David Cameron: Family Guy?

Oh well, my two hundredth post had Blair in it, so my three hundredth might as well have Cameron in it.

Has the penny finally dropped even for David Cameron, who makes Margaret Thatcher look like she had a coherent political philosophy (and that is quite a feat)? Far from being conservative, the "free" market corrodes to nought everything that conservatives exist in order to conserve, including family life, as well as national sovereignty, agriculture, manufacturing, small business, local variation, and so much else besides.

That the Conservative Party has for so long supported the "free" market, contrary to its own history, is because it has for so long been dominated by people who are not in fact conservatives at all, but rather Liberal Unionists, Liberal Imperialists, National Liberals, and so forth, exemplified in part by Alderman Alfred Roberts (who sat as an Independent while the Liberal Party collapsed around him, never joining the Conservative Party to his dying day), and thus above all by his daughter, Margaret Thatcher.

In fact, Toryism in its Disraelian classical form has far more in common with Labourism in its classical, also very Disraelian, form than either has with this Gladstonian Liberalism. Labourism agrees wholeheartedly both with the importance of defending the conservative values and with the "free" market's self-evidently destructive effects upon them, but goes further in proposing, specifically, the universal and comprehensive Welfare State (including, for example, farm subsidies) and the strong statutory and other (including trade union) protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment, the former paid for by progressive taxation, the whole underwritten by full employment, and all these good things delivered by the partnership between a strong Parliament and strong local government. Albeit with differences as to detail, this was always been acceptable to Tories, but certainly not to Thatcher, since she she was not a Tory (i.e., a Disraelian), but a Gladstonian.

Furthermore, Gladstonians (such as Tony Blair), since they favour unregulated markets, therefore favour the use of armed force to secure this global state of affairs, which they see as necessary for the emergence and defence of democratic institutions. By contrast, we Disraelians (whether Tory or Labour) see such economic arrangements as subversive both of those institutions and of the values that, among other good things, sustain them; accordingly, we are immensely cautious about adventures abroad. The rising Chinese superpower confirms our belief that the "free" market not only subverts democratic institutions and their necessary underlying values, but prevents those institutions from developing where they do not already exist.