The Con of "One Nation" Conservatism

It's ironic that so-called One Nation conservatism was actually responsible for the grievous fractures and fault lines that now exist in our formerly homogeneous culture. It is the enemy of all true conservatives, the cuckoo that ousted us from our own nest and even stole our name (nowadays we have to get used to being dismissed as alt-right or at best swivel-eyed loons mired in nostalgia for a vanished or never-existing past).

One Nation conservatism has its intellectual roots in a certain bogus strain of conservatism which:

1) seems to attribute a value to institutions simply because they exist, and without regard to how they came into being, how well they perform their functions, or whether their supposed "functions" are actually socially necessarily or desirable;

2) seems to accept change as inevitable, but not as something that conservatives themselves should initiate or sponsor (although they should remain completely free to jump on the bandwagon once somebody else has dictated the direction of change); and

3) seems to boil down to little more than political opportunism, unencumbered by "dogma" (or what ordinary people call principles), whose raison d'être is gaining and retaining political power and the enjoyment of its perks and perquisites.

This kind of conservatism is bankrupt in modern politics. There is certainly a case for resisting radical change to institutions that have evolved organically and piecemeal over a long period of time (our language and culture, our traditional built environment and countryside, our demographics), and which perform their functions largely successfully, but the trouble is that there are few areas untouched by the frenzy of half-baked meddling legislation from the post-war period to date, and that to claim that institutions created by this flawed and haphazard process are somehow worthy of preservation simply by virtue of their lazy acceptance by the New Establishment is nonsense.

But such bogus conservatism, except for the brief interlude of the Thatcher years (which were themselves more about economic liberalism than conservatism), has dominated the post-War Conservative Party, and the fruits of its lazy opportunism, and its cringing to political correctness and cultural relativism, can be found in the catastrophe of multiculturalism, which is nothing less than a concerted effort to abolish Britain and any meaningful concept of what it means to be British.

At some point in the Cameron years the "British values" championed by the Conservative Party ceased to be about the traditional combination of faith, flag, family and freedom, and became, by diktat of the Party Establishment, equality, diversity and "tolerance" (where the latter is selectively applied so as to be inimical to the freedom of the majority). And at stroke, traditional conservatives found themselves disenfranchised, irrelevant, without a voice, and increasingly anathematised and marginalised by the Party Establishment. But all this was the perfectly logical result of multiculturalism and its sister concept of political correctness, which must destroy our authentic cultural heritage in order to supplant it with its own version of cultural relativism and the false values - equality, diversity and "tolerance" - that sustain it.

It is this state of affairs that the so-called One Nation Tories, with their support for post-War mass immigration, have brought about. But what is the "nation" to which they would have us pledge our allegiance? It seems to be an amorphous entity, drained of the concrete values of our true national identity, cultural heritage, customs and way of life; an empty shell, sustained only by a few hollow abstractions, in which migrant minorities can nurture their separate and dysfunctional ghettos.

The idea that "Britishness" is about cultural identity, not accidental place of residence, is now taboo. Even the idea of a separate White British or English cultural identity as one among many cannot be allowed to stand. It's simply no longer available to us. Our culture must be that of the cosmopolitan and metropolitan elites who preach and dictate to us, and we and our benighted values must stand in the same relation to them as Neanderthal to Homo Sapiens. Guilt, not pride, is the only permissible attitude to our national and cultural heritage. It seems that cultural relativism only extends so far.

So what should be the response of traditional conservatives to One Nation (or No Nation) conservatism? We are sometimes apt to forget that Burke, a figure sometimes associated exclusively with piecemeal compromise and gradualism, was a fierce counter-revolutionary, whose opposition to the French Revolution was relentless and uncompromising. Today's conservatives should not be afraid to show the same fighting spirit. Change is inevitable, and often desirable; but conservatives shouldn't be afraid to oppose undesirable change, or to advocate the reversal of harmful innovations, simply because they are fashionable in New Establishment circles. Conservatives who abdicate responsibility for initiating and driving radical change of their own (like the pre-Thatcher post-war Tories or the neo-Blairite Tory "modernisers") lose control of the political agenda, and lose sight of the institutions and values which it ought to be goal of every conservative to preserve. There's more to politics than the unprincipled pursuit political power. And there is more to conservatism than the counterfeit "One Nation" variety.

Know thy Enemy: the New Clerisy

Our antagonist is our helper. This amicable conflict with difficulty obliges us to an intimate acquaintance with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial. 

Edmund Burke

The twin pillars of the Liberal-Left Establishment are propaganda and censorship: the lies to which we must assent and the truth that we must not speak. They fear an agenda they do not control. They shun a debate they fear they will lose.

But the Liberal-Left love to preen themselves on their supposed intellectual superiority. They revel in paradoxes and shun common sense. They think it makes them enlightened and profound, the intrepid seekers of counterintuitive answers to questions that have confounded inferior minds, mired in the pedestrian and conventional. But it's really just symptomatic of the fact that they're ready to believe anything that fits their agenda. They hate simple (and obvious) solutions to "complex" problems, equating "simple" with "easy" when simple solutions are often the most arduous and demanding. That's why they love to equivocate and prevaricate, manufacturing easy and comforting reasons why the common sense solution won't work, and why the convoluted and factitious obfuscations they favour will.

The Liberal-Left are driven by paranoia and a self-dramatising sense of martyrdom and victimhood. They love to indulge in hysterical masochistic fantasies of oppression by the Right in media products like the Handmaiden’s Tale or Bushwick, but the reality is they’ve been the oppressors for decades.

Control is their objective, loss of it their nightmare. Hence the panic of Liberal-Left big tech as they realise they no longer dictate or control the political agenda on social media. The rush to censorship is a testimony to their loss of nerve.

The Liberal-Left Establishment control education, particularly higher education. The purpose of a modern university is the continuous replication of a would-be Liberal-Left clerisy in its own self-image, each member warranted to parrot reliably uniform PC views, a class of self-identifying “thinking people” who’ve been told what “thinking people” should think. Anyone who questions this indoctrination flunks the course. And anyone who fails to conform to type is ostracised, excluded, censored or de-platformed.

Profound hypocrisy lies at the heart of the Liberal-Left mindset, to which a twisted sense of self-hatred and a misplaced guilt complex are fundamental. But despite the handwringing, their contrition is insincere because they are determined that the rest of us should be made to suffer for their self-indulgent guilt trip. As the new clerisy, they get to superintend the ritual self-flagellation of our society without partaking of it themselves. Ours are the burdens and the sacrifice, the groans and the lamentations, theirs the wild ecstatic dithyrambs of atonement and redemption, the intoxicating thrill of phoney moral edification.

Equality and diversity are the gospel of the new clerisy - except, of course, when they might backfire on their own privileged position. That's why they love to pose as enlightened social arbiters, the liberators of the oppressed, and the champions of the downtrodden. Affirmative action seldom seems to weaken the stranglehold of wealthy, well-connected Liberal-Lefties on positions of power or prestige, but it's always the indignant stock response to the rest of us when we complain about having to pay more for a worse service, or for the dubious privilege of making it harder for our children to get good jobs or university places.

The new clerisy are the high priests and prophets of political correctness, or the imperative to ignore, skirt around, downplay, suppress or deny an obvious truth, and to call for sanctions against those who refuse (or simply forget) to do so, because it’s “offensive” to an officially privileged minority. But for all the self-righteous lip-service to equality, political correctness is an esoteric doctrine, designed to confer phoney moral superiority on a self-regarding elite, and anathema and degradation on the (non-minority) plebs. Confecting charges of racism has become a sinister parlour game played risk-free by self-important Liberal-Lefties with the stakes of the livelihoods, liberty and reputations of ordinary people.

This game becomes more sinister still when played in the politics of our public institutions. As Roger Scruton says:

"… political correctness causes people not merely to disguise their beliefs but to refuse to act on them, to accuse others who confess to them, and in general to go along with policies that have been forced on the British people by minority groups of activists."

The ubiquity of the corrupting culture of political correctness explains the systematic cover-up, collusion and active conspiracy of the professionals and public officials who should have exercised a duty of care and served the public interest over Muslim grooming and other scandals. And it's also why the same bureaucrats, whose negligence and perversity made these scandals possible, have been allowed to reinvent themselves as the solution to the problem they created and why virtually nobody has been, or ever will be, held to account for their egregious failure.

But like it or not, the Liberal-Left Establishment are our political masters and political correctness is the official state dogma. When one contrasts the energy, quiet efficiency, continuity and unity of purpose through changes in government with which the Establishment prosecutes its woke agendas with its apparent impotence to deliver anything we voted for, one starts to take conspiracy theories seriously.

But as Roger Scruton says, conservatives are united by a love for and a desire to protect those very things - our culture, our country, our countryside, the family, the truth - that the Liberal-Left hate and wish to subvert, corrupt or destroy. And it is upon the sure foundation of this common bond that we must build our resistance to the tyranny of the New Establishment.