Ed is an interesting, insightful and usually perceptive writer but he has completely failed to understand that the dystopian - and entirely unprecedented and ahistorical - reaction to this virus is the antithesis of conservative. In any sense.
I don’t understand how a conservative could write this. I just do not understand.
Far from showing compassion, our leaders have - while taking control of the media in a way recognisable to a socialist state - ...
Far from showing compassion, our leaders have - while taking control of the media in a way recognisable to a socialist state - ...
...imposed measures which have had a devastating effect on lives and livelihoods; measures which are the most illiberal *and* unconservative perhaps ever to be imposed.
It is not excusable to assert that they are made out of care for others, especially as to do so accuses others of not caring, while failing to understand basic facts and data that show the the measures were ineffective.
To assert that they are made out of care for others implies that others do not care. This is not excusable without at least addressing the facts and data that show - or at least strongly suggest - the the measures were ineffective against their primary target,...
...but a public health disaster for everything else; quite apart from their effects on lives, education and livelihoods.
But, more to the point from the pen of a conservative, they have devastated the little platoons, private relationships, and great institutions that any conservative should value.
From the top:
From the top:
Parliament has been sidelined and turned into a delayed taking shop whose pathetic contributors have nothing to say about the most fundamental incursions on freedom and society ‘perhaps ever’ (Hickinbottom LJ).
The government took control of the agenda and the media through daily propaganda repeated without question by almost all the media. Conservative? Or Eastern Block.
I find this, from EW, particularly off-key. An orchestrated paean of praise for a state institution - enforced by social disapproval - that has failed its patients through discouraging checks and cancelling treatments.
The small businesses integral to our organic social networks in our town, village and even city centre communities were closed - some never to return - to the advantage of big supermarkets and multinational corporations.
And liberty *is* integral to a conservative philosophy. Burke and Smith were liberals - in the true sense - as well as conservatives. They understood that society only evolved organically and - ultimately - fairly if individuals, communities and businesses are free.
Without that freedom one doesn’t have a network of communities but a state community in which decisions are made for the ostensible benefit of all but the actual benefit of none.
All this conservatives once understood.
It is shameful, deeply shameful, that the Party of Bolingbroke and Burke, Pitt, Disraeli and Thatcher have abandoned them in favour of dystopian statism.
It is shameful, deeply shameful, that the Party of Bolingbroke and Burke, Pitt, Disraeli and Thatcher have abandoned them in favour of dystopian statism.
