The Party's Over
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I hate to be a party-pooper but the issue isn’t the Downing Street party during lockdown. It’s the Conservative Party.
If the Trade Description Act applied to political parties the Conservative Party would be in breach. Let’s take the Party’s wikipedia entry as a guide to what the UK Conservative Party is supposed to stand for. “The party is generally considered to sit on the centre-right of the political spectrum, and to be ideologically conservative.”
Ideologically Conservative. Hmm. Let’s look at how that great Conservative thinker, Roger Scruton, described Conservatism. In his book, How to be a Conservative, he wrote:
“Whatever our religion and our private convictions, we are the collective inheritors of things both excellent and rare, and political life, for us, ought to have one overriding goal, which is to hold fast to those things, in order to pass them on to our children.”
So how has this been going for the current Conservative government? Lockdown was an affectation dreamt-up by tyrants. No-one of sound mind who has lived in the United Kingdom from birth to adulthood could possibly have believed that a Conservative-led government could have contemplated locking down all of our civil society in order to evade an airborne common cold derivative virus.
Just as we can remember where we were when the twin towers fell, we all remember where we were and how we felt as a supposedly ‘libertarian’ Conservative leader told us we weren’t to leave our homes. In my case, I was in denial up to the last minute that Boris Johnson would do what he did. But he did. Small business owners had their livelihood ripped from them. Families were unable to visit elderly relatives in care homes. Elderly patients were sent from hospitals to care homes to die. Children’s parks were closed. Schools were closed. Masks were imposed. Travel was curtailed or banned or made thoroughly miserable. Public debt was piled on public debt to fund government Ponsi schemes like PPE procurement or the farcical ‘test and trace’ scheme. And while all this was going on the Prime Minister and his apparatchiks were partying in the 10 Downing Street Garden.
But the party…the Conservative Party…did nothing. Yesterday various Conservative cabinet ministers (and wannabes) were clearly cajoled or encouraged to issue tweets supporting the Prime Minister. The tweets were remarkably similar. The Prime Minister has explained (not quite apologised) and we must move on, kinda thing. The impression created was of an uncaring, entitled rabble telling the public that they knew best. Zero contrition was offered.
Clearly the visceral, human response is to say, “Get out of office, you useless, heartless bunch of cretinous Communists.” But, of course, such an obvious reaction is not available to us because the alternative is much, much worse. A near consensus (Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems) has emerged that parrots the line that the “pandemic” response was necessary. That any alternative response (based on well proven and understood, erm, science and backed-up with a cost-benefit analysis) would not have provided sufficient virtue signalling opportunities for seasoned, Globalist nut-jobs.
Instead of ideology, our politics has become the interminable blandness of the moron-elite. Counter arguments, based on rationality and time-served understanding of cause and effect, have been banned, smothered or de-platformed. Our politics is the politics of anti-sense to replace common sense. Women have willies. Viruses evade us if we’re having a Scotch egg. Children spread disease even when they’re not sick. And masks make us considerate, smiles don’t.
It could have been different. I’ll let Roger Scruton have the last word.
“Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. This is especially true of the good things that come to us as collective assets: peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property and family life, in all of which we depend on the cooperation of others while having no means singlehandedly to obtain it. In respect of such things, the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation slow, laborious and dull. That is one of the lessons of the twentieth century. It is also one reason why conservatives suffer such a disadvantage when it comes to public opinion. Their position is true but boring, that of their opponents exciting but false.”