Time for the Conservatives to live up to their name
By Robert J Davies
THE Conservative Party more or less won the last three British general elections, yet conservatism remains on the back foot within the party and country as a whole. The Tories seem to have no answer or clarity of thought – even while in a position of power – to face down Labour’s ideological challenge. The Left can and do spout ludicrous nonsense, always from behind a faux veneer of fairness and equality – yet within weeks if not days, their warped concept of society claims another victim and Britain takes a further huge stride towards egalitarian dystopia.
The Left pour forth concepts, ideas and beliefs which are outlandish to any sane person, yet despite this, they set the agenda and get tongues wagging. In Britain 2018, the centre of gravity has shifted leftwards yet again to the extent that men can now choose to be locked up in a women’s prison simply by declaring to the world that they think of themselves as female. An idea which would have seemed bizarre even in an election manifesto for the Monster Raving Loony Party becomes accepted by – and acceptable to – a conservative government.
And look how that is panning out – the Prison Service has been forced to apologise after a male paedophile was remanded to a women-only jail after telling the authorities “she” now identifies as female. It will only be a matter of time before headteachers are forced to ban girls from wearing skirts for fear that some boys will insist on having the right to wear them also. It’s already happened in a handful of schools.
At a time when British identity has never been more under threat through seemingly unstoppable mass immigration and the continued erosion of the concept of Britishness, this is the kind of issue we find ourselves discussing. Our country is becoming an ever-more dangerous place. Television dramas like the BBC’s politically-correct but nonetheless compelling Bodyguard bring fictional terror attacks into our living rooms. Only later, perhaps when we’re trying to sleep, do we possibly reflect on the fact that this is the kind of nation we have actually become; forced to live in a state of siege, not knowing when suicide bombers will strike next.
It’s worth pondering what previous generations of Britons would have thought of Britain today; its identity blurred and shifting due to demographic upheaval and multiculturalism; the safety of its citizens threatened by countless implacable enemies allowed to circulate in our midst and now dealing with the multi-faceted challenge that extricating ourselves from the European Union poses.
Yet still we must find time, not only to debate and agonise over the needs of a section of a society so tiny that their numbers would not exceed that of a moderately-sized village, but to alter our society accordingly, regardless of the consequences.
Why do Leftists feel so passionately about an issue affecting 0.2% of the population? Surely there can’t be that many votes in it? But the needs of minorities, large or small, matter greatly to the hardliners now ruling Labour for they are pawns to be deployed in the attempt to overthrow traditional, socially-conservative values hitherto held by large sections of the population, including their own support base. In Jeremy Corbyn’s alternative Britain, British culture, values, patriotism, faith, and history are to be replaced by an aggressive ersatz egalitarianism which is not only a battering ram to smash down what went before but is also intended to provide the masses with an alternative religion of some sort.
Much of the blame can be laid at the door of the Equality Act 2010. This is a horrible piece of legislation which has stitched Cultural Marxism into the fabric of the British constitution and its effects are proving far-reaching. It is, essentially, an attempt to reshape our society into something wholly different without seeking or receiving the consent of the British people.
Why is it still on the statute book? Wouldn’t a genuinely conservative government repeal it at the first opportunity? Would such a government not only permit the current hate crimes to remain law but now seriously consider extending the list to include misogyny? How laughably ironic that this would instantly discriminate against men (though as Orwell pointed out in Animal Farm, some animals are of course, more equal than others).
Bereft of any ideas of its own, the Conservative Party meekly absorbs the Left’s cultural revolution, haplessly believing that this will play well with the British people and help it to lose its tag as the “nasty party” – as it was christened, not by a tub-thumping Leftie, but by none other than our current Prime Minister when she was chairman in 2002. At the party conference that year, Theresa May infamously vowed to move the party on from “nasty” to “kind”.
But it is not being kind – not to us and especially not to generations of Britons yet to be born – to allow the moral compass which helped give our country its sense of purpose and direction to be smashed and replaced with the vacuous nihilism of the Left. If the British people no longer know who they are; what they believe, what God they worship and whose country this now is then we are in a desperately sorry state.
Yet the Brexit referendum of 2016 was a ray of sunshine amid the gloom, for it was a sign that despite all the virtuous chatter of politicians, the British people themselves still very much had a pulse. The question now is, do the Tories? No-one on the Right of politics will benefit if they one day fall apart over Brexit and/or their own self-invented existential crisis.
The forces of conservatism need a Conservative Party proud of the label “conservative”; happy to be identifiably on the political Right and determined to dump the new normal of state-sanctioned weirdness in favour of a return to a truly normal country in which we all feel comfortable to live. Our future quality of life depends on it.
