The Two Kinds of Moderate

As a British former moderate conservative who's abandoned the party, though in truth I feel the party has abandoned me, I see a UK conservative party that has followed a very, very similar transition. Moderate conservatism has just been kicked out of the party. It's now a radical ideology captured by libertarian think tanks in American image -- and several of them funded by the US. The conservative party is now the ERG party or Way Forward party.

There is no space in the party for a Dominic Raab, Ken Clarke or Michael Heseltine, or One Nation policies -- once the bastion and bedrock of post-war conservatism, or even being in favour of a mild exit deal with the EU. Just dogmatic pursuit of blind, disproven policies for the benefit of a tiny minority such as the joke of austerity, closure and gutting of services many former Conservatives actually built and developed in former decades. For all her dogma on the Poll Tax, Thatcher could listen and understood the scientific advice, privatisation of many services that were eventually sold off were, to her, beyond the pale. She had her limits too, she did not and could not understand society, and people within it.

Thatcher's first set of ministers contained Whitelaw, Lord Carrington -- possibly the last high ranking UK politician of any party with an innate sense of ethics and standards, Heseltine, Pym, Prior and many others I forget, who wouldn't be welcome in today's party, let alone get a ministry. Plenty to bring some balance to cabinet, to moderate the extremism of the mad monk who invented Thatcherism -- Keith Joseph. Of course Joseph was the creator of one of those first extreme libertarian think tanks, the Institute of Policy Studies.

One Nation Conservatism, and moderate conservatism is dead. There's a radical party that uses the same name. They even adopted a bunch of US Republican voter suppression tactics in this election, page 48 of the manifesto. Promoting the suppression of democracy as policy aim! Gerrymandering constituency boundaries, picture ID to vote in a country that requires no ID -- knowing full well that hits the poor and minorities hardest (Who might well not be inclined to vote Tory), politicising the Judiciary. No, the Conservative party of yore no longer exists.

Before long we'll be back to buying votes.

Great example of this going around in the British press today: https://twitter.com/alexvtunzelmann/status/12103404251244584...

The small child at the top with the horn and red jacket is framed as Good, despite embarking on an illegal foxhunt at the end of which a fox will be killed with dogs. The "lawyer killing a fox with a baseball bat after it attacked his chickens" story immediately below is framed as Bad.

As the tweet says, you have to know the team loyalties for this framing to make any sense.

(The Telegraph is of course not any kind of moderate)

Eventually this ends up with a million people dead and everyone saying "well that was probably bad, maybe we should have tried to prevent that".

Just because we cannot guarantee certainty or outcomes doesn't absolve us from the moral responsibility to try.

> he first of which included an invasion by the USA after WWI

I'm not familiar with this event?

> this country under Stalin had enormous economic growth

Ironically this is the same argument used by capitalists and colonialists when they claim that a huge body count or deliberate famine was "worth it".