Conservative leadership candidates are falling over themselves to acknowledge the mistakes of the past few years, each claiming to know exactly what is needed to put the party back on track to win the next election.
But to my eye the traumatic decline in party fortunes is all too raw and recent, and time and space are needed to regain perspective – to summon the ghosts of Christmas past and absorb the harsh lessons, rather than to double down on failures by plunging ahead with yet more electoral hemlock.
Hubris has been the Party’s nemesis. Despite achieving so many good things along the way, our leaders became fixated on fag-packet policy-making, which voters overwhelmingly rejected at the ballot box. If we should take just one leaf from Keir Starmer’s book, it is surely the emphasis on service, that government should be more about serving than governing.
At such difficult times it is surely right to return to basics – to ask ourselves what Conservatives are good for. Why is conservatism superior for the welfare of the British nation compared to socialism, right wing populism, or liberalism? What philosophy, enacted in enlightened policy, can Conservatives now offer the droves who abandoned them – not cynically, merely to buy their votes, but to regain their trust and loyalty?
I confess I don’t know the answers myself. But I know someone who did.
Roger Scruton was undoubtedly one of the greatest political thinkers of our time. He understood that Conservative government properly run is a force for good and universal prosperity. To him, core Conservative values thoughtfully translated into policy serve the public better than any others. For him, Conservatism and conservation are inseparable because both strive to conserve what is good and build upon it.
At the heart of Scruton’s philosophy was “oikophilia”, the love of the oikos, or household. He despised the environmental radicalism that depersonalises and subjugates family to a nebulous “greater good”. His intellectual conservatism sprang from Hume, Smith and Burke, but in his green iteration, as expounded in his seminal work, “Green Philosophy”, Scruton held the natural world as an indispensable public good, and hence a core priority for government.
There is a host of statisticians analysing surveys and statistics to try to read the palm of the Party to discern policies that might appease lost voters, as if that were the cure for its ills. But policy without principle is hollow, insincere, and quickly found out.
In contrast, green conservatives are not trying to please or appease anyone. We simply advocate what we profoundly know to be right. As such it is the purest form of conservatism there is, and it occupies the moral high ground, unsullied and unbowed despite the electoral carnage.
Other areas of Conservatism should therefore take careful note: green conservatism could and should become the launchpad for the renewal of the movement as a whole.
One thing I do know: that the candidate who declares that Roger Scruton will be their touchstone will take a major step towards regaining this disillusioned voter’s faith and trust.
Views expressed in this blog are those of the author, not necessarily those of the Conservative Environment Network. If you are a CEN supporter, councillor, or parliamentarian and would like to write for the CEN blog, please email your idea to info@cen.uk.com.
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