The 'Good Right' isn't the caring side of the Tories. It just thinks it knows what's good for you

The rise of moral hubris in the Conservative party has gained momentum in recent years

Michael Gove, the Justice Minister, is a supporter of Tim Montgomerie and his Good Right (Reuters)

Each term, my 12-year-old daughter’s class has a “topic”. The topics display the interests of her teachers. Last term it was “poverty in our back yard”. This term they are lamenting the plight of girls around the world who do not go to school.

They do not study these topics. My daughter has learned nothing about the history or economics of education this term. It came as news to her, for example, when I explained that many families in poor countries depend on the labour of their children. If they sent them to school, they would starve.

The causes and effects of the matters under discussion remain a mystery to my daughter and her 12-year-old classmates. Nevertheless, they are encouraged to pass judgement on them, and to make policy recommendations – in this case, obviously, that all girls everywhere in the world should be provided with an education by their government. (Never mind that taxes have exactly the same effect as private expenditure on people’s ability to buy food with the money left over.)

My daughter and her friends are gaining no real understanding of the world. Rather, they are learning the progressive way. Point to something you don’t like; say boohoo, loudly and proudly; and demand that the government fix it. They are being taught to be self-assumed moral superiors.

This kind of education is not new. The humanities departments of universities have been teaching little else for decades. They aim not at imparting an understanding of things so much as an evaluation of them.

Socrates considered uncertainty the mark of serious engagement with a subject. Today, progressive students are so sure of their judgements that they ban people who disagree with them from speaking on their campuses. They have nothing to learn from dissenters.

Who can blame students for this attitude? Since they were primary school pupils, they have been encouraged to make judgements about a world they do not understand. And they have been assured that these ill-informed judgements deserve respect.

Whereas moral certainty is the foundation of progressive politics, humility is the foundation of political conservatism. The institutions we have inherited, from private property to the nuclear family, are the result of centuries of adaptation to complex forces that no one can fully comprehend.

Our institutions can be improved, of course, but not by grand design. Even when conservatives are creationists about the cosmos, they are evolutionists about society. For they doubt the existence of the moral gods that progressives imagine themselves to be.

Humility is also the foundation of market liberalism. We might learn roughly how economies work in general terms. But the particular goings-on of a particular economy involving millions of particular buyers and sellers of millions of particular products and services, with their constantly changing preferences and resources, are beyond the ken of any individual or committee.

As Friedrich Hayek pointed out, this “knowledge problem” explains why planned economies fail. No one can know enough to plan an economy. Market economies work so well because they locate decisions where the relevant information exists: namely, with the buyers and sellers involved in the transactions.

The political left has always rejected these humble doctrines, believing that politicians can make better decisions than the people involved in what is being decided, believing that political processes are better than social processes. In Britain, the Conservatives have been the humble party – in theory, if not always in practice.

No longer. At the Conservative Party conference this month, speaker after speaker declared his or her intention to replace social processes with political diktat. They aped those left-wing politicians who present a determination to make people live according to their moral visions as a sign of caring. We saw humility replaced with hubris.

The rise of moral hubris in the Conservative Party has been gaining momentum over recent years, even as the movement has changed its name. In the late 1990s we heard of “compassionate conservatism”, adopted from George W Bush. Then came Cameron’s Big Society, promoted by Phillip Blond, the Christian moralist and author of Red Tory. Now we have the Good Right, the title of a book, website and ideological movement promoted by Tim Montgomerie, founder of Conservative Home and a Times columnist.

Michael Gove, the Justice Minister, is a supporter of Tim Montgomerie and his Good Right. At a fringe conference speech arranged by the Legatum Institute, he explained how society could be improved by forcing people to live in accordance with his moral judgements. For example, he announced a plan to make sure that only the deserving become rich.

How much you earn cannot be left to contracts between you and your employer or customers, Mr Gove reckons. In such a free market, you may get more than you deserve. That’s why Britain today has so many “undeserving rich”. To remedy this social injustice, the Good Right will decide how much people deserve and see to it that they get no more.

It is astonishing to see Mr Gove, supposedly one of the deeper Tory thinkers, falling for the moral self-regard of the left. But there can be no doubt that he has. How better could you display it than by claiming to know the incomes deserved by strangers – people whose actions you cannot possibly understand, either in their causes or their effects.

Or perhaps there is an even clearer sign of the moral hubris infecting today’s Conservative Party. The effusions of leftist organisations such as the Fabian Society often make me queasy with their self-congratulatory tone. But a movement that calls itself “the Good Right”? Pass the sick bag.