Conservatives should not develop inflexible affections or dislikes for people, institutions and nations that might cloud an understanding of their permanent interests.
Lord Palmerston wisely taught that Britain had neither permanent friends nor permanent enemies - only permanent interests.
Conservatives will nearly always want British foreign policy to promote free trade, normalise rogue nations and fight hunger and disease.
At this point in history those permanent interests are best served by the nations of the Anglosphere. The Old European nations are unwilling to pre-emptively strike against terror. They appear too self-absorbed to tackle third world poverty. And the sclerotic eurozone has become a model of economic inefficiency.
But America is not a consistent servant of Britain’s permanent interests. In recent years it has erected protectionist measures (that have unfairly damaged the British steel industry) and its agricultural subsidies are deeply damaging to developing nations within the Commonwealth.
And your enemy’s enemy is often not your friend
One of the worst mistakes that a politician can make is to assume that his enemy’s enemy is his friend. Murray Kempton talked of the "evil of lesser evilism". This mistake was made on the international stage when, for example, America armed Osama bin Laden during his war against the Soviet Union (when it was occupying Afghanistan) and it has been made on the domestic stage, too…
The case of the BBC versus New Labour
During the height of the row between the BBC and New Labour - over the alleged ‘sexing-up’ of the Iraq war dossier - the Conservative Party betrayed conservatism’s strategic interests for dubious tactical advantage. The Conservative leadership and The Daily Mail had become so obsessed with their hatred of Labour that they gave succour to the BBC. The Conservative Party came to believe that its enemy’s enemy was its friend and shelved the brilliant Elstein report that might have begun much needed reform of the BBC.
Tories appeared to forget that the BBC always ‘red corner questions’ from the liberal left. The BBC’s biases against the political right, and against conservatism more generally, are indefensible. But the BBC has always hidden behind the fact that the licence fee allows it to produce programming of a quality that commercial broadcasters do not regularly match. The Elstein Report proposed the removal of that last defence. Elstein suggested that taxes on digital subscription fees are used to establish a new public broadcasting fund. This fund opens up the possibility of high quality, public service broadcasting continuing - but with organisations with diverse worldviews able to access that fund.
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