What am I?

Every little girl and boy that's born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal or else a little Conservative

For most of my life I called myself conservative. Yet what is it that I want to conserve about today's Britain? Her welfare dependency? Her dumbed-down culture? Her lethal health service? Her chaotic and ineffectual schools? Her cowardly obsession with "health and safety?" Her cultural cringe?

Do I support the laws of the land? No, I think that more than 90% of them should be repealed. Do I support the institutions of the State? Hardly, since I would close most of them. What about "the boys in blue?" Every conservative loves them, surely? Well then I am no conservative, since I regard them (pace the good souls still in their midst) as the IRA to New Labour's Sinn Fein.

They may not always hold office, but in public life the victory of the Labour Party has been total. Save for isolated pockets of comically ineffectual resistance, its thinking now commands academia, the media, the educational establishment and indeed all the public services (including those formerly known as "forces"). If David Cameron were elected tomorrow, that would not change at all. The pace of Britain's destruction might slow, but the trend would be the same.

Since he would conserve far more in our country than I would, Gordon Brown is more properly called a conservative than am I. Conservatives (the clue is in the name) favour the status quo in a broad sense; socially, economically and politically. And in such a broad sense, Britain's society, her economy and her political structures are all now Labour. It is the Labour barons who feel at home in our country. It is the intellectuals of the Left who swagger, unchallenged, amid our dreaming spires.

How can I call myself a Conservative when it would now take far more change to make a Britain of which I could approve than to convert her to a Communist or Fascist state? In the original sense of the word, I am now a radical since I desire root and branch reform.  I am one of the alienated few who believe that - 999 times out of a 1,000 - free individuals making their own life choices with the informal support of family and community will do better for themselves and each other than will even the best-directed State.

Such people used to be called "conservatives". What should we call ourselves now?

Comments

[Dave H]

We, (broadly speaking) call ourselves libertarians.

[Kinderling]

I agree. I live in an open prison run by the inmates. There is no justice. And society will perish.

[jameshigham]

There comes a point, Tom, when labels become largely meaningless. Even libertarian as a label - I see limits to this too. I don't think anything would change with a change of deckchairs up top in 2010 or earlier. The whole mental set of the palce needs to alter and years of deterioration reversed. Sad, sad state of affairs.

[Deogolwulf]

"Conservatives . . . favour the status quo."

Only in one sense of the word, by which one can quite legitimately talk of conservative Marxist-Leninists in, say, the Soviet Union. This, of course, is not the same meaning as comes from the old conservative tradition, which has in mind the preservation of perennial principles of government, rather than of just any principles that just happen to be established. The kind of conservatism that accepts the established depredations of progressives is little more than faint-heartedness.

How about becoming a reactionary? You probably won't get to be on the winning side, and people will generally treat you with suspicion, if not outright hostility, but at least you can march to old tunes, rather than to the shill pop played by the pipers of progress. By the nature of progressive radicalism, it is possible to be a reactionary to some extent even with a name like "Thomas Paine"; for we have "progressed" so far to the left in the last two hundred years that even to be an old radical has the taint of reaction.

Some of us are libertarians, some are classical liberals. We should call ourselves "Sensible"!

[fake consultant]

ironically, the world you describe is a strangely liberal/radical vision, and you are so correct when you describe both brown and cameron as conservatives representing both sides of the same coin.

i have the same debates with american conservatives who support new restrictions on basic freedoms--and with american liberals who feel the same way.

yep, it turns out that supporting freedom is a most radical idea in a world not inherently disposed toward radicalism...and we should remind ourselves that even the american revolution was far from a majority-supported enterprise.

[Stuart]

Try www.politicalcompass.org and then you'll know!