*Tim posting this for Stephan*
Tim’s piece on ConservativeHome about ‘the hare and the tortoise’ is absolutely essential to the future debate among conservatives. It provides some structure of mutual respect for our discussions. Without this, we can too easily degenerate into casting each other as enemies. I treated Danny Finkelstein this way in my post on Saturday, he did the same to me on Monday, and then Stephen Pollard trumped everything by calling me “remarkably stupid”, “too dense” and a purveyor (unwitting, because uneducated) of Goebbels-style anti-semitic insult.
Even when we don’t descend this far, we all show a preference for creating straw men of each other who we then triumphantly knock down. So those of us who want a lower-tax economy are assumed to think the mere mention of cuts will bring the voters flocking: most of us don’t think that. And anyone who starts talking about brand-modernising strategies is assumed by the other side to be unprincipled and superficial, which is also unfair.
Hares and tortoises are both successful beasts; the tortoise happens to win in the Aesop fable, so there’s an important concession there for the discussions ahead.
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