bullied-enough-at-school psyche, they understand that the Fabians love them as the hated peasants never could.