Thursday, 21 March 2019

The Right View


But notice that if you now professed the views that were the editorial policy of Margaret Thatcher's supporting newspapers (although not usually the policy of her Government) in the 1980s, then those same newspapers would demand and applaud your arrest, prosecution and imprisonment.

It is widely remarked that Labour Leaders have been moving left for years, reflecting their party's members and voters. Less noticed, but at least as important, is that the same has been true of Conservative Leaders, culminating so far in the election unopposed of a Leader whose programme was broadly that of the previous, fairly left-wing, Leader of the Labour Party.

All that the next one will have to be is more right-wing, including more pro-EU, than Jeremy Corbyn. That is all that he or she will be. And the Conservative Party's members and voters will be perfectly happy with that. 

Right-wingery, they would tell you, is a Continental or an American thing. It has nothing to do with Her Britannic Majesty's Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Tory Party, the activists and the core voters of which, even when they are the Leaders of Councils and sometimes even when they are Members of Parliament, will flatly deny that they are political at all.

If Britain wanted a major party that defined itself as part of the Right, then it would have one. Such a party enjoyed saturation coverage fora decade without ever electing more than two MPs, both of them Conservative defectors who went on to lose their seats to their former party. 

Britain does not have a major party that defines itself as part of the Right, plainly and simply because it does not want one.

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