A loud celebration of being right wing...

Disraeli - a great right winger!

I am a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad. I seek to preserve property and to respect order, and I equally decry the appeal to the passions of the many or the prejudices of the few. (Benjamin Disraeli)

A while back I penned a little joyful celebration of being “Tory Scum”:

For me, yelling “Tory Scum, Here We Come” is an admission once again of socialism’s defeat. There is no rational, intelligent argument in this dystopic, dehumanising creed’s favour so its advocates must resort to insult – to hurling abuse, to fear, aggression and destruction as a substitute for debate and discussion.

Socialism died in 1989 – us “Tory Scum” were proved right. And when I hear it now, I smile.

I forgot, in writing this, that there is a wider problem for the failure that is Labour – the need to condemn its enemy, anyone who disagrees with the numbing, controlling, interfering, mistrusting and uncaring “democratic socialism”. And the way this is done is – along with thinking it cool to attack people personally for believing in free markets and independence – to use the dread term “right wing”. Especially when that term can link free marketer libertarians with state-loving fascists.

The problems with this position are two-fold – firstly, it represents an act of desperation by social democrats. The term “right wing” represents (in the mind of the social democrat) all that is bad an evil – Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Pinochet, these are the incarnate representatives of what it means to right wing. And it is but a short journey from not actually supporting social democracy to building gas chambers or machine gunning children.

Secondly – and most importantly – Fascism, in whatever incarnation we chose, is not right-wing but is the bastard child of Fabian social democracy. Yes the social democracy was corrupted, forced into a marriage with militarism (rather as we see with Castro, with Ortega and with Chavez) and made to serve aggressive nationalism. But, in the end, it is socialism – the idea that the state could perfect man – that sits in the middle of fascism. No observer free from the left’s prejudice could describe National Socialism as ‘right wing’.

So let us rescue being right wing from this corrupted view of the left wing commentariat, let us set out what is really means to be right wing:

·         For the right “caring” doesn’t mean raising taxes from the relatively poor, paying them to middle class professionals who then ‘care’ for the poor. Caring is something we do personally – it is an individual act, done without looking to a nice salary and an index-linked public pension. Right wingers do not view charity as a sin

·         Right wing people seek out independence and self-reliance – our aspiration is to provide for ourselves, to care (that word again) for our families, to look out for our friends and to pay our way in the world without recourse to the support of the state

·         As right wingers we do not see the words ‘business’ and ‘enterprise’ as problematic or slippery  terms only salvageable through the appending of the word ‘social’ – these words are central of belief that, left to their own devices, people will take advantage of the market’s natural laws to better themselves and, in doing so, better society

·         Right wing people recognise the importance of place – not as something to be managed, let alone created, by the agents of government but as the mud on our boots, the soil in which we have settled and grown strong. And the right to own that place – to be able to use our property as we see fit – is essential to that understanding. Place without private property is serfdom

·         And lastly those of us on the right doubt and question the role and purpose of government. It is not simply to echo Ronald Reagan’s joke – the most frightening words in the English Language, “I from the government and I’m here to help”- but to believe that independence, enterprise and the busy-ness of hard work are driving betterment and that the state is, most of the time, a barrier to a better place, a better society and happier people

This is what is means to be right wing. It is to be celebrated not muttered secretly behind our hands in case some BBC executive or Guardian columnist hears and points the finger crying; "look they admit to being right wing, they must be stopped before terrible things happen".

And those terrible things? Ah yes – peace, freedom, democracy, self-reliance, independence and the ownership of place.

Whatever the Guardian and the BBC may say, whatever lies they made spread, never forget....

...being right wing is good, you’re helping save the world from the controlling state, you’re making it better, cleaner, wealthier and safer for everyone.

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