Britannia Radio

Oh brave new world

WEDNESDAY, 12TH MAY 2010

Conservative Home reports:

Answering questions, the Prime Minister said that the pair had looked at the option of a minority government on a confidence and supply basis, but that they agreed that it was ‘so uninspiring’ which would not allow them to do what they came into politics to achieve and wouldn't mean anything.

Is this perhaps the first example of brazen Cleggeroonian spin? Uninspiring?Please!! Read instead, surely, ‘too much of a threat to my fast vanishing prospect of power’. Having incompetently put himself in a position where Nick Clegg could play Labour and the Tories off against each other, David Cameron was clearly terrified that Clegg would form a coalition with Labour.

Instead of taking the view that any such Labour/LibDem coalition would be catastrophic for those two parties because a) it would fall apart b) it would be blamed for implementing savage expenditure cuts c) the voters would punish the LibDems for keeping Labour in power against the wishes of the electorate – an analysis which caused a number of prominent Labour folk to sound the alarm about such a deal and thus help to sink it – Cameron decided that it had to be pre-empted by offering Clegg a Tory/LibDem coalition, with policy compromises and seats in the Cabinet.

This decision was surely rendered all the more urgent by Cameron’s presumed perception that, if Labour and the LibDems had joined up and left the Tories once more in opposition, his own position would have been vulnerable to Tory colleagues rightly furious at him for the strategic and tactical failures of the Tories’ failed election campaign. What was really so ‘uninspiring’ that it prevented him from taking this principled and politically savvy stand was therefore the fear that he might be junked as Tory leader.

The result is that, with the gleeful trumpeting by the Cameroons that the Tories are now the lynchpin of ‘progressive’ politics, political conservatism in Britain would appear to have died. In order to neutralise the taunt that the Tories were ‘the nasty party’, Cameron reshaped the party by adopting much of the LibDem package – social libertarian, green, committed to state control through the NHS.

Now the Cameroons think that by governing with the LibDems they will finally prove they aren’t the nasty party because the Lib Dems are ‘nice’. Such thinking displays a quite extraordinary shallowness. The LibDems are further to the left LibDem are broadly to the left of Labour. That means what they stand for is not nice at all. It means they have an ideological, illiberal view of the world which undermines the moral basis of this society at every turn, replacing truth, justice and morality by ideology and the demonisation of dissent.

So I doubt whether we shall now hear very much from the Tories about repealing the Human Rights Act. I doubt even more whether we will hear anything about protecting the rights of Christians who have been harassed for trying to live according to their religious principles. Or about fighting the evil of political correctness in the police; or the demonisation of men by feminist gender warriors; or tackling the Islamisation of Britain, let alone stopping Iran from getting its genocide bomb.

(The symbol of such perversity is surely that Theresa May, known principally for her slavish devotion to silly shoes and political correctness, is now Home Secretary – an appointment which, when it became known this morning, caused convulsions of incredulous hilarity throughout the media and Westminster village.)

On all these issues and more, the great mission of conservatism to defend the bedrock values of western society against attack has now been junked, as the Conservative Party now joins forces with those who attack and undermine them in the name of a liberalism whose meaning they have turned upside down. The task facing conservatism is surely to retrieve the language of liberalism, human rights and decency from the left and return them to their true meaning. But instead the Tories are so thrilled that the LibDems will now confer upon them the aura of ‘progressivism’ that they cannot see that they themselves will now be tainted by the singular mixture of vapidity and viciousness that characterises their illiberal and not very democratic coalitionists.

With the notable exception of Iain Duncan Smith, whose appointment to the Work and Pensions portfolio offers a real chance that the welfare state might at last start to be properly reformed along principles of true social justice and moral responsibility, this is now a government of Cleggeroons. The Cameroons and the LibDems get along so well because they are indeed very much like each other in their outlook on life – a secular, utilitarian approach in which the deepest principle is the unfettering of constraints on the free individual at the expense of moral rules, to produce the pernicious doctrines of moral and cultural relativism and their doctrinaire enforcement through political correctness, aka cultural Marxism.

Which brings me to Michael Gove, who manages to embody both social libertarianism and a deep understanding of the importance of nation and its history, and who, after several alarums and excursions, has finally ended up at the Department of what is now thankfully once again called Education (his first sound move). I fear, however, that his apparently radical programme  of ‘free schools’ (which has been undermined from the beginning by the Tories’ opposition to academic selection) might have been finally emasculated by this little phrase in the Coalition Agreement:

We agree to promote the reform of schools to ensure...that all schools are held properly accountable.

Accountable to whom? To local authorities, as the LibDems have always insisted? If so, that’s the end of the ‘free schools’ experiment. On this, as on so much in this brave new blue and orange dawn, we await enlightenment with weary anticipation.