On a few occasions I've set down to write something explaining my problems with Tim Montgomerie's 'Good Right' grouping and others who want to turn conservatism into some sort of moral crusade or worse still something 'progressive'. Some how I've never quite got to the core of the problem without then stumbling into grumbling about Fabianism or worse still Fascism.So I'm grateful to Jamie Whyte for this quotation (and the accompanying article):
Whereas moral certainty is the foundation of progressive politics, humility is the foundation of political conservatism. The institutions we have inherited, from private property to the nuclear family, are the result of centuries of adaptation to complex forces that no one can fully comprehend.
It's not simply that Tim Montgomerie's 'Good Right' automatically categorises all the rest of the right as somehow 'bad' or 'wrong', but also that the policy prescriptions give credence to an interventionist approach to personal conduct. The result is that a speech from Ruth Davidson saying that Conservatives need to be about more than good services is held up as an illustration of how the party should proceed. For me, as a born again 'soft loo paper' conservative I don't want to sign up to some sort of mission that places people into pigeonholes of rightness and wrongness, goodness and badness.
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