Elizabeth Oldfield: How often do you meet someone, figure out how they vote, and think you probably know a huge amount more about them? I’m really hoping that is not just me. I think the data shows we all do this. We are extremely capable of taking a small bit of information about someone—particularly their politics, but not just that—and backfilling their values, their philosophy of life, what motivates them, really everything else important about them.
The conversation that you’re about to hear is with James Vitali. James is a local councillor in Dorset. He’s the former head of political economy at the think tank Policy Exchange. He is a reservist army officer and the author of the book The Ownership Society: How Bourgeois Values Can Save Britain.
What are you thinking? What’s going on in you? What set of associations has bubbled up for you? What is your predictive processing, your mental model of the person that you are about to listen to?
Honestly, the army officer thing, the bourgeois society thing meant that I was expecting someone to walk in who might be a bit arrogant, who might be a bit brash, who might be very clear about what they thought, who might—not in all areas, but in some areas—be working from quite a different set of values than I am. And again and again, I’m reminded to pause, to let all that fall away and really listen to the person in front of me. I hope that you get as much from it as I did. And there are some reflections from me at the end.
James, you’ve had a bit of warning that I’m going to ask you about your deep principles and values. So tell me, what do you hold sacred?
James Vitali: Yes, it’s funny. I feel like it’s one of those things that you best discover through its opposite, or the lack of it.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yes.
James Vitali: As I was thinking about this on the way over, I was thinking about desecration. And in the village I was born and raised in and live in still, Marnhull in Dorset, there’s a church right in the centre of the village, and it is on the main road through the village. And recently it was graffitied over. The wall—the sort of churchyard wall—was graffitied over. And I thought about why I found that so distressing. And I think it’s a mixture of three things.
I think it’s the church itself. Christianity is a big part of my upbringing. It’s right next to the war memorial. Both my parents serve in the military, and I’ve recently commissioned. And the idea of, I suppose, more abstractly, sacrifice—that’s always been quite a sacred idea to me. And then finally, community. And all those things are sort of wrapped up in this church wall that have been defaced. And the fact that people coming into—you know, the place that I called home would see this as the first thing they saw. So, yeah, like I said, one of those things that you sort of discover through the absence or the privation of it.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Well, that’s there in the literature about it, that we often don’t know—that it’s quite unconscious. What are the things that we’re building our life around or defending in these non-instrumental ways? Not just because they’re good for us, but because we feel like there’s something sacred about them, even if we wouldn’t necessarily use that language. One of the clues is when you get that ick reaction, when you get that, like, no.
James Vitali: Yes. They’re non-tradable.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah.
James Vitali: There’s no amount of money that could be given to you to part with.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Mm, yeah. And they do become visible when they’re trespassed, or when someone asks you to compromise on them, and then you feel the internal ache, and that’s like a clue that there’s something that’s guiding you.
Tell me more about that place, because I know it looms large in your sense of your identity and your calling and your thought. Were you born there?
James Vitali: So, yeah, so I was born in Salisbury, but then I was born and raised in the same house all my life. Both my parents, as I said, service personnel. And the part of Dorset I grew up in, the Blackmore Vale—for listeners who don’t know it, it’s a central part of the universe of Thomas Hardy. He writes a lot about the Blackmore Vale, and Marlott in Tess of the d’Urbervilles is Marnhull. So it’s got a really proud sort of relationship with the literature of Thomas Hardy. So that part of Dorset sits equidistant between a whole range of bases and establishments that my parents worked at.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I think of military families as mainly growing up on bases, but is that just a misconception?
James Vitali: Well, it’s a bit of a choice. You can kind of be mobile or you can be static. Some military families travel with the job. My paternal grandfather did, and the family sort of moved with him. But we were stationary. I think that was a conscious choice for my parents.
Elizabeth Oldfield: And did they meet—forgive me, I’m just getting so nosy—are they in the army?
James Vitali: They’re both Navy officers. I have army officer family members, but both my parents in the Navy. They both met at Dartmouth, which is the naval academy in the South West. And it would be very difficult to meet them and not think, yeah, you’re probably in the military, and you’re probably in the Navy. But yeah, and that seeps into the way that they brought my brother and I up.
But yeah, so exceptionally special place for me. Really rooted, very stable family life growing up. I would say our upbringing was privileged. I don’t think—it wasn’t the case that we had a great deal of disposable income; we didn’t. But the privileges we had were, you know, extremely loving parents, the stability of a place that we knew and felt safe in, an immense amount of social infrastructure in a place like that.
Elizabeth Oldfield: What do you mean by social infrastructure?
James Vitali: So, yeah, I mean, it’s a concept in the academic literature, but in simple terms, it just means all those bodies and organisations that sit between the individual and government that provide things of value. They’re pubs, they’re cricket clubs, they’re churches. They used to play far more functions in our society, but they still play important ones today. They give you an immense amount of opportunity as a young person. It’s very difficult to quantify. There’s things like, you know, good schools—they’re quantifiable by, you know, how they’re assessed and graded. But the value of having a cricket club down the road, a church which has a sort of thriving youth group or, you know, a larger congregation, as it did then—exceptionally useful for people growing up.
Elizabeth Oldfield: How do you think your parents—well, I guess one question is, what do you think of the values that the military, or maybe the Navy particularly, really inculcates, that you saw in your mum and dad?
James Vitali: So obviously I’ve come to think about this a lot more as I’ve got older and joined the military too. Latent in the background of everything you do in the military is this idea of sacrifice. We speak more about service—”Thank you for your service,” as the Americans say. But in the background, there is this final preparedness to give yourself in some way for other people. With the military, of course, it’s for the nation.
But then to come back to that point about the things I hold sacred, thinking about it, all of those things are related to sacrifice in some way. I think the underlying metaphor of the Christian faith is sacrifice, the gift of self. That’s the case with the military. And it’s also the case with community. It’s the idea that we get meaning and value from our relationships. Our existence is relational. And that really is about understanding yourself from the perspective of others, putting yourself in the shoes of others, and also having obligations to them. I think that’s how I would think about it.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Were there periods in your childhood where it wasn’t easy having family in the military, or did it always just feel like a solid good?
James Vitali: Dad was a warfare officer and drove ships. He was away for a lot.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Sorry, a warfare officer? What does that mean?
James Vitali: So it’s almost like a trade within the Navy. He learned how to command ships, drive them around on deployments. So he was—and deployments in the Navy are typically longer because, you know, you’re taking a ship to various parts of the world. So he was off and away for—you know, I remember deployments of sort of six to nine months, which meant several things. It meant that my relationship with Dad really began to flourish a lot older, and I was very close to my mother because, frankly, she was there. She was there.
But my mum left the Navy to raise my brother and I. After 9/11—and I think a big part of this is that she had worked in America and was deeply fond of American people and culture—she was mobilised after 9/11. And so we were raised by my grandma for big parts of my childhood.
Elizabeth Oldfield: So she was mobilised back into the Navy?
James Vitali: Correct. She was an intelligence officer. She’s a very cool lady, but she had a very different Navy career to my dad. But yeah, for proportions of when my brother and I were at primary and secondary school, she was away a lot. And so we lived with my grandmother. And again, to the point about social infrastructure, she lived just around the road. It just speaks volumes to the benefits you get from a society with that level of trust and that level of integration that when both my parents were away, the community sort of wrapped itself around my brother and I and was able to look after us. So we grew up extremely close to our grandma as well.
Elizabeth Oldfield: And what role did the church play in your life? It’s a really private question.
James Vitali: No, no, no, it’s not private at all. And again, something I’ve given more thought to recently, because so many of my friends are coming to faith and starting to go to church. I have a very good friend of mine in political circles—was atheist when I met him, you know, a matter of three or four years ago—and is now extremely active and involved in the church. And I think there’s many such cases, more generally, more of the Catholic Church and the Church of England. Perhaps we can talk about that later.
That wasn’t the case for me. I can’t ever remember not believing and not being religious. My mother is—was—a churchgoer, as was my grandma. We went to this church I mentioned earlier, where my parents were married, where I was baptised, where I was confirmed, where my grandma’s funeral was—this sort of very special building.
Elizabeth Oldfield: How old were you when she died?
James Vitali: I was twenty-five, twenty-six. So not so long ago. But, yeah, she’s a remarkable lady. But I never had this kind of conversion moment. I always believed, and I got confirmed quite young. In many ways, I regret that, because actually going through confirmation when you’ve kind of got some formed views is probably a far more rewarding experience. But I sort of—I always knew. And as I said, religion was a big part of our life growing up.
The one caveat is, I suppose you have these moments where you’re slightly shaken out of complacency. I do remember at Cambridge, just a friend of mine—he’s always asked very probing personal questions—just asking really basic questions like, you know, do you believe Jesus is the Son of God, who rose on the third day? And all these kind of very particular things. And it really did make me go back and think, you know, what do I believe? And maybe I should spend more time thinking about it. And then, you know, through that, you get to C. S. Lewis, as so many of your guests have spoken about. And for me, strangely enough, the papal encyclicals, which have such rich arguments about the economy and society.
But yeah, a big part of my life. And I’ve discovered that my Christianity is a complicated relationship with politics. Again, something we might come on to. But in many ways, most of my political beliefs are downstream of my Christian ones.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Let’s definitely dig into that. But I want to ask some quick-fire questions. This might be hard, but try to respond without overthinking. I’m bad at this, so pot, kettle, black. But what brings you joy?
James Vitali: We’re in London at the moment. When I get on the train and I’m heading back to Dorset—just a genuine sense of joy.
Elizabeth Oldfield: How dare you? It’s the best city in the world.
James Vitali: I love London, and I’m sceptical of those who down-talk it too much, but yeah.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Dorset’s home.
James Vitali: Yeah, it’s home, and coming home is the most amazing feeling.
Elizabeth Oldfield: What makes you feel fully alive?
James Vitali: Makes you fully alive? That’s a great question. I mean, I love sport. I used to be quite a good cricketer—less so now. I love being on the cricket pitch and competing with other people. Competition, probably. I really like being involved in things that matter. I suspect that is probably a reason why so many people are attracted to politics. But where you think that there is something really important on the line, and you’ve got an opportunity to, you know, put your finger on the tiller and move it a different direction—that is a really driving part of my character, I think.
Elizabeth Oldfield: What scares you? Or maybe, what are you afraid of? I don’t know why those feel slightly different, but they do.
James Vitali: It’s funny. It’s, I suppose, a feeling of letting others down. I really—I love responsibility. I love—as we’ll discuss, I write a lot about it. But, you know, with responsibility comes the bearing of consequences. And I think it’s both an essential thing for developing as a person, but it is, of course, scary when you’re—as a councillor, you know, I’m responsible for very mundane things like the bin collections and potholes. I’m also responsible for someone in my ward who’s homeless, and he’s got to find shelter. And every day that I don’t do something about it, he’s on the streets. So, yeah, it’s this paradox. It’s probably what I’m scared of, but it’s absolutely essential, I think, taking responsibility.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Has it always come easy to you? Were you a responsible kid, teenager, all the way through, or did you rebel?
James Vitali: I think so, as an older brother. That’s usually quite important. I was very lucky to get opportunities to be responsible early. I think I didn’t really realise how it was meant to be done until I went through Sandhurst and its way of teaching responsibility and what it is to lead. They’ve got this concept of servant leadership, which is—it’s very religious, actually. I didn’t realise. You spend time in the college chapel.
Elizabeth Oldfield: And would you mind just pausing, for particularly international listeners who don’t know what Sandhurst is, saying a little bit about your commission, so they know?
James Vitali: Of course. So the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst is the academy for those who are joining the army as officers, and you can commission as a regular, and so it’s your full-time career. I joined as a reservist last year. But everything you would have in your mind’s eye about what it’s like to go to boot camp or join the military is true, and Sandhurst is that on steroids.
But it also is very serious in that it teaches a very particular style of leadership. As I said, servant leadership—the idea that to lead is really to put yourself behind the interests of those you lead. And so much as I thought that I had a really good grip on this and was great at it when I was younger, I’ve radically changed my views on what it really means, having gone to Sandhurst. And I’ll always be grateful for that.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Tell me more. What changed?
James Vitali: Sincerely, that point about sacrifice, and that others go before you. I think there’s a nervousness about politicians—that positions of responsibility are an opportunity for self-promotion. That is simply not acceptable in a military context. And I think it’s such an important lesson for those going into public life. And possibly part of the reason why trust in politicians is fracturing is this sense that they’re putting themselves before the interests of others.
And relatedly, that they’re not taking responsibility. When it’s easy to claim the benefits of being in a position of responsibility, or a position of decision-making power, then it’s all fine and dandy. But when you’ve got to bear the consequences of bad actions, things that have gone wrong, that’s a far harder exercise. And the inability to do that effectively, and in a way convincing to the public, is, I think, part of the reasons why public trust in politics has fallen.
Elizabeth Oldfield: This is probably an insanely large question. But how did you—maybe we didn’t get here. Maybe we’ve always been here. You know, the icon of servant leadership is obviously Jesus. And this is not a new idea, that this should be part of leadership—this kind of leaders-eat-last model. But again and again, that becomes the exception, and the norm becomes leaders who we don’t trust because we don’t believe they have our interests at heart. I guess, culturally or intellectually, what are the formative influences that are, again and again, putting those people in power?
James Vitali: I mentioned that the relationship between politics and religion for me is complicated. In many ways, politics can’t help but be a moral activity. But also I’m firmly of the view, and I think most conservatives are too, that politics isn’t applied morality. It’s not just a tool with which you can kind of—
Elizabeth Oldfield: Make people do the right thing.
James Vitali: Correct.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Make the world in your image.
James Vitali: We’ve lost that, and politics has become a lot more technical and mechanical, and I can’t think of a better word than rationalist. The idea that it’s just the exercise of reason, and if we just put people in who are clever enough, they’ll solve all our problems for us. That’s a very different vision of politics from one which is about—particularly in democracy—standing for a set of values, asking the public if they agree with you or agree with your vision of where the country should go, and being responsible for a set of decisions to try and do that. And then, again, being responsible if they go wrong. When that started is more difficult to set out. But it’s probably true that those trends have mirrored the sort of secularisation of society more generally.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Interesting. I would love you to tell me something you’ve changed your mind on.
James Vitali: It probably comes across as a really stubborn answer, but whilst I’m talking, I’ll think about something that I’ve genuinely changed my mind on. I would say that I basically—I’ve had a whole set of instinctive, intuitive views about the world for as long as I can remember, and I didn’t always know how to articulate them. And I’ve been lucky to spend a lot of time listening and reading other people who are very good at articulating them. And so it’s not so much things I’ve sort of decisively changed my mind on; it’s more I didn’t have a way of articulating things I did actually believe.
Probably this sense that politics has a moral component, and it is not just a technical exercise best exercised by people of technical proficiency. It has a moral component, and that’s an essential part of a healthy and vibrant democracy. And I was probably more liberal, I suppose—Thatcherite, perhaps, in younger days. But I increasingly have a complicated view of that. It is difficult for conservatives, right? Because she is so totemic, because she changed the country in a way that most politicians have failed to be decisive since. But I’m sort of acutely aware of the things that they—the legacy issues that they’ve bestowed to our generation that we need to solve now. So that’s probably a genuine thing that I’ve changed my mind on.
And it comes back to this point with which we started. All those things that I hold to be sacred have somehow—they’ve not been doing so well over the last forty years. And it seems to me the responsibility of politicians of our generation to fix that. That’s the problem to be solved.
Elizabeth Oldfield: So you said the things you hold sacred are community and sacrifice and the church. People have different associations with Thatcher, but the famous phrase—that is sort of a misquote, gets argued over—about “there’s no such thing as society.” Would you say that is where you differ from her, that you put more emphasis on the threads that hold us together than she does?
James Vitali: So I think she deserves—it’s a caricature of Thatcher. I mean, if you read her speeches, she spoke immensely eloquently about the moral foundations of society, the need for small platoons. This is a Burkean idea that we learn love and obligation in the family, in the small platoon, and that’s how we eventually learn love for larger and larger social groups. She was acutely aware of this. And that quote about there being no such thing as society, it’s followed immediately by this remark that there are families and there’s community and there’s individuals.
I think the thing that she was trying to get at is there is no abstract actor who’s going to do these things for us called society. People have to roll up their sleeves and do it, either themselves or, usually better, in combination with other groups and other individuals. Which is why I say it’s a complicated relationship the Conservatives have with Thatcher. It’s probably more true to say it’s Thatcherites that were the problem, because they forgot that essential part of Thatcher’s worldview.
But no, undoubtedly, as I said, a lot of the problems that we face today are legacies of the 1980s. But as I have written in lots of places, I think the underlying problem actually runs a lot deeper and is a lot older. And I’d probably try and—if I was trying to put it temporally, it’s more mid-twentieth century rather than the ’80s.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Okay. In as layperson’s terms as you can possibly manage—because bear in mind, I’ve spoken to a lot of politicians, but it’s not my mother tongue, and for many people listening—what would you say is the problem about how we’ve structured society that you would love to see change?
James Vitali: There’s this great quote from Alexis de Tocqueville, who basically wrote the best book on democracy. And he worried about the tendency to use people to achieve great things rather than making great people. And I think that’s a really pithy way of summing up the problem. We have basically decided that the lens through which to look at politics is—every social issue is a peg for the hammer of government to whack. And actually, I think critical to solving so many of our problems today involves a very different view. It involves saying, how can we solve these problems ourselves? When we look at socioeconomic problems and consider them our problems, we see them as yours and my problem, not someone else’s problem.
And really, I think that that sort of sentiment—that energy, that desire to take responsibility, to solve problems yourselves in combination with others voluntarily—is absolutely essential, not just to a free economy, but also to a flourishing society too. It comes back to, I think, a really important Christian teaching, which is that to do good—and my sense of what flourishing means is one in which people are free to do good. To do good is to do something freely. It’s to exercise your free will and do something off your own volition. And you shrink that space to do good and to flourish, in my mind, when things are taken out of the hands of freely organising people and put in the hands of government. Because at the bottom of government is the latent idea of compulsion—that if you don’t do this, you will be forced to do it.
I often describe the problem as a sort of defect of liberalism. We’ve gone from saying that to do good you must be free, to saying to be free is good. And that makes it a lot easier for us to give up responsibilities that I think in the past were a really important part of, you know, a good and flourishing society. And in giving them up, the best place that we’ve decided to deposit them is with government.
Elizabeth Oldfield: It’s interesting listening to you speak, because I’m sort of both in this world and not in this world, and deeply politically confused. But I can feel my reaction to the statement, like, “We together can solve socioeconomic problems, and we need to take ownership of them.” This real, like, oh, come on—that stuff’s above my pay grade. And there are these giant global systems that I understand, and there are these economies that function like these, like, relentlessly gobbling machines. And I have a reasonable level of education, right? I have worked in Westminster and the BBC. I’m not, like, right out on the fringes. And I feel I wouldn’t even know where to start, right?
Like, and I think you’re making me realise there is this unconscious story of, like, somewhere is a group of people whose job that is. And I sort of want it to stay their job. And I want to probably be able to complain about them. This is being very honest. Because I imagine that’s a lot of what—I hope that other people listening are like, yeah, I feel that too. And what do we do with that? What do we do? If your kind of premise is we need to take ownership for these things, and we honestly feel, like, overwhelmed and we wouldn’t know where to start, what would have to change for me to know where to start?
James Vitali: So, yeah, I totally understand all those sentiments, but I would say that you see instances of what I’ve described taking place quite widely. I think—I’m really interested in almshouses, for example. You take a big socioeconomic problem like housing shortage—
Elizabeth Oldfield: Say again what they are, for people who do not live in random, olde-worlde parts of England.
James Vitali: So almshouses—I mean, there are different variants, but the main version of the almshouse is effectively social housing owned by churches.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Medieval legacy, right?
James Vitali: Correct. Very old. The giving of alms—another Christian idea. Churches often had houses that they gave to those needy in their congregational parish. Now, almshouses are run by charities and non-church civil society organisations—generally speaking, church organisations. And I’ve seen amazing instances of almshouse associations basically plugging a gap of housing supply, delivering new housing designed for certain types of people who have particular needs. It’s a very small example, but there are so many.
In my ward, or just outside my ward, there’s something called the Vale Pantry, which is a community shop, which is a subscription basis, but it gives people who are struggling with groceries and bills like that support. There’s so many instances, and there seems to me something really, really important about that style of thinking. Here’s a problem. Let’s take ownership for ourselves. The question of how do we then generalise that so that it can deal with the really big issues at scale—that, to me, is the fundamental problem we have to confront.
But just take discussions at the moment about social care reform, just because they’re in the news. Isn’t it telling that the immediate response is, how can we basically make this a service that is delivered, like so many others, by government? Well-funded, standardised, across the board. Usually with higher levels of taxation. We haven’t thought—you know, what have been the principal bodies to deliver care and support in societies for hundreds of years, and work really well? And things like, you know, families. How can we give them a greater say in it? How can we support them? How can the state basically make its influence, or its bearing on society, lesser by giving people the resources to take ownership themselves? That is a style of thought that I think used to be common, has disappeared, and it’s really important that we rediscover.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Your book is called The Ownership Society: How Bourgeois Values—I’ve got it over there. I can’t see the subtitle. What’s the subtitle?
James Vitali: How Bourgeois Values Can Save Britain.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. I love a punchy title. Did you have conversations with your—often what you’ve got is the author being like, “Can we make the title less punchy?” And the editors and the publisher being like, “No, it needs to be Marmite so that people pick it up.” But putting the—how much was the “bourgeois” in the title like you were, “That’s what I want to lead with”?
James Vitali: Not at all.
Elizabeth Oldfield: This is what I suspected. I wonder if that surprises you.
James Vitali: I have an excellent publisher. He’s been—George Owers at Polity has been brilliant to me. He pushed it really hard, and I didn’t like it at the start, because I felt it was something that would immediately split people, like any publisher would probably look for. The more I thought about it, there is a real kernel of truth in it.
Bourgeois is almost always a term of opprobrium, a critique. And I think that’s because of its sort of sense of narrow-mindedness and parochialness. But one—and also its connection with sort of an individualism and a consumerism. One, that’s not my understanding of bourgeois values at all, and it’s not the understanding of so many who have written about it. We can speak about what those values are in a moment. But the other way that it’s sometimes spoken about is a sort of English mundaneness, opposed to the grand projet, the really ambitious plan for society that’s arrived at the top layers of society.
And to come back to that Tocqueville quote, I think that the hallmarks of a really flourishing society is one in which, at the local level, individuals, families, groups are given the capacity to flourish—not one that sets a plan and tries to bend the rest of society into its image. So, and those bourgeois values that I alluded to—it’s not individualism, to me. It’s—and again, I do think there is a Christian dimension to this, so did authors like Max Weber—it’s an idea that there’s an inherent dignity to individuals because they bear souls, they’re soul-bearing, and life is precious.
In addition to that, though, it includes values like thrift and saving, enterprise, voluntarism, hard work. And these things have got a—they’re not philosophically true everywhere and anywhere and objectively good for humans, but they’ve proven themselves through history to be a good way of organising society. And they retain that space for people to make decisions themselves, exercise their free will in combination with others to do good. And it’s a model of society in which those decisions are not abstracted to government and made on our behalf.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I see this overarching theme in your thought is, how do we get power from up here to down here? How do we take away that feeling that I have of helplessness, and empower people to solve problems and to take responsibility and see the impacts of their work in the world, right? So it’s a localist vision.
And that vision has sometimes been played out in ways that have felt cruel to people, right? And you acknowledge this. That when you have a society which is generally meeting many of our needs at the government level, and then you remove a lot of that—the most recent example is the kind of years of austerity—the lived experience of lots of people is being abandoned, right? Of not knowing where to get care, of not necessarily seeing a rising up of civil society coming in to meet that gap. Particularly, I would say—and again, you acknowledge this—in areas that don’t have a lot of social infrastructure, don’t have a lot of money, don’t have a lot of time. Everyone’s just surviving, right? And they were surviving with a little bit of help from the government, and then the help from the government goes away. What do you do?
And this was one of the most interesting things for me, these trade-offs—that when we’re trying to think about, how do we live together well? How do we love each other? How do we care for each other? As soon as you kind of extrapolate out from our neighbours—and we live in this communitarian experiment; we’re trying to learn to love our neighbours, we’re trying to learn to take ownership and responsibility for this bit of land, for this area—but we also interact with the nation, with the state. What do you do with the sense that in order to get from where we are to your vision of local control and local ownership, there might be just, like, quite a lot of suffering between here and there?
James Vitali: So I think the first point is a general one, which is that that is—and I’m not saying that’s what you’re characterising conservatism as—but very frequently there’s a view that to be compassionate is to believe in a very generous state-led welfare system. And to be not compassionate is the opposite of that. A positive—small p, as in an assertive—idea about what government is for, and how you can do care in a compassionate way.
Another thing I would say is that—I mean, it’s manifestly the case that frequently services that are delivered at a level that feels abstracted from local communities are less effective and less good than ones that are really—
Elizabeth Oldfield: Less relational. They make us feel less human.
James Vitali: Precisely. And they don’t nurture those relationships between people in places. In many ways, they desecrate them.
But to the more important point that you raise—and probably where I part from lots of other conservatives—my view of the state is not a neutral state. It doesn’t not have a view about what the good life is. A quote I use from someone called George Will, who says that statecraft is soulcraft, which I think is quite powerful. It’s not a neutral state. It’s a small state, because it believes that the responsibility of government is to create as much space for people to freely give themselves as possible. But that means it has a role. And there’s a whole range of things that individuals can’t do and communities can’t do, because there might be a collective action problem. It’s simply not possible for individuals or communities to take those on themselves. What I’m saying is, I think that there becomes a point when it’s not—the state is not providing that kind of set of services to society, and when it then is actively reducing the scope for individuals and communities, when they could be taking on these roles.
Another issue is that none of my ideas are original. No, there’s no new ideas under the sun. There was a Big Society concept during the Cameron years, which I’m sure you would have thought about and covered. I think the great problem with that is that there wasn’t much of a sense of how the government would take a role in restoring those things that have been eroded over time proactively. Because we can’t expect the state to retreat from areas of care, and for people who have lost the kind of sense—touch—of how to do these things, and just to say to them, “Crack on.” That, to me, is—it would be an abrogation of responsibility.
So these questions do need to be played out. I think the trickiest part of this whole debate is, how willing are you for outcomes to diverge in different places? Because freedom to do good stuff and impressive stuff and stuff that works is also, if it’s genuine freedom, freedom to not do them well. And that is going to be a difficult consideration for this government, which has spoken a lot about devolution. How willing are you to let people not succeed? It’s difficult. I would say that my tolerance for those sorts of divergent outcomes above a certain threshold are higher.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Sorry, can I—I have to translate.
James Vitali: Yeah. Once the state has provided that minimum level of service, such that people don’t fall through the safety net and don’t live in abject poverty, it should be right that councils can deliver better services in different parts of the country than others. Because I think those experiments are helpful for the whole of society. But if that’s going to happen, they need to be able to be genuinely responsible. Not just to have the power to do things, but to have to raise the money and to be accountable when it doesn’t go right.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I want to try and pull on a thread that—thinking’s really left me thoughtful about. And it’s about—so in my work, in my tradition, we talk about formation, which you would be familiar with. Who are we becoming? And your book’s called The Ownership Society, and your case is basically, ownership is morally good for us, because we literally—we take ownership for things, we take ownership for our decisions, take ownership for our communities, we take ownership. And you’re particularly focused on home ownership.
And we live in this bizarre way in an intentional community house, where we’re trying—inspired by our faith and a kind of, like, profoundly communitarian, I guess, politics underneath it. And when we were trying to figure out—well, it seemed impossible to buy a house. But when we were trying to figure out how to get here, we went round and round. Do we need to own? Do we need to own a house? And for us, our main inspiration is the New Testament. And the New Testament is sort of profoundly conflicted, right? Like, the accumulation of wealth is something that we’re warned against as a soul danger. I don’t think it’s, like, banned, but there’s a, like, careful, careful. And there’s, you know, don’t build bigger and bigger barns. Like, do not build up your treasure on earth, but build up your treasure in heaven.
And we were really questioning this: what is the instinct to own? And in the end, it was me that was like, I think as we are raising children, I would love to be able to offer them the stability of not getting kicked out of a rental. And we have no other options, right? We’re working within the housing market as it is. It’s, like, riddled with injustice. We are complicit in lots of different ways, and the recipient of lots of different wealth—lots of wealth, you know, privilege compared to many people. We’re just going to own, because that is the least-worst choice. But at no point did I think, and that will be good for us, right? That will be good for our souls. And you’re making a really orthogonal case to the—to why—do you think that ownership, and ownership in particular—I think you think it’s really good for our souls, and I’d love you to explain that.
James Vitali: So originally, the reason I came to write the book was that I had written a lot about this idea called the property-owning democracy. And it’s this quite old idea that a democracy is more stable if there’s more people with a stake in it. Quite simple, quite a powerful idea. And my publishers got in touch with me and said, “Look, we think there might be a broader idea here.”
I think what I discovered through researching and writing the book—and it was also just an inkling of mine as well—is that, one, the reason why property ownership to me seemed interesting was not economic. It was moral, in that it promoted a certain set of values. One. But two, that wasn’t in and of itself the case. And I think that’s a problem with the ways lots of people look at the economy. They sort of think, here’s a good model, here’s a bad model. Actually, the culture that underpins our economy is just as important. What values does it transpose onto the economy? And I’m always very nervous about people who say that it should try and get rid of moral values and work more efficiently.
I define ownership as the propensity to take responsibility for things. And I think with owning property, it’s the educative effect it has on an individual who doesn’t just have the rights to use it, but has to bear the responsibility for looking after it, making sure that it’s preserved over time and retains its value, can be passed on. The reason why it doesn’t do it in and of itself, though, is that if you have a society that’s eroded these ideas about obligation to others, community, then it does just become another version of material acquisitiveness.
For me, it’s—there’s a version of ownership which is connected to stewardship. It’s deference to a community. I own a property, or I own a stake in this community, and therefore I have obligations to those other than just myself, and maybe even just those in my family. I think there’s an architectural dimension to this. So what I worry about in Dorset is housing companies building homes which are simply units. And they don’t show any deference to the community they’re being built in. They literally stand apart. And there’s that version of the free market economy and ownership, which is certainly not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about one that nourishes our sense of obligations to one another, creates a sense of responsibility.
And there are many ways in which that sense of ownership can be generated, but I think one of the strongest is owning a home of your own. The other helpful thing is that this has been an extremely long-standing and powerful aspiration, ideal, for British people for a very long time. You know, an Englishman’s home is his castle. This idea that it gives you independence, roots, a stake, and something that can give you stability over time. It seemed to me that that would be a really good thing to try to promote these values that I care about, which are far more general. There’s a sort of starting point, as it were.
Elizabeth Oldfield: And just imagining someone listening—I can think of someone, multiple people on our team, right, who are in their twenties. The idea that they will ever own their own home seems almost inconceivable. If you don’t come from wealthy parents, if your family’s immigrated here from a less prosperous country, if you—there’s all manner of reasons, right? People with quite a lot of prosperity behind them generationally are still thinking, how’s this ever going to happen?
And I can feel the, like—because there’s this thread in your book of self-sufficiency and self-help, and particularly this phrase about being a grown-up. It’s something about growing up. When we own things, we learn to grow up. A knee-jerk response might be, “Well, thanks very much, James. Great. What do you want to do? Go back to before the Reform Act? You can’t even vote if you don’t own anything.” What would have to change to break that logjam, and to make it actually in service of kind of justice and a moral set of obligations to each other, rather than what it feels like, which is one class of people hoarding and another class of people locked out?
James Vitali: So let’s just be clear that that broadly is what it has become. It has ceased to be a galvanising ideal, and it’s become a source of contention and division in our society, particularly between generations. I would push back on your point about, you know, returning to a point prior to the Great Reform Act. The teaching—the property-owning democracy idea is that in the past, we used to say that—
Elizabeth Oldfield: To be clear, I’m obviously—
James Vitali: Yes, yes, I know, I know, I know. You know, in the past, you said you had to own property to be a voter. But in the context of a democracy, we flip that around and we say, since everyone has this political responsibility, they should be given the opportunity for economic responsibility too. I think that’s a really powerful idea.
The fact that it’s become so unreachable for my generation—I should say I’m not a homeowner; I rent—is entirely a matter of choice. And it’s because, as I said, we’ve emptied the idea of any sense of moral value. Property now is an investment asset. It’s something that accrues value over time. My defence of the continuity and the stability that it gives is not a financial one. It’s not that it’s going to enrich people. It’s literally that it gives you a hold, a piece of somewhere that you can call your own. And I think good communities work when a multiplicity of people have a sense of stake and ownership within them.
Elizabeth Oldfield: And some stability.
James Vitali: And stability. But the collective—sorry, to come back to the point about community. Communities don’t work when everyone feels like it’s someone else’s job to look after that community. It’s when—the cleanliness of the streets, the vibrancy of the organisations, the appearance of the church, to come back to the example I used at the start—is when people think that it’s their personal responsibility, yours and my responsibility, not someone else’s, that you get strong, cohesive, functional communities.
But to return to the housing market, the reason why it’s ceased to support that aspiration of home ownership is down to political choices. And we have created a situation where there’s extremely high levels of demand, supply has been constrained. We haven’t incentivised the development of good homes. We’ve incentivised development of ones which are often ugly—
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, ugly.
James Vitali: —poorly designed, often not built to last. You see some housing developments and they’re already falling apart. And that intensifies the problem, right? Because people that I spend time with in Dorset, they experience change as loss when it’s a beautiful part of their country that’s been desecrated by something that doesn’t belong and doesn’t pay deference to the area. And so they object to development even more.
You had Sam Bowman on, talking in similar terms. We disagree on lots. We really agree on that. There’s a tendency, I think, to look at those who have bought and are property owners, and who are nervous about new development in their area, as selfish. But their concerns—their feeling that something precious is being lost—is an entirely valid one, and it needs to be addressed. There’s nothing inherent about home ownership or the property market that should split people along generational lines or along socioeconomic lines. It’s something that is in our power to ameliorate and make better.
Elizabeth Oldfield: James Vitali, there is much more we could have spoken about, but I’m very grateful for your time today on The Sacred.
James Vitali: Pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I need to be really honest here that when James Vitali’s publisher pitched this book to us, I wasn’t super excited. There’s something about that word bourgeois—it was not drawing me in. And part of it is that whenever we encounter someone new, that we don’t know, we are kind of triangulating, right? What relationship am I going to have with them? And am I drawn to them, or am I repelled by them? And honestly, so much of that is about our own, often insecure, self-perception than it is about the other person, right? The things we’d like to be true of ourselves, the things that we’d like to believe about ourselves, the things that we’d like other people to think of us.
And for me, bourgeois is not in that list. The idea that I would be living a petit bourgeois life—that that is something to be celebrated, actually, as James would say—wasn’t obvious to me. It wasn’t intuitive to me. I feel maybe a bit differently about it, having spoken to him.
But the other thing to say—and this is very niche British, particular generation—but there was a Fast Show character (which is, like, a comedy sketch show in my youth) called Young Tory, who is a sort of funny, over-the-top, braying caricature. And I do think—James is in his twenties—there is a certain sense of, certain sort of, like, associations that we in the UK have with, particularly, young conservatives. Freya India said this to me. She said it’s quite hard, actually, being a young conservative, because often people start off with more liberal or progressive values and get more conservative as they get older. I think James would say that’s because they are able to, and are naturally, taking more ownership of things.
But yeah, that association of a young Tory was one of the preconceptions, the prejudices, that I had in my head when I met James. I was expecting someone much less softly spoken, much less thoughtful, much less sincere and human, actually.
And a lot of his story reminded me how powerful it is to know why someone believes something. There is this phrase in the peacebuilding and reconciliation world: biography over beliefs. Because if you start with someone’s beliefs, all you’re doing mentally is calculating enemy, friend, agree, disagree. But if you start with someone’s story—and this can be something as simple as asking someone, “How did you come to believe that?” Not “Why do you believe that?”—what you get is not someone’s talking points and their arguments and their data. What you get is something that’s meaningful to them as a person in their own life.
And hearing about this village—this secure, rooted, settled, strong community village that has been such a powerfully positive legacy on James—really helps me understand how he’s come to some other positions that he has. But also hearing him talk about the military, and it reminded me again just how differently we can react to concepts and words, right? We had another guest in this series called David Gee, for whom the military represents violence. That’s all it represents. He wants to abolish it. It is state power imposing violence, usually on the vulnerable.
But James Vitali paints a really different picture of the military. His parents served in it. His parents sacrificed time with him and his family to go and serve for it, out of a really strong sense of calling and duty to self-sacrifice—it being a way of being prepared to lay down your life for others. If you’re a leader in the military, he says, you get trained to be someone who can lay down your life for the people that you’re leading. It’s a really, really different set of associations.
And it’s so helpful to be reminded that when a word or an idea gets lobbed into a conversation, or we’re reading about it or thinking about it, and we cannot understand why someone is reacting so differently to it, they might just have something really different in their biography and in their story that means the texture of it, the flavour of it, the emotional body charge around that word or concept is polar opposite to your own. And that’s where curiosity can come in, right? That’s when we can start to realise that the way we see the world is not the only way to see the world.
