Reform UK, lead by Nigel Farage, is a once in a century opportunity to destabilise the status quo and displace the political establishment in Great Britain. A unique window of time has opened up in which the British people are discontent enough to reject both the Labour party and the Conservative party, throwing their votes behind what currently amounts to a populist vessel without any record of governance.
A recent poll by Ipsos shows Reform UK with 34 percent, 9 points ahead of Labour, continuing its rapid transformation from an irrelevant third party enclave for disgruntled Tories into a serious electoral force; one threatening to be responsible for the first election since 1910 in which a party other than Labour or the Conservatives won the most seats. Whatever your assessment of Nigel Farage’s character, or Zia Yusuf’s intentions, or how sound Reform UK’s policy proposals are, or even just the party’s tactics and rhetoric – I think it’s important to remember both the existential threat this country faces and how important it is for us to gain political power. That is ultimately all that matters – power. If we aren’t working towards winning councillors (thankfully, Reform is), and if we aren’t working towards winning seats in the House of Commons (thankfully, Reform is), then we are wasting our time.
Many people on the right of politics seem to be stricken with reservations when it comes to supporting Reform UK. A caveat with that is when I say “many people on the right of politics” I specifically mean the most politically engaged, most active online group of people on the right. The general logic concludes that Reform is:
- Appealing too much to old people.
- Is ideologically incoherent.
- Has become soft on its core issues (immigration, identity, etc.).
On point one, they have astutely assessed that the Labour party is weakest from its left flank. As such, coming out against the cuts to the Winter Fuel Allowance and in favour of scrapping the Two-Child Benefit Cap is a good way of exploiting fragmentation within Labour’s electoral coalition. On point two, Reform has realised that the primary barrier to their electoral success is the degree to which people see Reform as being associated with the Conservative party (by history, by figures within the party, but most importantly by policy and rhetoric). This means that for the next 4 years they will be selling themselves as a fresh, new third party with ideas detached from the old constraints of red-blue, left-right partisan lines.
Regardless of your assessment of how committed they would be on delivering this; they are fundamentally a populist party. If you want Reform to sound like Margaret Thatcher on taxes, welfare and state intervention in the economy you will never be satisfied with them. Finally, on point three, by the nature of us living in a democracy, Reform inevitably has to win votes from the broad, apolitical masses in order to gain a majority in parliament. If that means Reform politicians have to sound like soft, liberal centrists in order to win votes from women aged 30-50 then sobeit.
A predictable wedge emerges from the fact that Nigel Farage needs to appeal to the country but Robert Jenrick needs to appeal to his base – in order for either of them to achieve their current goals. Plenty of figures in politics, predominantly Conservative MPs , currently have the luxury to be able to throw around as much rhetorical red meat as possible because the stakes are so low and they are nowhere near power. Farage, and Reform UK, have no such luxury. They have the weight of a desperate, panicked people on their shoulders and a country that is putting unearned hope into their project.
By Reform’s luck, the Conservative party is playing perfectly into their hands. A Midnightian miracle is unfolding, whereby Nigel Farage and Reform UK are becoming the sensible right wing party with broad appeal across the country and the Conservatives are becoming the fringe, impotent party obsessed with a handful of issues and unable to step outside of pandering to a noisy, narrow clique online.
The two parties are switching places, and yet Reform continues to position itself to the left of the Labour party. In a strange twist of fate, irrespective of the genealogy of the viewpoints of Reform’s officials or its membership, it will actually end up being the Labour party that replaces the Conservative party. What room is there remaining for the Conservative party if Labour are the fiscally responsible, steady-handed, sensible experienced party pleading with the electorate to continue on with the status quo and Reform are the party promoting a radical, progressive populism in opposition to that? Pictured below is the current state of British politics, the lines of attack each major party is making and their direction of travel. On present trends, by 2029 Reform will be the “left wing” option and Labour will be the “right wing” option in our two-party system. Do these terms really mean anything anymore?
I have my own reservations with Reform – I would like a much more radical economic policy from them. I would like to see a party that really lent into nationalist, or even just Corbynite, arguments on banks, big businesses, free trade and the overfinancialisation of the economy. I would like to hear “nationalisation” and “reindustrialisation” a lot more. I would like to hear that Nigel wants to continue fighting “multinationals and the big merchant banks.” I would like Reform to promote an isolationist foreign policy position in defence of Britain’s national interest, rather than being content with the £12.8 billion spent on the Ukraine War and our continued involvement in that proxy war on behalf of American imperialists. Given the state of our public services, infrastructure and just about every facet of British society – I don’t think Reform should be tacitly in favour of 5 percent of GDP, an extra £80 billion, being put into military spending. Nor do I think we should be getting further involved in Middle-Eastern conflicts, something which we haven’t gained from since the Sykes-Picot Agreement. But that’s just me!
Reform UK does not get enough credit for being as broad a tent as it is. It’s open for internal dissent on a whole number of issues. It more closely resembles a National Government in waiting than it does a singular political party. With the help of brilliant figures like Zia Yusuf in prominence, Reform UK is primed for a kind of internal mass line policy pragmatism. I continue to support them irrespective of disagreements because that is the nature of the operation of a political party – you subordinate yourself as an individual to the collective will in order to achieve results. Perhaps right wing people today struggle with this premise because they have never understood the necessity of trade unions, or perhaps because they are too committed to their personal “freedom of speech”.
Primarily, my support for Reform UK is derived from my personal loyalty to, and trust in, Nigel Farage. Secondarily, it is derived from two assumptions on what would occur should Reform win a majority and Nigel Farage be made Prime Minister.
The first assumption is that in such a scenario, half of the seats in the House of Commons predominantly will have been granted to fresh faces and strangers to Westminster. That in and of itself would be an astonishing political event the likes of which this country has never seen before. I’m not really sure the current political and journalist elite can weather a moment that destabilising. All grip on the Overton window and news cycle would be lost and a whole new batch of political advisors, think tanks and journalists would gain patronage overnight. The old regime and its comfortable net of nepotism that is currently maintaining everyone’s position either disintegrates or is seriously diminished in that scenario –before any legislation has been passed.
The second assumption is that, rather than calling for another referendum on electoral reform, they would instead in 2029 run on Proportional Representation and implement it once in power. This would break up our ossified two-party system and put us more in line with the fluid, active democracies of continental Europe. It would mean concern over pressing issues such as demographic change due to mass immigration could never be sidelined again, with all views in the country granted the political representation they deserve.
For those reasons and more, I back Reform UK. It is a calculation, but it’s not as cynical as it used to be. Put simply, my gut tells me to be optimistic about the future of the country and to put my support behind the only party capable of damaging the two parties that have so thoroughly wrecked our beautiful country. We can still save it, we can still restore it, we can still give it a new era to be proud of – but Britain will never have that opportunity unless you put your support and trust in those best placed to gain power.
-
Little England: Bekonscot, Le Corbusier and the Housing Crisis
The Morris men stand, hankies aloft, in the same pose they’ve held for decades. The little girl tugs at her father’s sleeve.
“Who are they, daddy?”
Her father pauses for a moment, scratches his chin and ventures a guess.
“They’re Irish dancers.” He says, “I think.”
The girl looks confused.
“I mean, I don’t know why they’re wearing lederhosen.”
Puzzled, he contemplates the scene further. I walk on.
BEKONSCOT
In 1927 Roland Callingham’s wife, tiring of her husband’s toy railway, insisted that he take his trains outside. Callingham, a well-to-do city accountant, purchased four acres of land on the outskirts of the Buckinghamshire town of Beaconsfield and, with the assistance of his gardener, W.A. Berry, began work on a model village, complete with a high street, church and railway, each constructed at the scale of one inch to one foot. Callingham dubbed his creation ‘Bekonscot’.
Originally intended as a private diversion, Bekonscot opened to the public in 1929, and soon became a popular tourist attraction, incorporating, in time, seven model villages. Initially, Bekonscot kept pace with the changing architectural styles of the times. However, a reactionary purge in the 1990s saw most modern buildings removed and the villages returned to a thirties aesthetic. Thus, what was originally conceived as a chance to see the everyday world in miniature, is increasingly a museum of a bygone Britain. Notably, the villages’ high streets are devoid of the vape shops and Turkish barbers that lend colour to the contemporary streetscape. Today, concessions to modernity are confined to a handsome Art Deco tube station, a few authentically drab office buildings and some token Arts and Crafts houses.‘THE BEAUTIFUL’
The week before I visited Bekonscot, the government, determined to accelerate the rate of housebuilding across Britain, announced plans to build 300,000 new homes annually. Earlier in the summer, Angela Rayner announced plans to drop a requirement that new houses be ‘beautiful’, dismissing the old rules as ‘ridiculous’. ‘Beautiful’ explained Rayner ‘means nothing, really.’
For our deputy prime minister; her mind addled, like most of her generation, by postmodernism; ‘beautiful’ is a concept too subtle to be reduced to simple language, and as such, is essentially meaningless. For the modern liberal, ‘beauty’ can be filed alongside ‘female’ and ‘nation’ as terms too slippery to contain meaning.
This does not mean that the Angela Rayners of the world fail to recognise beauty (or, for that matter, ugliness) when they see it. It is rather that they have taught themselves to disregard the evidence of their eyes and dismiss all aesthetic judgments as purely subjective. But how smart must one be to understand that the average street in Salisbury, say, or Stratford-upon-Avon, is more beautiful than its equivalent in Salford or South Croydon? This is a truth that I am sure even Angela Rayner would acknowledge, if pushed.FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION
Why, among those less sophisticated than the average Labour cabinet minister, is ‘modern’ often a synonym for ‘ugly’? There is no reason why contemporary buildings should not be beautiful. Modern architects can do ‘spectacular’ well – witness London’s ‘objects’ – the statement buildings that litter the City and Docklands. But such edifices, no matter how impressive, do not belong to any regional or national tradition. The Gherkin would not look out of place in Los Angeles, say, or Lagos. Further, every ‘object’ is an experiment, and if it fails to pay off, a city must live in its shadow.
By contrast, tradition makes for attractive architecture. Ugliness is seldom worth repeating and does not endure. In aesthetics, as in politics, however, the liberal distrusts tradition, preferring theory. In our enlightened age, it is not enough for a building or artwork to be beautiful, rather it has to satisfy certain theoretical criteria. One only needs eyes to judge how a building looks. It requires an education to understand what a building means.
Only an architectural theorist of Le Corbusier’s brilliance could have built a city as inhuman as Chandigarh. By contrast, the numberless attractive villages that dot the British countryside were built, in the main, by unlettered craftsmen, men who would have found modern architectural theory incomprehensible. The vernacular architectural styles immortalised in Bekonscot evolved across centuries and were to inform the styles of suburban housing into the immediate post-war era.
The latter half of the twentieth century saw the defeat of tradition and the victory of theory, in politics, in art, and in architecture. Just as, for the political utopian, one solution (the common ownership of the means of production, for example, or the disappearance of the state and the triumph of the market) is sufficient to meet the needs of all human societies, so, for Le Corbusier, the principle of ‘form following function’ was a universal maxim. The great brutalist dreamed of a world remade in concrete and glass. Le Corbusier spoke of architecture when he maintained that ‘[In] Oslo, Moscow, Berlin, Paris, Algiers, Port Said, Rio or Buenos Aires, the solution is the same…’ but the sentiment is echoed throughout radical literature.
The Le Corbusiers of the post-war era have left Britain an uglier place. I am confident that, by the time Labour leaves office, many of Britain’s towns will be uglier still.
Britain needs new houses, of course. Would I feel the same sense of trepidation if acres of countryside were to disappear beneath dozens of (full-scale) Bekonscots? No. But, alas, the philistines hold power and are intent on despoiling our countryside with more of the soulless Legolands that litter the outskirts of our towns.
In Bekonscot, of course, it is forever 1933. Were things really better then? Life today is undoubtedly easier, but in many respects, Britain is a less pleasant place in which to live, with the cultural and economic revolutions of the post-war era having eroded social solidarity and trust. This decline finds a strange parallel in the quality of our built environment, as the reins of power passed to those less concerned with ensuring that England looked like England.
Tellingly, overseas visitors to Bekonscot seem to be having a great time. Perhaps Bekonscot looks more like the England they hoped to see than whatever they have found outside.THE LAST DANCE
This is the future we have chosen, or at least, the future that was chosen for us. We could choose another. Conservatives should reject the mistaken idea that the cultural, social (and yes architectural) changes we are living through are inexorable and unalterable.
Which brings me back to the incident with the Morris dancers.
By the late nineteenth century, Morris was all but dead. A small band of Victorian enthusiasts recognised the tradition’s value and fought to ensure it did not die. Folk dance has never been fashionable, much less ‘useful’ (I should imagine that it would be difficult to convince Angela Rayner of its value) but England would be that little bit poorer if it were to disappear.
Likewise, the antique crafts required to build cottages and cathedrals were passed down across generations and are largely lost now. We are poorer for their being lost. But they could be revived. It only requires will.
Bekonscot’s brochure describes a ‘little piece of history that is forever England.’ There is no reason why the full-size England outside of Bekonscot’s walls should not remain forever England also. Traditions are only truly lost if we stop fighting for them
-
History Module From Hell
The modern English are a deracinated people. They know nothing of their great artists, poets and writers but most importantly, they’ve been uprooted from their history. History is a socially adhesive force, binding the dead to the living and those yet unborn with the unending assault on our culture and customs over the last 60-70 years having its intended outcome – a docile mass of atomised consumers.
The modern English care nothing for Elgar’s marches or the works of Shakespeare. Instead, they prefer instantaneous access to subscription-based services like Netflix and Spotify, where they can fry what remains of their brain circuitry watching Lizzo twerking her fat arse. Ask an English teenager “Who was Admiral Nelson?” and more likely than not they’d reply with something about a Multi-Car insurance policy rather than the Battle of Trafalgar. Joking aside, our material opulence and abject lack of transcendental belief has exacerbated this totalising apathy and ignorance. Moderns only care for the evisceration of their attention spans by short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops and satiating their basest desires. The average Zoomer can’t watch a video about the war in Ukraine without a pretty Tiktok girl dancing along to it – it would demand too much of their concentration capacity. This stark reality begs the question: can Zoomers and their coming generational successors focus long enough to read about their history? The answer of course is no – so it matters what they’re taught.
Modern Curricula
Upon leaving my secondary school after my A-Levels, I had the pleasure of being in a class with a militant communist who draped our Sixth Form building with a flag of the USSR on leaving day. This same individual was successful in petitioning our school to include a module on the history of migration throughout British history a few years after leaving. This module, ‘Migrants in Britain, c800-present’, is run by the Edexcel exam board for GCSE students and it is as insidious and subversive as it sounds. The goal of the course is to present a narrative that England and Britain have always been cornucopias of ethnic diversity, that ‘migration’ has been an ever-present facet of English society, and that, just like the United States, we really are a ‘nation of immigrants’.
A brief specification outline for this module is as follows:
• c800–c1500: Migration in medieval England
o The experience and impact of migrants
o Case study: the city of York under the Vikings
• c1500–c1700: Migration in early modern England
o Case study: Sandwich and Canterbury in the 16th century, and Huguenots in 17th-century England
• c1700–c1900: Migration in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britaino Case study: Liverpool in the 19th century, and the experience of Jewish migrants in the East End of London in the late nineteenth century
• c1900–present: Migration in modern Britain
o Political changes: the creation of the BUF and the BNP; laws to restrict immigration; laws to establish equality for migrants.o Case study: Bristol in the mid-twentieth century, and the experience of Asian migrants in Leicester from 1945
o Social attitudes: the hostility of far-right groups; Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech; attacks on Jews, e.g. Battle of Cable Street, 1936, race riots in 1981 and Burnley, 2001.
To be succinct, I shall tackle two of these subsections: ‘c800–c1500: Migration in medieval England’ and ‘c1900–present: Migration in modern Britain’.
Migration in Medieval England
It’s 867AD, and Viking ‘migrants’ are peacefully integrating into the city of York; they’re skipping down the streets with Anglo-Saxon children and making daisy chains to express their gratitude at how hospitable the locals have been. Just like the immigrants of today, they undoubtedly want the best for the country they’re ‘migrating’ to and yearn for nothing more than seamless assimilation, equality and GDP growth. I am of course painting a caricature of what this module is implying, though the fact remains that the Vikings were not ‘migrants’ at all – they were invaders.
The Kingdom of Northumbria was already deeply embroiled in a civil war between two rival Kings, Ælla and Osberht when the Vikings began a raid of the city. Norse tradition holds that upon defeat the two Kings were blood-eagled and the Vikings ultimately triumphed in a battle of excessive violence. The Vikings proceeded to seize control and established the Kingdom of Jórvík centred around York. I could spend an age deliberating on the minutia of these events but the pressing issue at hand is the insidious language being woven into the modern teaching of history.
Something the right is truly awful at is effectively resisting the linguistic warfare being callously waged upon us. The merciless brutality of the Battle of York highlights the underhanded substitution of the term ‘invader’ for ‘migrant’; this surreptitious move undoubtedly has the politically motivated goal of the student not distinguishing between modern mass immigration and medieval Viking invasion. They’re dying to hear their indoctrinated students say “Immigration has always been a staple of our culture”, and hoping they question no further.
The usage of the word continues to be applied liberally throughout the module – the specification defines a migrant as “encompassing those affected by both voluntary and forced migration, temporary migrants, migrants from abroad and internal migrants within Britain”. This definition would have you believe that Alan from Gloucester, who is moving to Chippenham for a consulting job, is exactly the same as Ali, a Pakistani immigrant, travelling halfway across the world from a culturally alien society to start a grooming gang in Rotherham. I think you’d agree that the term possesses little currency if the scope of its meaning is so vast and clouded.
If one wishes to engage in semantics, the Vikings were technically ‘migrants’, but to give an inch to subversives and indeed to even entertain their lexical framing is to lose the battle entirely. The writers of this module wish to create the impression that England and Britain were always multi-ethnic societies. To be clear, England was never a multi-ethnic society – not in its conception, nor reality – it was a monoethnic society of Anglo-Saxons established by King Æthelstan in 927AD. Celtic peoples resided in northern parts of the Kingdom as well as Cornwall if you wish to be pedantic, but the meta-narrative of the nation was inextricably bounded to King Alfred and the Anglo-Saxon ethnicity.
Migration in Modern Britain
One positive of this module section is the use of the word ‘migration’ in the title – it is more congruent with the socially understood meaning of the term. The substantially larger downside is that it is packed with unabashed lies, outright deception and vindictive demonisation of the native population.
Mass migration into Britain began in June 1948 with the arrival of the HMS Windrush at Tilbury Dock and, unsurprisingly, the module writers immediately begin to deceive their confiding students. Reading this module or watching any modern documentary on the subject, you’d be presented with an allegory of noble West Indians altruistically surrendering their way of life to help unwelcoming Londoners rebuild their city after the war. This narrative is xenophilic, self-hating garbage.
The Windrush was operated by the New Zealand Shipping Company on behalf of the Ministry of Transport and it was half empty when docked in Kingston, Jamaica in April 1945. The company had the brilliant idea of selling Jamaicans cheap tickets to England to pocket a little extra cash, all the while giving the English no prior warning. The politicians at the time were taken aback by the arrival of the ship and even had to make emergency provisions for them. Accounts of the passengers on the Windrush make no mention of ever being invited to work in England. Don’t believe me? Have a read of some personal accounts from the BBC website yourself. They, like most people who emigrate, did so for what they deemed a better lifestyle and as a calculation of economic self-interest.
The weaving of this myth deliberately portrays Londoners as ungrateful and cruel as well as falsifying and obfuscating key details of the event; fanning the flames of anti-white hatred. Unfortunately, when these distortions and fabrications enter public consciousness, the symbolistic power they are imbued with can prove difficult to dispel.
The module goes on to demonise Mr Enoch Powell, possibly the most erudite politician of the 20th century. Powell lived an amazing life and achieved many outstanding feats. Powell was the youngest brigadier in the British army, became a professor of Greek at the age of 25, and spoke nine languages to name just a few of his achievements. However, the most notable characteristic about Powell didn’t end up being his encyclopaedic knowledge but his intellectual fearlessness.
On April 20th 1968, Powell gave his famous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech and the module would have you believe that Powell was motivated by unbridled hatred of immigrants rather than a love of hearth and homeland. When Powell took pleasure in speaking Urdu in Indian restaurants, when he became an expert in the country and town planning, and even when he placed value in the continuity and traditions of Britain, he was always undoubtedly guided by hatred. Contrary to mainstream perception, Powell was actually very liberal on various issues from divorce law reform to opposing capital punishment to name but two (a far cry from the crypto-fascist authoritarian picture being painted).
The simple fact is that Powell was an ethnocentric man like most other people on the planet and sought to protect his nation from what he saw as catastrophic demographic collapse. Powell’s dynamism and oratory prowess struck an emphatic chord with the people and the prescience of his observations is undeniable to anyone today.
Our ‘Educators’ and Rectifying the Problem
Gaetano Mosca, the progenitor of what came to be the school of Italian Elite Theory, came up with the idea of the ‘Political Formula’ i.e. the philosophy that justifies the rule of an elite. Our current elite’s political formula is something along the lines of: ‘diversity, tolerance and inclusion’ and holds that individual self-expression is the ultimate good, from this it would follow that collective identities are the ultimate evil due to their exclusivity. Nationalism is a form of collective identity, and collective identities exclude and alienate people by their very nature; what value does an identity hold if everyone can possess it? Not much. Nationalism and group identity are therefore a spit in the face of our elite’s political formula, specifically directed towards their sacrosanct value of inclusion.
Coupled with this political formula, our elite possesses a managerial and technocratic ethos, pursuing economic growth above anything transcendent; the notion of ‘Homo Economicus’ is ever-present. This hyper-individualistic and material mindset has a direct impact on how our elites view their own history – it tolerates no deviation, and trickles down to our teachers.
Rectifying this problem begins with assailing the current political formula and the Boomer Truth Regime we live under. The political formula of the Right should be one of hierarchy, dynamism and vitality. Life-affirming masculine narratives of our greatness should be taught to our students – national heroes like Drake, Nelson and Wellington would be mandatory course material. The endless self-flagellation we’ve been subjected to is not in the character of our people and should be thrown onto the dumpster fire as duplicitous crap. Harping on about our supposed moral shortcomings and historical wrongs is not in the best interests of our people – they need something different.
Conclusion
The insidious aims of these module planners are all unspoken of and intentionally so; incrementalism is a powerful tool – slowly boiling the frog has too often proved effective, but leftist chicanery need only be unearthed by a man willing to do the digging. Clandestine word games and their political goals become painstakingly clear when intellectually challenged and vast portions of our people yearn for well-grounded positions against them. This fact only further necessitates that the linguistic framework we find ourselves in requires a radical counteroffensive – this is of paramount importance.
People are not governed by rationality, their opinions are governed by belief, superstition, feelings and base instincts. Following this logic, a nationalistic outlook is branded into the minds of most healthy people, all that is required is a little cudgelling to get them in line with our vision. I believe the average Englishman is instinctually aware of the intellectual deconstruction of his culture but articulating it coherently is another matter.
Modern sensibilities demand that not only we English, but all European nations simply give up the exclusive nature of their identities, sacrificing them on the altar of inclusivity when no other peoples are expected to do so. Only we bear the moral responsibility of safeguarding our identity from these malicious attacks – permissiveness from others and within ourselves must not be tolerated.
-
Is Conservatism Really All About Freedom?
Giving a speech in front of a room filled with people who no doubt think of themselves as conservatives, Liz Truss talked primarily about low taxes, personal responsibility, the “freedom to choose” — and just “freedom” more broadly. She also said that she would govern as a conservative, which instead makes one wonder: is governing as a conservative really all about freedom?
For fear of being accused a “squish” who relentlessly attacks Tory leaders while defending Sir Keir Starmer at every given opportunity, I ought to say that I really like Liz Truss; she understands that the free economy is the best vehicle for delivering economic growth and lifting people out of poverty, and that is certainly important. Important too are many of the traditional liberties which we all enjoy in Britain: the right to speak one’s mind freely, to worship in the manner one prefers and to enter into contracts without excessive state interference. However, does this mean that conservatism is all about freedom and not concerned with any other values at all?
My answer — and, indeed, the answer which conservatives used to give before our movement took on the heavily libertarian tone it now projects — is no. It is liberalism, not conservatism, which sees individual liberty as the end goal of politics; it is liberalism which starts from the position that individuals are by nature free and equal and that the role of the state is to protect that natural freedom and equality.
Conservatives start from an entirely different place. Per Aristotle, they recognise that man is a social and political animal. They look at the world and see that individuals are not born free: they are duty-bound to the families, communities and nations in which they find themselves in but never consciously choose. A child, for example, can never declare himself free of his parents; if he were to neglect his parents in their old age, shouting something or other about his natural freedom, he would rightly be seen as a moral monster. Nor can a person declare himself free of his nation, at least not on a whim. It is possible to emigrate, of course, as I have done — but it is not an option to spontaneously and arbitrarily assert your freedom from any allegiance to your country during a wartime draft.
It is also not the case that individuals are born “equal”; one can never, for instance, be equal to one’s parents, even if one enjoys a warm and friendly relationship with them — because the natural hierarchy between a child and a parent, which stems from the knowledge that the child would not exist if not for the parent, can never dissipate.
Conservatives believe that these natural loyalties and hierarchies are beneficial to human beings and conducive to their flourishing; without them, human beings would wander aimlessly through life, always reaching out for the key to happiness but never quite finding it. For this reason, it is authority, law and tradition that are at the heart of conservatism — not freedom — because, without direction, there is bound to be chaos in the public sphere; without tradition, a disorder in the private sphere; and, crucially, without authority, neither law nor tradition can be preserved.
This is not to say that conservatives do not value freedom. They are dearly fond of the ordered, civilised liberty which arises amidst the stability and security provided by law and tradition. What they reject is the Rousseauian notion that “man is born free but everywhere is in chains” due to the oppressive nature of our inherited social and political institutions, recognising instead that it is these very institutions that provide us with liberty which can actually be of use to us. What good, after all, is a notional “natural” liberty if your community is filled with criminals, hooligans and louts who make it impossible for you to go about your everyday activities in peace and with a smile? And, indeed, is it really an improvement to be liberated from the constraints of your traditional religious inheritance only to end up a slave to your own appetites, depedent on pornography and “light” drugs, as so many young men currently are? I rather think not.
I hope, therefore, that Liz Truss will focus not just on protecting freedom but on defending the institutions — from the Church to limited parliamentary government — which have shaped it, because that is what conservatism is truly all about.
