Danny Kruger has been the Member of Parliament for East Wiltshire, previously Devizes, since 2019. He became David Cameron’s chief speechwriter in 2006, whilst Cameron was Leader of the Opposition. He left this role two years later to work full-time at a youth crime prevention charity that he had co-founded called Only Connect. For his charitable work, Kruger received an MBE in 2017. He was Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s political secretary between August and December 2019 and became Shadow Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in November 2024.

Instead of a social contract, an imagined deal struck in the light of ‘reason’ between the sovereign individual and the totalising state, we need a social covenant. This word is difficult. Its origin is in the peace treaties and tribal agreements of the ancient Near East, adopted and adapted by the people who became Israel to explain their relationships with God and with each other, and in due course with the land they inhabited. It defines a model of political organisation that is deep in the foundations of the West, and of the United Kingdom in particular. Put most simply, the politics of the covenant is built not on reason but on love.

The meaning of the word has been well conveyed by the phrase ‘artificial brotherhood’.7 A covenant is a way of expressing and formalising the love – unconditional, unstinting, permanent – that can exist between people who are unrelated by blood. The foundational social covenant is marriage, the union of two unrelated people that forms the nucleus of a new blood relationship, a family. Other covenants, less obvious and discrete, work in the same way.

Just as families are made by the covenant of marriage, so places – human communities situated in a geography – are made by the covenants of civil society, the formal and informal institutions and associations through which the people of a neighbourhood achieve agency and belonging. Nations, meanwhile, are formed by the covenant of statehood, the mysterious complex of powers, ceremonies and institutions in which a people recognise, authorise and confess allegiance to their country.

In each of these covenants something real is acknowledged: an elemental and important thing is honoured, made safe and put to a social purpose. The goal of the marriage covenant is to make sex safe – to reduce its capacity to wreck relationships and produce unwanted babies – making it the foundation of a family. The covenant of place, the local arrangement of civil society, honours the land, and makes on a patch of earth a community that regulates and, through local economic activity, sustains itself. And the covenant of statehood, in Burke’s phrase, ‘makes power gentle, and obedience liberal’: it tames the fact of violence, the capacity of the strong to dominate the weak, and so creates a nation, which is something not merely to fear but to be loyal to, even to fight and die for.

The covenants of family, place and nation share a set of qualities. Being rooted in physical reality – sex, land, violence – they reflect the nature of things, and thus transmit the ordinary affections that people feel towards their family, their neighbourhood and their country. Crucially, though, they create communities of difference. A covenant is essentially heterogeneous. This is true in marriage, where the partners come from different families and each bring their own idiosyncrasies and identities to the creation of this new thing. It is true in neighbourhoods, which are naturally diverse: as Andrew Rumsey has pointed out, the Greek ‘paroikoi’, the word from which we derive ‘parish’, means someone outside the household, a stranger to the people. The parish is a community of the unrelated, with an obligation to the outsider. And the same goes for nations, or at least this nation. The British are bound by something quite other than blood; ours is a civic not a racial nationalism, an ‘artificial brotherhood’ forged by centuries of peaceful enjoyment of the common inheritance to which all newborn citizens, whether ethnic Saxons or Afghans, are equal heirs.

The heterogeneity of a covenant is resolved in a further quality. A covenant, unlike a contract, does not simply force competing interests into a legal arrangement by which each expects to profit, and in which each remains essentially an adversary. A covenant aligns interests, including the interests of those who are not direct parties to the arrangement, such as future generations or the natural world.

The essential difference between the ‘social covenant’ we need and the ‘social contract’ we derive from Hobbes and Locke is that the relations of a covenant have the quality not of choice but of givenness. A covenant is not created by your consent, but sustained by your assent to it. You join something that existed already – this is so even in marriage, where you join ‘the married state’ whose terms and conventions, and indeed the form of the ceremony that admits you to it, are laid down in advance. Indeed even in marriage, where the relations begin in choice, the choice takes the form (at least in pretence) of an assent to the only choice that is really possible: a yielding to the compulsion of love.

The meaningful choice in all these covenants is not whether to enter but whether to leave them. You are always free to change your nationality, leave your neighbourhood or divorce your partner. But the expectation is that these are commitments that matter, and indeed they keep their hold on you even if you walk away. The covenant itself might be broken but the thing it makes – the family, the community, the nation – endures, with you part of it. You can never entirely renounce the land and place of your birth, and a divorce does not cancel the responsibility you have to the person you once loved and promised to care for, and certainly not to the children you made together. A covenant is not conditional, like a contract, where one party can renege if the terms are broken. It is an ‘artificial brotherhood’. Like a blood relationship it cannot be undone, and where there is a permanent breach there is lifelong regret.

The covenant gives us a common conception of the good, a language in which we can understand each other and a sense of collective endeavour towards a better world which we can all imagine. And it gives to each individual the proper ground of personal freedom: it is the ‘strong base’, in the words of the child psychologist John Bowlby, for ‘bold ventures’.