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October 14, 2003
C-conundrum

Back from a meeting of C-Change, the socially libertine/Portillista think tank. Although I disagree with their world-view, they put on good meetings and are not afraid of robust challenges to which they respond with civility and good humour.


Tonight the redoubtable American economist and thinker Irwin Stelzer was sticking it into the hapless Tories in general and some of C-Change's ideas in particular. One thing he said, though, raised my eyebrows. 'The culture wars', he declared, 'are over'.

Well, there may be no sign of any battles in the intellectually strangled UK. But in the US, with its welfare-to-work, its sexual abstinence programmes, its stabilised births out of wedlock, its zero tolerance of crime and its eye watering tough love social rescue programmes run by the voluntary sector, I'd have thought a fightback was well under way.

Stelzer also raised the interesting question of why the American Republicans are able to be a broad church while their UK cousins in the Tory party spend all their time knifing each other. Maybe it's because the divisions in Republicanism just aren't so strong. Maybe the strength of the US churches, and their roots in the Republican party, has repelled the encroachment of the brutal utilitarianism of the left that has taken over much of the Conservative party and caused it to junk conservative notions of family, morality, authority and social order.

Posted by melanie at October 14, 2003

Comments

See Sean Gabb's analysis @www.seangabb.co.uk/flcomm/flc113.htm

Posted by: dave fordwych at October 14, 2003 11:39 PM

Melanie,

You are right. What the Tories have to do is send a fact finding mission to Australia to learn the secret of John Howard, the Australian conservative PM, who toppled the longstanding Labor Government upon which Tony Blair quite blatantly modelled New Labour.

The point is that "national politics" are NOT really as important as many idiots in the media think. As someone who worked in the 2001 Australian election campaign, I found out that what the Australian Tories (known for some strange reason as the "Liberal Party")have done to kepp power is to select really good local candidates. Thus, for example in one blue collar outer metropolitan seat that had been Labour for years they put up a famous local sportsman as the tory candidate. This chap can hardly put two words together on the telly, but is a tireless and effective local campaigner. He won in a landslide.
Other lessons learnt by the Australian Tories include the "adopt a marginal constiuency " scheme. Under this scheme, the party organisation in each safe tory constituency sends personnel and money to assist in the party's campaign in a marginal constituency. This scheme has helped the Tories win a great number of marginals.
The Tories in England now have the policies, they now need the organisation, and they can make striking gains from the Governement at the next election. Backbiting and fighting amongst themselves will not help. Nor will the continual concentration on the leadership issue.

Posted by: Peter at October 15, 2003 11:57 PM

Shall I teach you how to know something? Realize you know it when you know it, and realize you don't know it when you don't.

Posted by: Auto Loan at February 1, 2004 12:02 PM