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.