Conservative party leader David Cameron gave a speech in 2007 on social justice which is remembered as the “hug a hoodie” moment. In it, he laid out the foundations of what would become the “big society” social programme and called for more compassion towards young people. The speech was written by his adviser Danny Kruger – the MP who has just defected to Nigel Farage’s Reform party.
Back then, Kruger, Philip Blond and Steve Hilton were seen as the key intellectual forces behind compassionate conservatism. But we now realise that the big society was really informed by a much darker vision of society than the hug a hoodie speech implied.
It was based on the belief that the country had been hollowed out by the moral vacuousness of governments (both left and right) since the 1960s. The picture the Conservatives painted even at the time was not one of optimism and progress but of crisis and decline.
This was exemplified by Kruger in particular. As he puts it in his essay On Fraternity, published the same year as Cameron’s speech: “Our culture is in the grip of this pernicious alliance, between … self-seeking individualism … and the bloated, all-aggrandising, all-powerful state … Between the two, society is being squeezed to death.” The political left is apportioned the majority of the blame for this state of affairs.
Blond was critical of every post-war government for creating a managerial welfare state which destroyed the old mutualism of the British working class while facilitating social permissiveness. This, he thought, had led to the commodification of sex and the creation of “empty pleasure-seeking drones” who looked to the state to solve problems. Today the right calls this being an NPC – a non-player character.
As a result of his links to Cameron, Blond became a feted public intellectual, founding a think-tank to promote his ideas. Kruger, meanwhile, pursued a career in the third sector before moving into politics. He became an MP in 2019 after a stint at the pro-Brexit Legatum institute.
Reading Cameron’s speech alongside Kruger’s essay today reveals not a coherent political philosophy but a carefully sanitised version of traditional conservatism designed for public consumption. What emerges is not genuine conservative compassion, but social conservativism dressed in progressive language.
The vanishing act
Kruger’s essay is replete with references to classic thinkers and concerns itself primarily with the abstract concept of fraternal bonds in society. Like Cameron, he defines British nationalism as primarily civic and not ethnic. Yet cultural change, including immigration’s effect on social cohesion, are rarely far from the surface.
He identifies “the presence of large communities with different national origins” as one of Britain’s three major challenges, contrasting today’s diversity with an allegedly more homogeneous past. This anxiety about rapid demographic change runs quietly throughout his analysis of social breakdown.
Cameron’s speech, by contrast, made these concerns disappear almost entirely. While discussing youth crime he avoids any suggestion that cultural diversity might complicate social cohesion. The “hoodie” instead becomes a deracinated symbol of alienated youth. Likewise, Cameron avoided golden age rhetoric by focusing entirely on the present and future.
Both texts struggle with a fundamental question: who gets to define the social values that supposedly bind communities together? Kruger writes extensively about “social authority” but rarely distinguishes benevolent community pressure from oppressive conformity except by implication. His requirement that “acts of public liberty” be “compatible with the interests and values of British society as a whole” sounds reasonable until you ask who determines that compatibility.
Cameron dodges this entirely by focusing on consensual values as well as, somewhat ironically, an appeal to expertise. But serious social problems often involve contested values around family structure, sexual morality, work ethic, and cultural integration. Compassionate conservatism had no mechanism for addressing these conflicts beyond hoping voluntary organisations would somehow resolve them.
This vagueness wasn’t accidental. It was essential to the compassionate conservative project. Specific policies force difficult choices between competing values. Better to speak in generalities about “love” and “relationships” while avoiding the hard questions about resources, priorities and trade-offs.
The collapse of compassionate conservatism
Understanding the collapse of compassionate conservatism requires recognising its primary function: electoral coalition-building. It allowed conservatives to appeal to socially liberal voters while maintaining traditional supporters. The problem is that this coalition was always unstable because it papered over genuine philosophical disagreements rather than resolving them.
Kruger’s defection represents the collapse of this synthesis. When migration pressures intensified, cultural conflicts sharpened, and mainstream conservative parties failed to address underlying tensions, the intellectual architects of compassionate conservatism abandoned the project for more explicitly populist alternatives.
Hilton abandoned British politics in the 2010s for Fox News, eventually siding with Trump and the MAGA movement. He is presently running for governor of California against progressive incumbent Gavin Newsom.
Blond still comments on British politics, using his X account in support of a variety of socially conservative positions on abortion, assisted dying, and trans rights. Today he believes the “most oppressed groups in the UK are white working-class males”, though he still interprets this as a progressive position.
Cameron’s speech worked as political rhetoric because it tells everyone what they want to hear – conservatives get individual responsibility and support for voluntary organisations, while progressives get structural understanding and emotional empathy. But when it comes to actual governance, these tensions become impossible to ignore.
Compassionate conservatism wasn’t a serious attempt to synthesise liberty and social justice. It was a marketing campaign that promised voters they could have conservative economics and progressive social policy simultaneously. The intellectual incoherence was a feature, not a bug. Politicians could avoid making difficult choices by pretending they didn’t exist.
The result was a politics of good intentions that consistently failed to deliver meaningful change, leaving both conservative and progressive goals unmet. Now that the electoral rewards of this approach have diminished, even its creators seem to have moved on to more authentic (or lucrative) expressions of their actual beliefs.
Nicholas Dickinson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
