Rafe Fletcher: No prosperity without order – why economic liberalism needs social conservatism | Conservative Home

Rafe Fletcher is the founder of CWG.

The Art of Purpose (‘AoP’) is a popular X account espousing culturally-conservative wisdom. It tells young men bachelorhood is “isolation rebranded as freedom” and waits hopefully for Elon Musk to welcome Christ into his heart.

It sits in a nuanced part of the American right: anti-woke, anti-socialist, and pro-family, yet not rampantly capitalist. It resents “grind culture” and idealises a more traditional nine-to-five existence. Men should return home to their wives’ home-cooked dinners and five children.

AoP juxtaposes social conservatism and economic liberalism. A recent post asked if “having safer neighbourhoods is worth more than an extra 0.1 per cent of GDP” – as if it’s a trade-off.

It’s a popular dichotomy that we hear from conservatives in the UK too. The paternalistic right argues that Margaret Thatcher brought material prosperity at the expense of social cohesion. Figures like Peter Hitchens argue her supply-side revolution dismantled institutions that bound communities together. Such criticisms often invoke Margaret Thatcher’s line that “there is no such thing as society” as proof of her relentless individualism.

But it’s a false dichotomy, and her quote is almost always decontextualised. Thatcher also spoke of a “living tapestry of men and women” to describe how communities emerge organically rather than through government mandate. It is a bottom-up philosophy; government exists not to manage lives but to ensure a high-trust environment in which people can flourish.

This gets lost in the caricature of Thatcher as some kind of British Ayn Rand, believing that radical self-interest breeds prosperity. It finds cultural expression in the moral decay of the grotesque John Self in Martin Amis’ Money or the crassness of Harry Enfield’s Loadsamoney.

It’s Rishi the trader in the fantastic BBC/HBO show Industry about the fictional investment bank Pierpoint. The show references Liz Truss’ 2022 mini-budget and the coke-snorting, gambling addict Rishi is most excited about it. He describes it as a manifestation of what we truly believe: “a no-bullshit free market vision”. His boss Eric Tao replies: “The ghost of Margaret Thatcher in a handsome Asian kid.”

Some of this reflects snobbery – a discomfort with upstarts breaking social ranks. But it’s a real phenomenon. Individualist philosophy appeals in throwing off stuffier tenets of conservatism. It’s metropolitan rather than provincial, Nietzschean animal spirits instead of Burkean order. It has a rebellious streak in its extreme manifestation of anarcho-capitalism, which argues everything should be provided by private entities.

Argentina’s Javier Milei is today’s poster boy for this free market radicalism. He’s making good on his campaign promises to dismantle the state. In his famous video, he starts by declaring, “the state is not the solution. The state is the problem.” He then theatrically throws out various ministries with an emphatic “Afuera!” (Out!).

But policing is the exception amongst Milei’s cuts. He has increased security funding; in June, he granted police new powers, including increased detention rights and the creation of a federal investigations’ unit modelled on the FBI.

Whatever his academic flirtations with anarcho-capitalism, Milei realises the importance of social order. While government largesse elsewhere raises citizens’ costs, inaction on crime does the opposite. Individuals and businesses must take out extensive insurance policies or hire private security. On a more intangible level, the Policy Exchange’s James Vitali says: “its biggest costs are to our collective sense of security and safety, of living in a country with shared values and high levels of trust.”

Vitali rebuts British data showing a long-term decline in crime. It omits shoplifting (up by 51 percent since 2015), robberies and knife crime (up by 64 and 89 percent respectively) and antisocial behaviour (up by 192 percent). It speaks to the “broken windows” theory: that visible signs of community disorder are self-perpetuating. Social order can break down.

That’s why Nigel Farage is right to make the issue central to Reform’s campaign. He’s sometimes dismissed as ideologically inconsistent, a Thatcherite appealing to Blue Labour. But these aren’t contradictory. His social agenda has practical economic purposes. Untethered immigration just artificially props up GDP figures (although not, crucially, per capita GDP figures). Falling birth rates raise real questions about dependency ratios.

And crime costs the economy. Policing it is not just a government cost. It is an investment, like infrastructure. The UNODC estimates that economies with lower rates of crime enjoy up to seven times higher per-capita GDP growth over a decade.

I see its evidence in Singapore. Petty crime is never tolerated. It recently jailed a foreign traveller who stole $200 on a Scoot flight for ten months. As a standalone case, it looks profligate.

But it breeds a culture where patrons can reserve tables at hawker centres (outdoor food courts) by leaving their mobile phones on them. As a former cabinet minister emphasised to me recently, its subsequent sense of personal safety attracts the right kind of people; aspirational families who want to get on unencumbered by concerns over personal safety. High-crime societies hollow out that aspirational class.

Of course, there is a balance to be struck here. Singapore, like other popular expat hub Dubai, is often criticised for its sterility. “Disneyland with the Death Penalty”, as William Gibson described it in a 1993 Wired article. His accusation of a “telling lack of creativity” still wounds the country’s psyche because it hit upon a latent insecurity.

For all its perceived economic dynamism, Singapore still struggles to produce a local entrepreneurial class. Obedience prevails over initiative. “Cannot” is key part of local vernacular, a regular response to deviation from an agreed set of norms. I once found I couldn’t take my one-year-old into the horse racing because she might gamble.

But all-permissive cultural hinterlands don’t prosper. You see it in America’s California exodus: 1.46 million residents left between 2020 and 2024, many heading for Florida or Texas. Yes, overbearing Covid restrictions and taxes played their part in this migration. But safer communities were equally cited in response to California’s increasing lawlessness. Tackling crime is not a luxury that can be deferred. It’s central to economic prosperity.

Adam Smith, the “father of capitalism”, said that “the first and chief design of every system of government is to maintain justice; to prevent the members of a society from encroaching on one another’s property.”

At its most basic, capitalism is futile if private property isn’t protected. Dynamic, high-growth economics need the grinding entrepreneurs AoP disdains – those who live to work. But in Thatcher’s “tapestry”, they also need workers seeking balanced lives unimpeded by external criminal concerns. Crime isn’t a distraction from growth. It’s the obstacle in its path.