The British Con-servative Party

2,295 words

“Stern and unbending Toryism has never paid dividends to the Conservative Party, nor in practice when in office has the party ever taken that line.”

 — Robert Norman William Blake, The Conservative Party from Peel to Major (2011)

The Conservative Party, founded back in 1834, has held power in Britain for most of the last half-century — yet they have utterly failed to conserve anything of real value. Their electability is owed more to the party’s well-oiled constituency machinery, opportunistic political expediency and the leadership’s downright duplicity, rather than any claim to their being the torch-bearers for Edmund Burke’s philosophical legacy.

Some of the more egregious examples of their long retreat from the traditions of their forebears, recorded very eloquently in Ed West’s Small Men on The Wrong Side of History (2020), include the constant questioning of the conventional wisdom that the heterosexual family is the bedrock of a civilized society; the promulgation of same-sex marriage; the sacrifice of centuries-old custom and practice on the rainbow flag-shrouded tabernacle of multiculturalism; the negation of national pride and the elevation of internationalist corporate trade; the facilitation of large-scale immigration from incompatible cultures to ensure low labor costs for their business sponsors; and the party’s abject surrender to the “equality and diversity” agenda.

This litany of dissolution is epitomized by Margret Thatcher’s aping of Ayn Rand’s dictum that there is “no such thing as society.” In society’s place, the Thatcherite New Right wing of the party put blind faith in a concocted credo called Monetarism, laced as it was with mythic Randian philanthropic individualism and garnished with the vagaries of all-knowing and all-seeing Market. These ideological forces were originally set in motion by Jewish-American thinkers like Milton Friedman and were later adopted through the myopic lens of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) by Judaeo-British hybrids like Lord Sieff of Brimpton, Sir Alfred Sherman, Malcolm Rifkin, Keith Joseph, and Nigel Lawson. These same people founded the Centre for Policy Studies in partnership with Thatcher in 1974, then remained close to her as she deposed Ted Heath in a fractious leadership contest and became Prime Minister in 1979. Rallying to the mantra of “roll back the State,” they cut welfare programs, privatized key utilities, and sold off public housing as part of the “cult of the market.” This sugar rush delivered, along with the Falklands War, the temporary highs of the 1983 and 1987 electoral victories. The writer Robert Philpot even went as far as to name a book he wrote in 2017 Margaret ThatcherThe Honorary Jew.

Thatcherism was a far cry from the Conservatism of Peel, Salisbury or Balfour, the genteel little ‘c’ catholic conservatism of Newman’s Oxford Movement, the mystical patriotism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s belief that “people are not things,” and Thomas Carlyle’s vision of an organic society based on “honor, youth, and tradition, rather than the atomistic one based merely on the economy.”

Thatcher and her mentors consciously decided to operate in the diametric opposition to Burke’s precept of true conservatism as set out in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790): “A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.” Instead, taking advantage of the parlous state of affairs left behind by the Wilson and Callaghan old Labour administrations, Thatcherism, under the guise of fiscal responsibility, set out to plunder what remained of the economy, as well as the unforeseen boon of North Sea oil and gas, in a more subtle but no less damaging way than the Russian oligarchs were to do later in the post-Soviet Yeltsin era.

The Thatcher Revolution threw up excesses that flew in the face of the more traditionalist conservative views held by scholars like Roger Scruton, who along with Hugh Frazer, Jonathan Aitken, and John Casey, formed the Conservative Philosophy Group, edited The Salisbury Review and authored The Meaning of Conservatism (1980).

Francesco Giubilei, in his book The History of European Conservative Thought (2019), emphasizes the following regarding Scruton’s critique of the nihilistic errors of Western Civilization: “the failure to adjust immigration policies to the goal of integration, our acceptance of multiculturalism, the habit of denigrating the real national and political culture, our commitment to “Free Trade” as the World Trade Organization defines it, and our easy acceptance of the multinational corporation.”

All of the above are the direct consequence of the dash for cash, to which Thatcher fired the starting gun. This has continued ad nauseam under water-carrier Prime Ministers like Major, Cameron, and May — all of whom, like the failed leadership contenders back in the early 2000s — spuriously lay claim to the notion of being One Nation Tories. This is itself a dubious concept, having been an expression coined by the notoriously flamboyant Benjamin Disraeli while part of the Young England Movement and forming the central themes of his famous Manchester and Crystal Palace speeches of 1872.

A very interesting anecdote! Especially considering Lord Kilmuir’s dictum that loyalty was the Conservative Party’s “secret weapon.” This “loyalty” can easily be interpreted as loyalty to foreign interests, as can readily be seen in statements like that made by David Cameron while speaking to Jewish lobbyists in London in 2007: “I am a Zionist. I’m not just a good friend of Israel but I am, as you put it, good for Jews.” This came at a time when he was being financially backed by persons like Lord Steinberg, hedge fund owner Stanley Fink, the retail outlet Next’s CEO Simon Wolfson, and Carlton TV boss Michael Green. This pattern predates the rabidly pro-Israel Lord Pickles, former Chairman of the Conservative Party and a leading figure in the influential Conservative Friends of Israel Group that is said to comprise 80% of all Tory MPs. The group received congratulatory accolades from Lord Polak, as well as from Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a recent Westminster reception.

Back to the lackluster Theresa May. Here’s the fulsome praise she received upon her resignation from the Board of Deputies of British Jews, from President Marie van der Zyl, as reported in The Times of Israel on May 24, 2019:

We sincerely thank Theresa May for being a true friend to the Jewish community during her time in office. Her government has adopted the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism; marked the Balfour Centenary; banned terror organization Hezbollah; increased security funding, and opposed anti-Israel bias at the UN Human Rights Council.

We will always appreciate her friendship and support as a champion of British Jewry.

And what sort of community are we dealing with here? Is it the one that stridently pushes its own agenda, is massively overrepresented in various walks of public life, influences weak and overambitious Home Secretaries like Amber Rudd to proscribe people holding negative opinions of Jews as terrorists, and is composed of people who knew in advance of the plan to bomb the King David Hotel that killed 91 innocent British servicemen and their families in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946? Is it the same one that sheltered an Irgun commando who left a bomb comprised of 24 sticks of dynamite at the Colonial Office in London and conducted a letter bomb campaign in 1947 that came close to killing Sir Stafford Cripps and Sir Anthony Eden? A people whose Rabbis relentlessly pursue the idea of open borders for European countries while insisting upon building a wall around their own cherished homeland? Those who aid migrants across the Mediterranean while they deport refugees from Israel? Could it be the one that reminds us on a daily basis of the dangers of ethnic cleansing while removing Palestinians from their own land and adopting an illegal settlement strategy that is universally condemned by all Right-thinking people?

This community finds a natural ally and a mutually beneficial co-dependency with a Conservative Party led by Wailing-Wall attendee, Boris Johnson, and his erstwhile deputy Dominic Raab. Raab even co-authored a book in the tradition of Ayn Rand entitled Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity (2012) with neoconservative radicals like Priti Patel, Kwasi Kwarteng, Chris Skidmore, and Liz Truss. These folks coalesce all too easily with people like Jacob Rees-Mogg, Leader of the House of Commons, whose company Somerset Capital Management was recently accused of attempting to benefit from the economic downturn resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic by buying into struggling businesses whose valuations had fallen. Other friends include Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, a man intimately involved with Jewish hedge-fund billionaire, Chris Hohn, who, like David Cameron, is implicated in the off-books accounting practices on the Cayman Islands; and James Brokenshire, who served in Theresa May’s government as Communities Secretary and sacked the aforementioned Roger Scruton for simply daring to question the motives of George Soros’s anti-Viktor Orban interventions in the elections in Hungary and expressing concerns over the impact of the increasing Islamification of the West. This dismissal was warmly welcomed by Tory MP Johnny Mercer, who has himself been investigated by the Crown Prosecution Service and criticized by the Taxpayer’s Alliance over his expense claims.

The Conservative Party’s membership has fallen to around 250,000 with an average age of 60 and is increasingly in financial and ideological lockstep with groups that do not have the best interests of the native British at heart. A Tory can barely point to an indigenous English, Scottish, Welsh, or Irish representative on his front bench in Parliament. Their electoral footprint is also out-of-touch with the newly ascendant Generation Z of young graduates, ethnic minorities, and LGBT activists who would have delighted in a Corbyn-led government. The youth now look for guidance from the new Labour Party leader, Keir Starmer, who is married to Victoria Alexander and whose children are being brought up in the Jewish faith and attend Shabbat dinners.

The Conservatives’ tepid doctrine has crumbled before the omnipresent Left’s Gramsci-like Long March through the Institutions. The Tories have proved impotent in the face of, or have even collaborated with, the non-compliant Civil Service mandarins and the BBC over the EU Referenda outcome. They’ve also fumbled and lied over reducing immigration, deporting failed asylum-seekers, and ending the ridiculous debate over reparations for the supposed Windrush Scandal once and for all.

The truth, of course, is that the Conservative Party has endlessly maneuvered to undermine any attempts to establish a real patriotic movement to its own Right. This is epitomized by its sabotage of the anti-immigration and pro-Rhodesia Monday Club’s growing alliance with the National Front in the 1970s, its interference with the Club’s semi-autonomous constitution in 1982, and severing all links with it by 2001 — in effect, symbolically emasculating their own Right wing.

In some ways, this led to some of the civic nationalist elements of the Conservatives splitting away to form relatively short-lived single-issue parties — like UKIP and the Brexit Party. This fracture allowed the remaining rump of the Conservatives itself to become increasingly compliant to alien interests, utterly failing in its core duty to preserve and improve the homogenous community it claims to represent. Two of its key exponents, both unfortunately now deceased, Sir Enoch Powell and Roger Scruton, highlight that failure in their own eloquent ways.

Powell said as far back as April 20th, 1968, that the British people now “found themselves strangers in their own country. They found their wives unable to find hospitable beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighborhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated.”

Scruton attacked the current tendency towards oikophobia — the repudiation of inheritance and home — and support for supranational entities like the European Union in his brilliant A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism (2006): “The domination of our own national parliament by oikophobes is partly responsible for the assaults on our constitution, for the acceptance of subsidized immigration and for attacks on customs and institutions associated with traditional and native forms of life.”

But when will we hear the final death-rattle of this snake-like party that has just won a pyrrhic victory at the polls, its greatest electoral success since 1979? And who, in the end, will write its obituary? Mosley’s British Union, Tyndall’s National Front, Griffin’s British National Party, and Nigel Farage have all fallen short. Could the Patriotic Alternative, coming at a time of global uncertainty and a rising tide of national populism all across Europe and the USA, be the beneficiary of the wave of indignation against the corruption and moribund thinking of the comatose conservative political class? We must hope so. The illusionist’s trick of “now you see them, and now you don’t” that has been played for decades by the Conservative Party and Thatcher’s other bastard sons, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, has almost been played out. We must pray that our people can snap out of the mesmerizing torpor that has befuddled us for so long. If we do not, the next century will literally be hell on earth — a place where the wet-dream of former Guardian journalist, Martin Walker, author of the anti-nationalist text The National Front (1977) will become a reality: “I firmly believe that the human race in 5,000 or 50,000 years will be a uniform coffee-color with a pleasing tinge of yellow, and I lustfully believe in accelerating the process.”

Walker’s prognosis and timescales prove woefully inaccurate. At the current rate of immigration, it will be his grandchildren and not his great-great-great-grandchildren who will live to see Grandpa’s death wish fulfilled. And if there is no substantial turnaround in its program, the Con-servative Party will have played its full part in making such genocidal dreams come true.

If you want to support our work, please send us a donation or superchat (paid comment) by going to our Entropy page [1] and selecting “offline super chat.” Entropy allows you to donate any amount from $3 and up. All superchats will be read and commented upon in the next episode of Counter-Currents Radio, which airs every Friday.