Archive for the ‘Conservative Party’ Category
Suffolk’s leading conservative intellectual, and Reform stalwart on Dan Poulter joining Labour.
This is too funny to ignore. The chaps at Kev’s Golf Club are spluttering into their pink gins. Tomorrow’s pheasant shoot will be lively!
Esther McVey.
Tory nation : how one party took over by Samuel Earle, (2023) one of the best recent books about the Tories, “This is a parable about the Tories’ periodic bursts of reinvention never really being what they seem. Thatcher, Earle argues, essentially wanted to avenge the collectivism embraced by her immediate predecessors, and return to the small-state attitudes that had prevailed before the second world war. In the same way, the Conservative belief in Brexit is all about returning control of the UK to Britain’s old elites. “Conservatism is often pitched as the opposite of radicalism,” he says, “but radicalism is permitted – even encouraged – so long as it is in pursuit of restorative ends.”
As John Harris states, ” Tory Nation capably explains two innate Conservative traits that are beyond doubt: an unquenchable lust for power, and a deep belief in stooping to conquer.” Having an even more favourable opinion than Harris recommend the book heartly.
Yet who would have predicted the present turn of events…
Update.
Douglas Murray returns to the culture wars.
Douglas Murray’s books have been critically reviewed on this Blog a number of times.
This is the most recent one.
2022: “The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason. Douglas Murray. Review.“
“From existentialism to deconstruction, all modern thought has exhausted itself in the automatic denunciation of the West, underlining its hypocrisy, its violence and atrocities.” wrote Pascal Bruckner in 2006 (La tyrannie de la pénitence. Essai sur le masochisme occidental). In The War on the West Douglas Murray has a more dramatic target than the long-standing critic of Third Worldism and “l’auto-flagellation” of Western intellectuals. There is, he sets of his first sentences, a “cultural war” “against all the roots of of the Western tradition and against everything good that the Western tradition has produced”. The alarm sirens sound out, “There is an assault going on against everything to do with the Western world – its past present or future.”
A “grand project of deconstruction and destruction fuelled by resentment and revenge” is underway. Murray’s battlefields range from the National Trust, statues, Western Holy Places, Museums, Schools, the American centred Black Lives Matter movement, and academic and educational institutions, also centred on the USA though with some nods to domestic haunts, su
This is worth recalling:
Now he is back in the fray.
As I said after watching at the Israeli embassy the other day the unedited footage of the massacre, this is one occasion when saying that some people are worse than the Nazis is not hyperbole.
Average members of the SS and other killing units of Hitler’s were rarely proud of their average days’ work. Very few felt that shooting Jews in the back of the head all day and kicking their bodies into pits was where their own lives had meant to end up.
Many spent their evenings getting blind drunk to try to forget. Nazi commanders had to worry about staff “morale”. When the war ended, the Nazis tried to pretend that Treblinka and other death camps never existed.
Compare this with the behaviour of Hamas on October 7.
Tendance Coatesy 