Well, no. I like Dan Hannan, and we have mutual friends. That he still has the Whip proves exactly how much MEPs really matter. Then again, this time next year he will be the only Briton left in the much-proclaimed new Group at Strasbourg.
But whatever happened to the tradition that put a commitment to the National Health Service in all three manifestos in 1945? The tradition of the Tories’ refusal to dismantle it and other key reforms when they returned to office in 1951?
That was also the tradition of those Tories who opposed first Thatcherism and then Maastricht. The economically populist and pro-manufacturing, morally and socially conservative, staunchly Unionist and pro-military, strongly church-based Toryism of those redoubtable defenders of the NHS, the Wintertons. The unyieldingly constitutionalist and civil libertarian Toryism of Richard Shepherd. The Keynesian, pro-Commonwealth, anti-neoconservative Toryism of Sir Peter Tapsell. And the conservationist, agrarian, anti-nuclear Toryism of Sir Richard Body. To name but a few.
In that last vein were the grave reservations about, and indeed outright hostility towards, nuclear weapons expressed by such distinguished Tories as Anthony Head, Peter Thorneycroft, Nigel Birch, Aubrey Jones, George Jellicoe and, above all, Enoch Powell.
That, in turn, stood within the recognition that even conventional wars, while sometimes inescapable (such as when our territory is invaded – we are neither fighting nor facing any inescapable war today), are not conservative, but cost taxpayers vast sums of money, create new threats by creating new enemies and entrenching or embittering old ones, and are morally and socially disruptive. The recognition that the point of the Armed Forces is precisely to prevent wars, by deterring them. And the recognition that everything to do with the Swinging Sixties really started during the War.
And overarching all of this (yes, even in Powell’s case much of the time) were economic policies that were and are perfectly conservative, since they were and are acceptable to Gaullists, Christian Democrats, conservative Democrats and other such exemplars of patriotism, moral and social conservatism, or both.
Surely, this is where an anti-war, Obama-endorsing paleocon like Hannan belongs? Not attacking the NHS on Fox News. Not attacking the NHS at all. And not on Fox News at all, come to that.
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You agree with the Wintertons, Shepherd, Tapsell and Body, then?
ReplyDeleteNot entirely, of course.
ReplyDeleteThe Wintertons were pro-Rhodesia, and although I'd have to check, I expect that they are pro-hanging.
Tapsell voted for 90-day detention without charge.
Body was against nuclear power, supported lowering the male homosexual age of consent to 16, defended sporting tours of and from South Africa, and flirted with legalising cannabis.
And so on.
But in his autobiography, John Major calls Nick Winteron "ideologically all over the place" and Body "quirky". To him as to so many other people, broadly Old Right positions (whether the Tory Old Right or the Labour Old Right, among others) cannot merely be wrong. They have to be faintly or completely mad.