Roger Scruton: Conservatives must think. So come and do so at the second Conservative Renewal conference.

By Roger Scruton

During 13 years of opposition the Tory Party had the opportunity to think. Issues that were of ever increasing prominence in the minds and the feelings of the electorate were ignored or fudged by the Party hierarchy. There was a need to re-examine the core beliefs and assumptions of Tory politics, and to reconnect with the instincts and values on which the Tories had in the past depended for their support. But the Party entered into coalition government with virtually no intellectual contribution of its own, and with a rooted desire to avoid the places where thought was needed. It was as though the entire period out of office had been spent sipping cocktails in the Bahamas, watching the antics of the Labour Government on television with quiet murmurs of dismay. Issues where the Party should be taking the lead – the environment, marriage and the family, the place of religion in the public square, press freedom, policing, the armed forces – have all been addressed as though the Labour Party were still in office, and as though there were no need to change one iota of the left-liberal agenda. True, in the matter of Europe the Party has made moves to protect national sovereignty, though largely because UKIP has forced the Tories to recognise that, by not doing so, they have jeopardised their core support. Perhaps it is only in the fields of education and welfare that we see the evidence of serious thinking, with Michael Gove and Iain Duncan-Smith making a courageous attempt to unravel fifty years of egalitarian claptrap.

There is a certain kind of Tory who will say that this is altogether inevitable and right. Conservatism, such a person will say, is not about ideas but about instincts, and the main business of conservative government is not to rock the boat but to keep it afloat in troubled waters. Ideas are not the solution but the problem, and if only we could dispense with them we could return to the kind of politics that the British people prefer, and which leaves them to get on with life according to their own peaceful ambitions. It seems to me that there is no longer room for that complacent attitude. Our country has undergone radical changes that must be discussed and addressed if politics is again to make sense to the people, and not to seem like the pastime of a self-perpetuating political class.

    Here are some of the matters where thought is needed:

• National sovereignty, what it is and why it matters. The debate over Europe has been conducted entirely in terms of economic cost and benefit, with no attempt to define the deeper issue of the nation, its identity, its culture, its borders and its enduring sense of pre-political loyalty.

• The secular law and the loyalty of Muslims. Have we yet had the debate that is needed about the Koran, about ‘Asharite orthodoxy, and the consequences for us, in a secular and territorial jurisdiction, of a rival law that purports to over-ride all man-made legislation?

• The environment, and the nonsense of building unconfirmed scientific theories into a political program. All the thinking on this issue has been conducted according to the narrow agenda of people with trans-national ambitions and a deep disregard for home, settlement and the nation state. Yet, as I argue in Green Philosophy, it is the conservative tradition that has the more persuasive arguments.

• The law, and in particular the need to protect our common law heritage from the edicts of unaccountable bureaucrats, and to re-establish the judicial equilibrium that the Labour Party set out to overthrow.

• Marriage and the family – why should we Tories accept legislation of a radical kind, which appeals to the left-liberal establishment but challenges deep feelings in ordinary child-rearing people, when there was neither an election manifesto that announced it nor a cogent argument presented in its favour?

• Internet pornography and the fate of our children. True, there is now a fumbling attempt to open the debate. But it has been live among psychologists for two decades without making any impact on the political process. What are conservatives for, if they cannot take the lead in issues like this?

There are many more issues that will occur to the reader, of course: foreign policy, military readiness, the Union and the North-South divide. My point is simply to remind the reader that, without thinking we shall not know what we stand for, and we will go into an election with an indistinct agenda and no readiness to fight for it. But there is hope. Young people in the Windsor Conservative Association have begun a movement for Conservative Renewal, with the intention of assembling thinkers and opinion formers who will concentrate the minds of ordinary voters, and influence the Party not only to define its position on the issues of the day but also to look for the arguments that would persuade others to agree with it.

Conservative Renewal is organising their second day-long conference, which will be held in Windsor on Saturday the 14th of September.  Book now for a place, and join in the conversation.

Comments

[David Lawrence]

Young and old alike.
Can the over 65s join the Young Conservatives.
Together we may make those in middle age think more.

[radsatser]

You can only renew something if you think it is broken or decrepit.

As far as I can see, the perception is that the cheap cardboard house that has been built in recent years is still infinitely superior to the property that had survived centuries, you knocked down to build it, it just needs a coat of paint to hide the rapidly forming cracks in not the facade, but the structure.

[JohnLilburne12]

'The environment, and the nonsense of building unconfirmed scientific theories into a political program. All the thinking on this issue has been conducted according to the narrow agenda of people with trans-national ambitions and a deep disregard for home, settlement and the nation state.'

What nonsense! I find your lack of scientific nous to be astonishing, given that you are an academic - albeit one who is rather woolly in your thinking.

'conducted according to the narrow agenda of people with trans-national ambitions and a deep disregard for home, settlement and the nation state.' Modern 'Conservatism' worships the abstract concept of the market to appease the people with trans-national ambitions and a deep disregard for home, settlement and the nation state. Get back to your ivory tower and write something more sensible.

[adrian clarke]

Its all there. The areas Conservatives need to think about and remember their core support. Unfortunately except in a couple of areas they lost all semblance of thought when they decided to elect a Blair clone( a poor one at that) as their leader.
There is now nothing to choose between Lab/Lib/Con except how to spend the money we don't have. All the same over the EU, sovereignty, political correctness. The list is endless.
No wonder UKIP are taking votes. We are the only party that speaks for the silent majority

[Allectus99]

Scruton makes a good point. There is a certain kind of conservatism, usually espoused by those on the left of the Conservative Party, whose intellectual roots run through Sir Ian Gilmour and Michael Oakeshott back to the "trimming" Marquess of Halifax at the beginning of the eighteenth century, that:

1) seems to attribute a value to institutions simply because they exist, and without regard to how they came into being, how well they perform their functions, or whether their supposed "functions" are actually socially necessarily or desirable at all;

2) seems to accept change as inevitable, but not as something that conservatives themselves should initiate or sponsor (although they should remain completely free to jump on the bandwagon once somebody else has dictated the direction of change); and

3) seems to boil down to little more than political opportunism, unencumbered by "dogma" (or what ordinary people call principles), whose raison d'etre is gaining and retaining political power.

To my mind, this kind of conservatism is bankrupt in modern politics. There is certainly a case for resisting radical change to institutions that have evolved organically and piecemeal over long periods of time (our language and culture, our traditional built environment and countryside, our demographics), and which perform their functions largely successfully (the House of Lords and the monarchy are a case in point), but the trouble is that there are few areas untouched by the frenzy of half-baked meddling legislation from the post-war period to date, and that to claim that institutions created by this flawed and haphazard process are somehow worthy of preservation simply by virtue of their lazy acceptance by the New Establishment is complete nonsense.

Change is inevitable, and often desirable; but conservatives shouldn't be afraid to oppose undesirable change, or to advocate the reversal of harmful innovations (same-sex marriage and civil partnerships), simply because they are fashionable in New Establishment circles.

Conservatives who abdicate responsibility for initiating and driving radical change of their own (like the pre-Thatcher post-war Tories or the neo-Blairite Tory "modernisers") lose control of the political agenda, and lose sight of the institutions and values which it ought to be goal of every conservative to preserve. There's more to politics than gaining and retaining political power.

Scruton is right to criticise the moral and intellectual drift that characterised the Conservative Party after (and before) 1997: but it is important to see through the myth that the Tory "modernisation" project represented some kind of intellectual renaissance for the right, rather than just a lazy and opportunistic re-branding of discredited New Labour thinking. The right still have a lot of thinking to do and I wish the organisers of the Conference every success.

[Prodicuss]

Thank God for Scruton.

[RutlandReliable]

This is an excellent agenda for a proper debate about real Conservatism.

[David Belchamber]

Thought before action is certainly desirable but I would plead specifically for a statement (or restatement) of the fundamental principles on which a modern, fair and progressive conservative government should be based.

[Donald Burling]

David Cameron gained the leadership of the party on a platform of social concern, which presumably the majority of grass-roots members approved of. Unfortunately since his coming into office that seems to have been forgotten.

The compassionate Conservative tradition exemplified by Lord Shaftesbury is in no way egalitarian, but it does pursue reasonalble justice for the poor.

[Paul Harris]

What worries me are those policies that are sold as one thing and yet the plan behind them is something far more sinister.

The ones troubling me at the moment are:

1) ‘Gay marriage’ and the ulterior motive of promoting sexual dysfunction coupled with the agenda to destroy real marriage and the Christen church in one go. The pornography agenda is linked to this as well. It creates the ‘demand’.

2) Welfare reform. The real reason is to transfer money from the needy and put it into private corporate business that is there to brainwash the victims. The Work Programme is highly dodgy and also I think it is a plan to reduce working conditions for everyone by forced labour, and to transfer labour resources to the government ‘charity’ sector, which is again mostly used to brainwash people. Even political think tanks are charities now.

3) Transferring money from welfare to policing. The extremely harsh sanctions regime is forcing people to turn to crime to eat. More money is therefore being wasted on police and now mega prisons are being built. This is extremely worrying. We are in the territory of the beginnings of Nazi Germany here. It’s all promoted through distortions in the popular press. The belief is that anyone can easily get a job and that they are simply lazy.

4) Subsidy to industry + creating jobs. This will give rise to the non-job and impinge badly on the economy by promoting inefficiency.

5) The government’s obedience to international agendas of the UN and the EU. Agenda 21 is of particular concern.

6) The rising level of immigration. Those who came to this country to do work should never be given British nationality and nor should their offspring. We need to revoke British nationality for those people. We need to send them back home or we will end up losing our country. The birthrates of Third Worlders is frightening. We are talking exponential increases here.

[Phil Kean]

Would this "Conservative Thinker" be welcome?

:-)

.

[Aidy_lewis]

Roger Scruton is the philosopher of our time, not Derrida or Foucault.

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