Coke Zero Conservatism

The Conscience-Free Conservatives

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

David Cameron - Conservative Party - Coke Zero Conservatives

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What self-respecting conservative could now bring themselves to support David Cameron’s triangulating, authoritarian, soul-sappingly unambitious Tory party?

Has the time finally come for small-c conservatives to admit that they have been utterly betrayed by Cameronism, and salvage what dignity we have left by deserting David Cameron’s ideology-free Conservative Party?

Pete North argues the case convincingly in an important blog post deserving of wide coverage, in which he excoriates the modern Tory Party for its rootless, centrist managerialism:

If your values are remotely conservative, look around you. We have not seen a reduction in the size of the state. Sure, the registered number of state employees has gone down but that’s because so many functions have been farmed out instead of closed down or truly privatised. Let me remind you that outsourcing is not privatisation – and given the ineptitude of government procurement it’s not going to save you any money either.

Moreover, the so called party of defence has wasted vast sums of money on big ticket toys, most of which barely work and vastly reduce our capability. This is the party that left us without a maritime patrol aircraft and made a pigs ear of procurement.

We have seen back-tracks on free schools and education reforms, u-turns all over the shop, and whatever you might think of welfare, you don’t have to be a foaming leftist to see that it is failing those most in need. Moreover, what is it in your estimation thinks Britain is showing its mettle going grovelling to 27 other states for permission to make a marginal tweak to welfare and immigration policy?

No, the Conservative party is just a continuation of politics-free managerialism, beset by the usual nannying authoritarianism, big spend, high waste massive government and has baulked at any principled reform in the spirit of Mrs Thatcher. At best we can say that Cameron’s conservatives are marginally less dreadful than Miliband’s Labour party would have been.

I must admit that I find myself coming to the same conclusion – I now look at the party of David Cameron and George Osborne and find it utterly indistinguishable from the party of Tony Blair. Neither believe in truly shrinking the state – in fact, both see electoral advantages in keeping it bloated. Neither believe in empowering the individual over the government. And certainly neither believe in the importance of defending the nation state against antidemocratic supranational entities like the European Union.

I haven’t been a member of the Conservative Party since I left Britain for Chicago back in 2010, but when I came back there was little prospect of me rejoining the party for which I campaigned so enthusiastically that year. At the dog end of Gordon Brown’s reign of terror, a fresh Conservative agenda seemed just what the country needed. But after having somehow failed to win that election outright and entering into coalition with the Liberal Democrats, by 2012 it was very clear that in David Cameron we had found ourselves not a new Margaret Thatcher but rather a reanimated Ted Heath.

Of course, you wouldn’t know it from reading the left-wing press or the Left’s loudest voices on social media, all of whom are convinced that David Cameron’s utterly bland, uninteresting government are on an ideological crusade to drown government in the bathtub, trample human rights and sell off Our Blessed NHS to their corporate crony friends.

This would be the same Evil Tory government which has maintained international development spending at 0.7 per cent of GDP while slashing Defence to the bone, which only half rolled back Gordon Brown’s spiteful and unproductive increase in the top rate of income tax, and which ran for re-election on a manifesto pledging a paternalistic, nanny state “plan for every stage of your life”.

But it is on the question of the European Union and Brexit where the Conservative Party are now betraying their principles and their base most grievously, as Pete North points out:

Put simply, if you want to leave the EU, you have already made up your mind that change has to happen and in this there is no room for sentimentality for the brands that used to represent what we believe. Cameron’s empty shell of a party is in no better shape than Labour and if your loyalty to to a brand matters more then you are part of the problem. And that goes double for Ukippers.

If you are a conservative, Cameron is not on your side. He takes you for stupid with phantom vetoes and bogus reforms. This is a man who is lying to us all and treating us with contempt. In the final analysis it’s up to you to decide what it is you really want. If you do want to leave the EU, don’t come bitching to me for pointing out that the Tory Vote Leave operation is catastrophic. Break ranks and take it up with them.

This is absolutely right. The Tory leadership has been indulged and given the benefit of far too many doubts, and the time has come for small-c conservatives to call the bluff of every single sitting Tory MP who has ever uttered a eurosceptic sentiment – and to rain down shame and unrelenting pressure on those whose commitment was false.

Candidate after Conservative candidate won selection by their local association by prancing around as though they were the World’s Biggest Eurosceptic. But now we know that in too many cases, it was all an act. Handed an unexpected majority, a weak opposition and the lucrative prospect of uninterrupted career advancement, too many of the new generation of Conservative MPs are more interested in securing Tory hegemony in government than actually accomplishing any of the things that one might reasonably expect a conservative legislator to do in office.

Hence the sanctimonious, preachy letter signed by 74 of the new Conservative intake, lecturing their older colleagues on the importance of “party unity” and not doing anything to sow divisions during the referendum campaign. But of course, this advice only applies to eurosceptic MPs – europhiles eager to spout David Cameron’s pro-EU lines are unleashed to say and do as they please in their effort to keep Britain inside the EU. It is only the Brexiteers who are muzzled.

One might ordinarily feel sympathy for these older eurosceptic Conservative MPs, being lectured on the importance of putting the party first and not “banging on about Europe” by the new upstart generation of careerists. But then you look at what veteran eurosceptic Tory MPs are actually saying and doing, and any potential sympathy melts away, to be replaced by sheer incredulity that the people who spent twenty years posing as strong critics of Brussels have apparently given no thought at all to how Britain might best leave the European Union.

This could have been the finest hour of politicians like John Redwood, Michael Gove, Daniel Hannan, David Campbell Bannerman and Mark Pritchard. But instead they have either chosen personal loyalty to David Cameron over trifling questions about British democracy and self-determination by campaigning with the Remain side, or they are firing out contradictory statements and half-baked mechanisms for Brexit which are implausible at best, and outright reckless at worst.

And this failure to live up to their rhetoric is not on some trivial issue or arcane policy area, where political horse-trading is to be expected; it is on the single most defining, central question to face the United Kingdom in a generation. On this acid test of conservative principle, nearly all of the “big beast” eurosceptics within the Conservative Party have been found wanting. As few as five (generally second-tier) Tory ministers could end up campaigning for Brexit.

So what possible reason for the failure of the Conservative Party – given the fact that the long awaited referendum could be very imminent – to express anything other than murmurs of approval for David Cameron’s transparent act of political theatre masquerading as a “renegotiation”?

These are the only plausible motivations which come to mind:

1. Despite what Conservative candidates and MPs said when they sought selection and ran for election, they secretly believe in the EU project and want Britain to remain a part of it

2. They lack faith in Britain’s ability to survive or prosper outside the European Union, and this pessimism overrides whatever euroscepticism they have

3. They simply don’t care one way or another

4. They do want to see Britain leave the EU, but they would much rather see their own careers blossom under David Cameron’s patronage than risk isolation by campaigning against the prime minister

None of these possibilities is appealing. And none makes me eager to sprint to my polling station in 2020 to reward them with five more years.

The Conservative candidate in my own constituency of Hampstead and Kilburn (north west London) was a jabbering fool who thought that the EU was simply magnificent, the bedroom tax was actually a tax, and that Britain should unilaterally disarm and get rid of Trident because the United States would do our dirty work for us should the need ever arise. I didn’t vote for him and he didn’t win, because why would the liberal voters of Hampstead vote for a Tory who walks and talks like a Labour candidate when they could just vote for the real thing instead?

But although this breed of Conservative did not manage to win Hampstead & Kilburn in 2015, it is clear that many others did succeed in forming part of the new intake, while a similar number of longer-serving Tory MPs holding the same wishy-washy views entered the parliamentary party in previous elections.

It may sound harsh, but they are all wasting time – ours and theirs. Now is not a time for vacillating centrists and Red Tory / Blue Labour moderates. Now is not a time for fastidious, parsimonious obsession with our public services to the exclusion of all else, or a prime minister who aspires to be a lowly Comptroller of Public Services rather than a world leader. There are still far too many people trapped in welfare dependency or minimum wage drudgery for us to consider pulling up the drawbridge on radical conservative reform.

Steady-as-she-goes Blairism has now reigned for nineteen years, first under the auspices of New Labour and latterly through the coalition years and on into David Cameron’s majority Coke Zero Conservative government. And it is a dull, authoritarian, uninspiring philosophy for government, worthy of a country which has given up on playing any role in shaping human destiny going forward, preferring to jealously obsess over our public services and what’s in it for me, me, me.

I believe that Britain is better than that, and that we still have much to offer the world – particularly if we can now seize this last, best chance to break free of the European Union and rediscover what it means to be an independent, globally engaged, sovereign country once again.

And if achieving this dream means that David Cameron and the Conservative Party in its current form must be circumvented, undermined, sabotaged, attacked and sent to their Armageddon, then so be it. We will have lost nothing.

 

David Cameron - What Do The Conservatives Tories Stand For In The Age Of Jeremy Corbyn

NOTE:

I encourage you to read the entirety of Pete’s article, and to follow his blog. The analysis of the coming EU referendum and Brexit process to be found there is far superior to anything you will find in the mainstream media, and if there was any justice Pete would have the kind of platform and following usually only obtained by the C-student nepotism beneficiaries who seem to win many of the coveted gigs writing for prestige publications.

Reading Pete’s blog in particular can be a good reminder of the optimism behind the Brexit movement, and it is essential when we fight this campaign that we do not sound like dreary bores, cranks or obsessives focussing on the negatives of Brussels. For however dreary and stultifying the European Union may be, we are at our best when we present our compelling vision of a modern, forward-looking, globalised Britain which seeks to embrace the world rather than shutting ourselves off in a protectionist, mid-century regional trading bloc.

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Thirty Years After Challenger, Who Now Inspires Us To Dare Mighty Things?

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

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Whether we meet triumph or disaster in our national endeavours, our politicians – and their words – are no longer up to the job of inspiring us to move forward

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat”

– Theodore Roosevelt, 1899

Thirty years ago today, the NASA space shuttle Challenger exploded in flight shortly after takeoff, killing the crew of seven.

Responding to the tragedy, which was witnessed by millions of people on live television – including many schoolchildren, for one of the astronauts was to be the first teacher in space – US president Ronald Reagan addressed the nation. He said:

We’ve grown used to wonders in this century. It’s hard to dazzle us. But for twenty-five years the United States space program has been doing just that. We’ve grown used to the idea of space, and, perhaps we forget that we’ve only just begun. We’re still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers.

And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle’s take-off. I know it’s hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them.

[..] There’s a coincidence today. On this day three hundred and ninety years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama. In his lifetime the great frontiers were the oceans, and a historian later said, “He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it.” Well, today, we can say of the Challenger crew: Their dedication was, like Drake’s, complete.

The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God.”

Two decades earlier, and another tragedy. On April 4 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was been shot and killed by an assassin in Memphis, Tennessee.

On hearing the news, Robert Kennedy, then junior senator from New York, addressed a crowd of people in the open air in Indianapolis, saying:

Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it’s perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black — considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible — you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.

We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization — black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand, and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion, and love.

My favorite poem, my – my favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote:

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

[..] And let’s dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.

Now think about the last great British political speech you remember.

And don’t mention Hillary Benn huffing about Britain doing “our bit” to defeat ISIS in Syria, because competent and well delivered though it was, if that now passes for a great political speech for the ages then we are all ruined.

Need some more time to think?

Challenger Shuttle Memorial

There is no poetry in our politics any more. There is barely even decent prose, judging by the inauthentic passion of Ed Miliband or the randomised utterances of someone like Sarah Palin in America. In place of poetry – the kind of language which is only possible when we focus on ideas, goals or aspirations bigger than ourselves – we have dull, technocratic language about the performance of our precious public services, and overwrought emotional language either detailing how something makes us feel, or demonising the other side (the Evil Tories).

Imagine if David Cameron responded to some future aviation or exploration disaster by talking about slipping the surly bonds of Earth and touching the face of God. Just picture it. He would be laughed out of office – or at least mercilessly pilloried in the press – for speaking in what we would now consider to be such a pompous way. At best you might tease from him a few careless, cookie-cutter lines about the families of the victims being in our “thoughtsnprayers” (or just thoughts now, more commonly). But nothing big picture. Nothing that encourages us to look beyond ourselves for one second.

That’s because in our society today, there is nothing bigger than the Self. We are the gods of our own lives – or at least we often think so. And politicians, painfully aware of this fact, talk down to us as though we were children, always seeking to catch our eye with flashy pledges of “what’s in it for us” rather than what is necessarily good for the country, or for human liberty and progress.

Vote Labour and your NHS waiting times will go down. But don’t worry, we’ll get them to pay for it through higher taxes. Vote Conservative and your taxes will go down, and if that means fewer public services for them, so be it.

Now I’m certainly not suggesting that taxes and public spending are not important issues. But when even the Conservative Party can fight the 2015 general election on an offensively paternalistic manifesto promising “a plan for every stage of your life“, can we really deny that we have become a nation of consumers rather than citizens, more interested in who will deliver the most goodies for ourselves and the people we like than who will best steer the ship of state through challenging times?

That’s what we now expect from our prime ministers today – not a world leader, but a lowly Comptroller of Public Services. No call to arms in service of a great national goal. Nothing remotely inspirational at all. Just a checklist of things promised to us in return for our vote. I’m not assigning blame for this depressing chicken-or-egg state of affairs. But this is how our politics now works, more than ever. Less asking “what you can do for your country”, and much more emphasis on “what your country can do for you”.

Even the coming EU referendum – when the British people have a vanishingly rare opportunity to reconsider the very way that we are governed, the way we face the world and deal with the challenges and opportunities of globalisation – is being treated by the main campaign groups on either side as a parsimonious matter of saving or incurring relatively trivial sums of money, with rival (and equally ludicrous) numbers being batted back and forth by the rival camps.

Vote Leave asks us to imagine freedom from the EU in dismal terms of saving enough money to build a new NHS hospital every week, as though that trumps the democratic right of the British people to live in a sovereign country, while Britain Stronger in Europe attempt to bribe us with a gimmicky calculator purporting to show how much our shopping bill will go up unless we remain part of a European political union.

It’s all so tediously depressing and uninspiring. Is it any wonder then that political apathy is on the rise, and that those of us who remain engaged increasingly opt for virulently anti-establishment parties like UKIP or the SNP? Or that with the decline of moderate religion and our failure to confidently express and transmit British values through our culture, some disaffected young Muslims, rootless and yearning to feel part of something bigger, are stealing away to Syria to fight for ISIS?

I’m a political blogger, and for my sins I sit and listen to far too many political speeches by cabinet ministers, shadow ministers and other establishment types. And to begin with, I thought that I would judge a speech according to whether it felt in any way inspirational, transcendent or like a genuine attempt to rally people toward a goal beyond their own personal enrichment and the state-sanctioned smiting of the hated “other”. A speech which, regardless of its political leaning, might set the pulse racing a little with possibility.

Well, four years later and my pulse continues to flatline. I haven’t heard a genuinely good speech yet – as in one that you might actually remember six months later or recite a key passage from – at least not one hailing from the three main parties. If anybody believes that they have heard one, please send me a link or transcript and I will be forever in your debt.

Maybe I’m just romanticising the past. Maybe in thirty years’ time when Ed Miliband’s kid is running for the leadership of the Labour Party, we will all look back on Ed’s fifteenth personal relaunch speech or David Cameron’s 2015 general election stump speech and hail them as bold, visionary masterpieces. Maybe.

But I strongly suspect that in the year 2046, anybody wanting to listen to listen to a great British political speech – with the exception of those made by firebrands like Margaret Thatcher – will have to look back in time almost a century, and certainly past the haunted late years of the 2010s.

 

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The Daily Toast: Iain Martin’s Brexit Ultimatum To Tory Ministers

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Conservative Eurosceptics - Brexit - David Cameron

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Politicians with the integrity to openly declare their stance on the biggest political issue of our generation should be the rule, not the exception

Like most people in Britain, Iain Martin has had enough of equivocating politicians – specifically Conservative cabinet ministers – refusing to take a public position on Britain’s EU membership, and maintaining the fiction that David Cameron’s cosmetic “renegotiation” can have any possible impact on their decision.

Martin goes so far as to call Conservative ministers “a bunch of careerist scaredy cats”, writing in CapX:

Britain’s looming vote on the EU is not – or should not be – politics as normal. It is a historic moment, in which the UK will decide to take one of two quite different paths. Party management and careers matter, of course, but sometimes there are choices that should be about something more than the mere game of politics. The EU referendum is one such event.

This is absolutely correct. Whatever one’s views on the European Union and Brexit, surely all of us can agree that this debate is infinitely more important than the minor tweaks to education, healthcare and fiscal policy which separate the various political parties.

Having established the importance of the coming referendum, Iain Martin issues the following challenge:

Ministers, it is make your mind up time. Although David Cameron’s renegotiation with the EU for new membership terms could have been the real deal, it is clear that it will deliver very little. It is In or Out, probably as soon as this summer. For that reason, ministers need to do something that is highly unfashionable and considered downright deranged in the British Establishment: decide what you believe – enthusiastically for In, reluctantly for In, or Out because you think it is best for your country – and get ready to fight for it at public meetings across the land. Don’t be scared. You are grown men and women. You might even be surprised how much voters like politicians saying what they believe rather than what is convenient for their careers.

This argument is – I know – a stretch, considering how careerist politics has become. But for anyone playing a leading role in the affairs of a nation to base such a vital decision purely on career progression or fear of friends is not only wrong, it’s pathetic. And in ten years time, none of it, all the hedging and game-playing, will matter a jot. By then David Cameron will be having a snooze after lunch in rural Oxfordshire. Osborne will be running the World Bank or a hedge fund. The decision on the EU, on the other hand, now that will have mattered a lot.

The current failure of Conservative ministers and other senior politicians to break cover and nail their colours to the mast only contributes to the (depressingly accurate) perception of contemporary politicians as principle-free careerists squabbling over the right to sit in technocratic management of our public services, rather than principled statesmen grappling with weighty political issues.

In our current political climate, where the Conservative Party runs away from small government principles in pursuit of the centre ground and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party is criticised for actually being left-wing, it is clear that the vast majority of politicians prefer the former to the latter.

Power is pursued for its own sake, even if it means the centrist coalition of supporters cobbled together to deliver victory make it impossible to do anything remotely radical, transformational or different once in office. Thus, despite the overwrought rhetoric from both sides, neither Labour nor the Conservatives  propose a single policy which would move Britain away from its current centrist landscape.

Politicians who came of age in this age of the Tyranny of Centrism find it inordinately difficult to express a strong, sincerely held political opinion because all of their training and professional experience teaches them that pragmatic caution and a reflexive fear of fixed beliefs are the surest route to success.

Whether it’s the NHS, tax reform, constitutional reform or Britain’s relationship with Europe, MPs are strongly predisposed to fiddling around the edges themselves, while accusing others of partisan recklessness. Thus change is only ever incremental, and nearly always in the direction of More Government – the path of least resistance for any elected official.

Unfortunately, too many within the public and the media are willing to excuse this state of affairs, urging us to put ourselves in the politicians’ shoes rather than demanding sincerity and principle from our elected officials. It is therefore particularly pleasing to see Iain Martin losing patience with the status quo and demanding that those who seek to run the country actually declare the direction in which they would lead us.

The Tyranny of Centrism can only continue so long as we tolerate and enable it by rewarding glib superficiality and punishing strong displays of principle from our politicians. And on an issue as important as Britain’s future relationship with the EU, this is no time for fence-sitters, careerists or cowards.

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A Plan For Every Stage Of Your Life

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

David Cameron - Parenting Classes - Plan for every stage of your life - Coke Zero Conservatism

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David Cameron’s rootless Conservative government is casting around, finding ever more ways to shoehorn the state into our lives

Buried in all the talk of Brexit and Bowie this week has been the Prime Minister’s announcement that he intends to force every British parent to take state-run classes in parenting – if not on pain of criminal penalty then at least at the sharp end of some pointed fiscal incentives.

The Telegraph reports:

All parents should enrol in state-backed parenting classes to learn how to raise their children properly, David Cameron will say as he announces a new plan to stop families breaking up.

[..] He will use a major speech on Monday to set out proposals for a new voucher system to incentivise parents to attend the classes in an attempt to make parenting advice socially “normal” and even “aspirational”.

The Prime Minister’s plan comes as he announces a £70 million investment in relationship counselling to prevent hundreds of thousands of families splitting up over the next five years.

Mr Cameron’s speech marks the latest step in delivering on the Conservatives’ key election promise to help families at every stage of life.

So here we are. The man who lets his daughter be carried around in a Waitrose bag in the Downing Street gardens – when he isn’t accidentally leaving her behind at the pub – thinks that the rest of the country make such bad parents that what they really need is a big, heaped spoonful of big government medicine to set them straight.

One does not have to deny that family breakdown and – how to put it – “unaspirational” parenting have real, negative consequences in our society to balk at the notion of government run classes enforcing the childrearing fads of the day on first time parents.

And Cameron is not even targeting potentially troubled familes – that would be far too judgemental. No, these classes will be “made available” to all, because children “don’t come with a manual” and apparently what has worked for parents for thousands of years is suddenly insufficient to the task of raising a child in twenty-first century Britain.

Dr. Ellie Lee retorts in Spiked magazine:

As parents well know, it is one thing to seek out genuine expertise and help when a child has specific problems (for example, parents of a sick or disabled child will do everything they can to get help from doctors and find all the advice possible to make their child’s life better). But it is quite another to imagine that parents want to be taught the supposedly general skill of parenting. Rather, being a parent means taking on the responsibility for trying, experimenting, failing and learning from experience over and over again. And parents find that the best people to support them in their childraising are those in their family and local community.

… [This] episode shows how a belief in parental determinism, justified through neuro-nonsense, generates a policy programme based on the idea that raising children is just too important and difficult to be left to mere parents, their families and their communities. Those who hold an a priori belief in the need for parenting education simply cannot accept that parents may neither need nor want expert advice. The only conclusion they draw is that more must be done to find ways to train parents, and to increase parents’ ‘demand’ for their own training. Furthermore, they openly support the idea that taking babies away from their mothers is a way to ‘alter destinies’ and ‘improve life chances’.

Policymakers and a parasitical layer of third-sector organisations, whose claim to expertise and professional status lies in knowing how to improve others’ ‘relationships’, are telling us nothing about parents and the family. And it’s not just parents who lose through the relentless politicisation of parenting, and, by association, the private sphere; it’s all of us.

How long, one wonders, until David Cameron seizes upon that totalitarian idea from north of the border, and seeks to introduce a Scottish-style Named Person scheme in England and Wales, whereby a specified adult named by the government is placed in a position of co-responsibility, together with the parents, for the welfare of every newborn child?

Don’t think he wouldn’t do it. If we have learned nothing else about David Cameron since he came to power in 2010, we know that there is no conservative, small government principle which he is not happy to cast into the woodchipper if it helps him to dominate the political centre ground and atone for the supposed reputational sins of Thatcherism.

Never mind that the Named Person scheme was cooked up by Nicola Sturgeon’s swivel-eyed SNP government in Scotland, and is the complete antithesis to how a restrained state should behave. That won’t stop David Cameron if he spies an opportunity to undermine the nationalists, steal a march on the Labour Party and gain short-term tactical political advantage.

But that doesn’t make it good policy, good politics or the right thing for any party calling itself “conservative” to be doing. Who within the Conservative Party – James Cleverley, Chris Philp, Lucy Allan, David Nuttall? – will stand against this creeping tide of paternalism, one which is otherwise likely to be implemented unopposed given that both sides of the warring Labour Party would probably also approve?

Mandatory parenting classes as part of your masterplan for every stage of our lives?

Dear God, man, stop talking. You sound more socialist than Jeremy Corbyn.

No to Named Person Scheme

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Je Suis Tory Scum

Samuel Hooper18 Comments

Tory Scum - Left Wing Hatred

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The hysterical left will always call conservatives “Tory scum” and hate us with a blind, unthinking rage. It’s time to stop cowering at their attacks and apologising for our values

As 2015 draws to an end, we still have four and a half more years of David Cameron’s wishy-washy, ideologically rootless, Conservative In Name Only government to look forward to, followed by a general election which will almost certainly deliver another five years of blandness.

For small government conservatives and libertarians, this continual betrayal of principle is bad enough. But as an added insult, it also means four more years of being spat on and called “Tory scum” by demented far-left types who view David Cameron and George Osborne’s half-hearted attempts to pare back the state as the modern-day equivalent of Nazi war crimes, and who have no reservations in publicly saying so. Not very appealing.

That’s why the time has come for conservatives of all stripes to finally seize back the word “Tory” from the haters and reclaim it with pride, rather than meekly and apologetically crawling around and apologising for our values – values which saved this country from decline and irrelevance three decades ago, and can do so again if only we fully unleash them.

In that spirit, Tony Parsons’ article from earlier this year in GQ magazine – in which he “came out” as a reluctant member of the Tory Scum collective – is a great opening salvo in the fight back against the hysterical Left.

In his article, entitled “Why I’ve Become Tory Scum”, Tony Parsons calls out the Labour Party and other forces on the Left for the sanctimonious nature of their campaigning during the general election, and their utter inability to empathise with their opponents – or even entertain the thought that those who oppose them might be doing so from a position of legitimate, morally valid disagreement.

Parsons points out:

The general election was decided not by shy Tories but by us reluctant Conservatives. The millions like me who saw nothing but catastrophe in Labour’s addiction to high taxes and big spending, their loathing of success, the way they could use a word like “mansion” with a straight face and, above all, that endless pious prattle about the NHS – as though the British have no other identity but as a sickly, enfeebled, diseased people in need of having our bottoms wiped by the state from dawn till dusk. 

Sadly, Parsons may be right about the British as an enfeebled and dependent people in thrall to the NHS, judging by the current exercise in mass virtue-signalling underway to make this awful song Christmas no. 1 in the charts.

But the truth is that David Cameron’s government is very much an unremarkable continuation of New Labour. Far from being a son of Thatcher, Cameron and his leadership team are very much the heirs to Blair, and would bear comparison with many centre-left governments around the world. The Conservative Party, even under Thatcher, has in many respects always been to the left of even the Democratic Party in the United States, and certainly is so now.

Of course, you would not think that the Conservatives were in any way moderate, judging by the hysteria among many vocal parts of the Left, who present David Cameron’s steady-as-she-goes paternalism and tentative deficit reduction as some kind of outrageous economic shock treatment combined with “human rights” abuses worthy of the Nazis.

Tony Parsons ponders why this is so:

Why are those of us who believe in a different economic model – one where aspiration is encouraged, where the state gets out of your way and doesn’t spend money it doesn’t have – morally reprehensible? Exactly why are we scum? History suggests that, when presented with the chance to vote for socialism the British people always run as fast as we can in the opposite direction. It doesn’t make us bad people. But the left have lost the argument and are reduced to shrieking abuse.

But then the hysterical far left have always talked about conservatives thus, and they always will. Parsons recognises this as he writes:

The loud left are as pertinent to modern Britain as blacksmiths. No wonder their protests are increasingly ugly. They react with furious disbelief at the result of a democratic election. They rave about balancing the nation’s books as if it was like drowning kittens in a sack. They scream in our faces about their own compassion while bandying around epithets like “scum” and “filth” with the vicious abandon of Nazis talking about Jews.

Since the abuse will never end, clearly there is nothing to be gained from running from it any longer. Nor is there anything to be gained by continually apologising for core conservative principles – free individuals and strong families, fiscal conservatism and a prohibitive national defence – as the current Conservative leadership sadly continues to do.

What British conservatism and libertarianism really need is their own version of Jeremy Corbyn – someone who unapologetically sticks to their principles, refusing to water them down for political expediency, and who seeks to lead and persuade rather than conform to the results of the latest opinion poll or focus group.

Or to use a West Wing analogy, British conservatism needs a Matthew Santos-like figure, someone willing to proudly wear the “Tory” label just like Santos refused to apologise for being a liberal in the famous presidential debate episode:

 

Speaking up for American liberalism in a way that one can only wish David Cameron or George Osborne would do for small government conservatism, Santos says to his Republican opponent:

What did liberals do that was so offensive to the liberal party? I’ll tell you what they did. Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created social security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act. What did conservatives do? They opposed every single one of those things. Every one.

So when you try to hurl that label at my feet – liberal – as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won’t work, Senator. Because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honour.

Of course it is almost unimaginable for a conservative to ever talk this way, with such passion, partly because we tend not to make such grand claims for ourselves in reshaping the world or forcibly changing human nature in pursuance of our goals. It is not in our nature to brag about our accomplishments, because the biggest accomplishment a conservative can aim for in government is to get out of the way and help remove obstacles from others so that they might reach their full potential.

But more than this, British conservatives since Margaret Thatcher have had precious little to brag about. Locked out of office under thirteen years of New Labour, the Conservative Party which emerged under David Cameron has made so many compromises with triangulating, Blairite centrism that there are almost no genuinely conservative policy victories or changes in the country which we can claim.

What are we supposed to brag about? Remember when the Tories stood up to the growing climate of intolerance toward freedom of expression, and formally codified a British citizen’s right to free speech? We can’t say that because it didn’t happen. Indeed, under Theresa May Britain is becoming an even more authoritarian police state than it was before, with human beings languishing in our prisons simply for saying, singing, or tweeting the “wrong” thing.

Remember when George Osborne struck a blow for fiscal conservatism, rallied the country with his argument that it was morally obscene for government to spend more on debt repayments than education or the military, and achieved a real budget surplus in order to finally begin paying down the national debt? We can’t say that either, because although Osborne is happy for the public and lazy journalists to believe that the Tories are “paying down Britain’s debts”, in reality the government is doing no such thing.

Conservative supporters truly have the worst of both worlds at present. We are attacked by the furious Left for an ideologically-motivated attack on the state and its poorest dependants, while in reality almost zero real conservative reform is being enacted. We are stuck with the leftist abuse, but have absolutely nothing positive to show for it.

As this blog asked when Jeremy Corbyn was on the cusp of winning the Labour leadership contest, finally giving one of Britain’s two main parties a leader who demonstrably believed in something more than the acquisition and keeping of power:

If David Cameron’s Conservative Party was voted out of office today, what will future historians and political commentators say about this government fifty years from now? What will be the Cameron / Osborne legacy? What edifices of stone, statute and policy will remain standing as testament to their time in office? Try to picture it clearly.

Are you happy with what you see?

No real conservative should be happy with what they see right now. Assuming that the political pendulum will at some point swing back in favour of the Labour Party, we conservatives have almost nothing to show after five years of David Cameron other than a half-finished job clearing the budget deficit. We have a reanimated Ted Heath sitting in Downing Street, not a worthy heir to Margaret Thatcher.

But just as the American Tea Party lay conspicuously dormant for the many years of fiscal profligacy and budget-busting spending under the George W. Bush administration only to miraculously awaken when a man named Barack Hussein Obama won the presidency, so the hysterical British Left are now shrieking bloody murder over a set of very pedestrian, middle-of-the-road centrist policies being enacted by the Conservative Party after having airily ignored the very same governing philosophy when the now-hated Blairites were in charge.

As conservatives, we realise there is no point in launching a futile battle against human nature or the instinct of many on the Left to demonise that which they do not or cannot understand. They will continue to call us “Tory Scum” and we have no control over that.

But we do have the power to take back ownership of the label “Tory” and refuse to see it as an insult.

We do have the power to point out that there is nothing virtuous or compassionate about throwing more money at unreformed healthcare and welfare systems, or spreading the wealth around so much that wealth creation is destroyed or driven overseas.

We do have the power to proclaim the importance of fiscal conservatism, not out of some wonkish obsession with balancing the books but because running up further government debt today is a blatant act of intergenerational theft, living at the expense of our children and grandchildren. And because as we have seen with other countries, excessive national debt can become a foreign policy and national security issue too.

We do have the power to point out to anyone who will listen that the modern Left love to parade their virtue and ideological purity but have apparently given up on coming up with alternative policies of their own, and to demand that Labour produce some costed tax and spending plans rather than simply railing against the inhumanity of the Evil Tories.

We do have the power to point out the many ways in which David Cameron’s pitiful excuse for a Conservative government ignores or betrays real conservative values, and to declare “not in my name”.

We do have the power to say “Oui, Je Suis Tory Scum – and I wish that our prime minister was a real conservative too, rather than a reheated Blairite with an ominous, socialist plan for every stage of our lives“.

The Left are not going to change, so we had better get used to the spitting, the vandalism, and the overwrought, emotional and short-termist way in which they discuss public policy.

But we can change. We can stop lying down and taking it every time a virtue-signalling lefty pontificates on welfare without offering a plan of their own, or seeks to win an argument on healthcare by stoking the public’s idolatry of the NHS.

We can stop fighting on the Left’s terms.

And who knows, if small government conservatives and libertarians actually succeed in getting off the back foot for the first time since Margaret Thatcher left 10 Downing Street, we might even manage to salvage something from David Cameron’s woeful premiership.

Bankers Toffs And Tory Scum - General Election 2015 - London Protests - Downing Street

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