Marc Sidwell: We're adults, let us play with matches

Marc Sidwell, a Research Fellow of the New Culture Forum and a member of the Organising Committee for the Henry Jackson Society, explains why he's starting the Dangerous Party for Adults.

There’s more than one way to be the nasty party. Take this recent gem from Michael Portillo, off the frontbenches and out of the Commons now, but for so long the archetypical modern Tory:

“We have the right to be disapproving of obesity because the costs to public health and to national productivity are borne by us all.”

That may be New Conservatism speaking - nothing to do with Europe! - but it’s extremely nasty. Portillo couched his article in terms of personal responsibility, but what he advocates is that the state has the right to tell citizens how to live their lives.

I wish I could see it as an isolated example, but I can’t. Project Cameron is increasingly transforming the Conservatives into a very modern party of “No”: no to high salaries; no to cheap food; no to foreign holidays for the poor; no to driving to the supermarket for a convenient weekly shop.

Something has gone badly wrong. For all the talk of a citizen-centred politics, the Conservatives seem to have lost sight of personal freedom as the rock on which their appeal is founded. They want to use our creative energies in the third sector, but to choose the ends to which they will be put. Rather than seeking a smaller role for politicians, they are staking claims on new social and cultural territory: peering into our fridges and suitcases, and even visiting our bedrooms to look for the marriage license.

Marc Sidwell: No child of mine will go to Hogwarts

Marc Sidwell is a Research Fellow of the New Culture Forum and a member of the Organising Committee for the Henry Jackson Society.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has been flying from the shelves almost as swiftly and magically as it arrives. Meanwhile the latest Harry Potter film, based on book number five, is an early summer blockbuster. Without wishing to infringe on anyone’s fun, the final bout of Potter-mania seems a good moment to acknowledge that, for all its fictive charm, Hogwarts does not offer a real education.

What, after all, do the students learn in their marvellous academy? How to cast spells certainly, but what about literature, calculus or logic? Optimistic classicists have pointed out that the neophyte wizards seem to run around muttering mangled Latin, but they con “Evanesco” only because it is a word of power. They have no need to learn the third conjugation for a deponent verb or construe from Book X of Virgil’s Aeneid. Harry and friends could graduate with honours in wand-waving and yet be fundamentally ignorant in a deep human sense. Hogwarts does not offer an education at all, only vocational training. It is a secondary modern in fancy dress.