That today’s Conservative party, as led and personified by Dave, has nothing to do with conservatism hardly needs any further proof. Yet Dave has kindly provided it.
Just look at the post-election developments that have already happened, and consider some that are bound to happen.
First, the cabinet reshuffle. Dave and his house-trained media are proudly bellowing all over the country that a third of the cabinet are now women. Yet to any conservative this is neither good nor bad – it ought to be irrelevant.
We ought to be governed by those best qualified to do so, regardless of any other characteristics. The brouhaha about the sex of our cabinet ministers shows that Dave et al have fully bought into the destructive agenda of the New Age.
For one thing, this sort of thing is demeaning to such cabinet members as Theresa May, who would be sufficiently qualified even if born with a different chromosome mix. And should Sajid Javid, an eminently accomplished young man, think he got promoted as a sop to a different branch of New Age philosophy? What about Robert Halfon who, as a crippled Jew, ticks two boxes?
The most important thing, however, is that those triumphant dispatches spell yet another obituary to parliamentary conservatism. As does Dave’s restated commitment to replacing the EU Human Rights Act with our own Bill of Rights.
Ditching the former is an idea long overdue – Britain has nothing to learn about human rights from Strasbourg or Brussels. But it’s important not only to do the right thing, but also to do it for the right reasons. For example, respect for our history, sovereignty and constitutional tradition is a good reason for wishing to leave the EU. Hating foreigners is not.
A new Bill of Rights would be only marginally less subversive than the Human Rights Act. It’s a way of saying to the EU not to bother about destroying our constitutional tradition. We can do the job ourselves.
We certainly don’t need another Bill of Rights, considering we already had one in 1689. Actually, we didn’t need that Lockean concoction either, but that’s a different story. What matters is that Dave’s legal thought seems to be anchored to a system of positive law prevalent on the continent.
Our common, precedent-based law doesn’t need to be codified in a single document: it comes not from a state diktat but from experience lovingly gathered and extensively tested over generations.
If Dave is unaware of this, it’s most unfortunate. But if he knows what’s what but talks about bills of rights regardless, it’s much worse. He has accepted the language, and therefore the thought, of those whose legal tradition isn’t only different from ours but is diametrically opposite to it.
The French, for example, even those supposedly on the right of the political spectrum, have unconditional étatism (of which positive law is part and parcel) as part of their DNA. Even those who have nothing but contempt for fascism, would find little wrong with Mussolini’s slogan “all within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”.
This adulation of the central state is remarkably different from the politics based on devolving power to the lowest sensible level, and ultimately to the individual. The French and other continentals mistakenly ascribe this, to them, quaint practice to les Anglo-Saxons, whereas in fact it springs from the political, originally theological, tradition of Chirstendom.
Even cursory familiarity with European history will show that a culture emanating from the central state isn’t conducive to political stability. We’ve had roughly the same system of government since 1688 (fundamentally, much longer), and I won’t bother you with enumerating the different political systems the French and the Germans have had in the same period. If I tried to do so, I’d quickly run out of fingers on both hands and toes on both feet.
Even though I doubt that Dave understands such things fully, he is clearly a European federalist at heart, which is why he’s desperate to codify – and thereby contradict – millennia-old English laws in a written document.
His approach to the EU referendum comes from the same source. The very promise to hold this plebiscite was wrought out of Dave by the rise of Ukip, which he saw as a threat to his political survival.
Dave never made any secret of his intent to campaign for the IN vote, provided he could extract some mythical concessions from Brussels. He and his ilk pretend not to realise that the EU is a totalitarian setup and, as such, will only ever offer temporary and meaningless concessions if Brexit looks likely otherwise.
Once those crumbs off the Brussels table have been thrown in our direction, Dave feels that the combined weight of our own and EU propaganda will swing the vote his way, burying British sovereignty for any foreseeable future.
Now he has let it be known that he plans to hold the referendum even earlier than the promised date of late 2017. Why such sudden haste?
The educated guess is that Dave wants to exploit the euphoria that supposedly followed his electoral victory. As one of our dailies put it, he can now take the Tory party anywhere he wants. And since he wants to take it to the IN vote in the referendum, his erstwhile adversaries on the left will joyously march in step.
This election has shown that a broad constituency for real conservatism doesn’t exist in Britain, and now Dave is demonstrating that neither does a major party with a taste for it. Let’s just hope that Ukip will come back with a vengeance and – this time – a coherent conservative programme. And enough firepower to affect the consensus.