Repent! The End Is Nigh!

I’ve finally worked out who Tory modernisers remind me of. It’s the loonies with the sandwich boards wandering round the high street. Admittedly, a sort of anti-matter version, endlessly shouting ‘Repent thy morals or face damnation on the Day of Non-Judgementalsim’.

The latest example of this dismal bunch appears in the Times. All the usual talking points are present and correct, with the same old dreary nonsense being spouted, even down to that most clichéd of Liberal talking points: the evils of the Daily Mail:

My own view is that the Tories have to stop being angry about modern Britain. Too often their spokesmen sound like the Daily Mail, moaning about the breakdown of family life, social values or whatever is the whinge of the day.

This is how four year olds argue. Is this guy really saying that the family hasn’t been under attack for four decades? Or that many communities aren’t collapsing? No, he doesn’t even address these issues; he just tries to breeze past these questions with a highbrow sneer. Liberals don’t want to debate these issues, lest people notice the correlation between the growth of these social pathologies and the implementation of the Liberal agenda. They’d much rather try and throw you off the scent with stupid smears:

Britain no long consists only of stable white families, and never did, of course.

Let move on from the historical illiteracy necessary to believe the ‘nation of immigrants’ line, and just note that he’s calling us racists even while himself alluding to a racist stereotype, that of the absent black father. I won’t even mention the fact that the notoriously stable Indian and Chinese families are only rarely white, I’ll simply say this: virtually every study into the subject shows children do better with a stable family structure around them. If family breakdown was a product, you couldn’t get a licence to sell it, but now this guy thinks Conservatives should turn a blind eye to that for electoral gain. This from the guy who claims Tories are too opportunistic ?

Rather, the Tories should look back to what Margaret Thatcher (and Mr Blair), did so successfully: appeal to peoples’ aspirations and hopes. A positive message is always more effective than a negative one.

Say what ? Blair’s positive messages ? There has never been a PM who’s claimed to find his government opposed by so many dark conspiracies. In early 1997 you could have been forgiven for thinking Blair was standing against a Party called ‘Tory Sleaze’. This is the man who claimed there was ’24 hours to save the NHS’. Just look how many groups have been demonised at various times during Blair’s rule: farmers, truckers, hospital consultants, gun owners, the Police, the Armed Forces, the City, Jews…. If Blair caught a cold, it would be because of a vast conspiracy involving Kleenex, the pharmaceutical industry, the BMA and Melanie Phillips.

Leaving the whitewashing of Blair aside, there is an almost worthwhile point there: Conservatives should seek to articulate a positive vision. Yes, they should - after all, to quote Lady Thatcher:

Conservatives have excellent credentials to speak about human rights. By our efforts, and with precious little help from self-styled liberals, we were largely responsible for securing liberty for a substantial share of the world's population and defending it for most of the rest.

Liberals keep banging on about the Utopias they could create, we don’t need to do that: we have reality. Yet, the very fact that the distinction between the effects of Conservatism and Liberalism is so huge mandates us to speak out about what we believe.

Conservatives are too angry ? No, Conservatives aren’t nearly angry enough. Look at crime. Ordinary, decent citizens are going out to walk the dog and never coming home. We should be enraged. Families are losing husbands, fathers and sons to scum, and the Left is channelling Marie Antoinette. As long as the Conservative Party is prepared to sign up to the happy-clappy Liberal consensus, whereby the slaughter of innocent people is just, y’know, one of those things, they deserve to be out of power. Why should people vote Conservative when all they offer is a legislative version of meet the new boss, same as the old boss ?

This is the essential lunacy of the modernisers position, they claim that Tony Blaire is a moderate, while the Conservative Party is extremist, yet just about every time a gap appears between the Conservatives and the Left, it turns out that the Tories are closer to what the public really believes. Consider the latest example of Liberal thought on education. Does anyone outside the Beardey-Weirdey Therapeutic Community of our educational system think this isn't insane ? This isn’t an aberration, this is who they are, this is what they really believe, and that’s the message Conservatives should be hammering home. But no – instead the Party is mired in dealing with alleged modernisers and their incessant suggestions that the Conservative Party really needs to stop beating its wife.