There was perhaps a time in the mid-1990s when few people in Britain would admit to being a Conservative with a big ‘C’, but that’s not what I’m getting at. Is there any mainstream politician in the UK today who embraces little ‘c’ conservativism?

I don’t mean what is properly called economic liberalism - support for free markets and a small government. I mean the older political position that is essentially opposition to social and political change, accompanied sometimes by the celebration of a past golden age that must be preserved or regained. American-style social conservatism (and apparently related positions such as climate change denial) seems to exemplify this outlook, but it seems almost wholly absent in Britain, where its traditional home, the Conservative Party, seems to have abandoned it.

Is it just that conservatism, without any sort of millennial expectation to serve as a foundation, is insufficently optimistic in a society so accustomed (and indeed resigned) to change? That is, we accept change as a fact of life (and often as a force for good) and we want our politicians to manage it in our best interests rather than resist it.

Or is it a deeper social transformation that has rendered conservatism unpalatable? Friedrich Hayek said conservatism

rests on the belief that in any society there are recognisably superior persons whose inherited standards and values and position ought to be protected and who should have a greater influence on public affairs than others

We have largely excised the vocabulary of natural superiority from our political and social language. Perhaps conservatism simply cannot survive if no one is willing to avow its foundational principle in public.

Either way - notwithstanding recent pro-family rhetoric - it’s hard to see it making a comeback in Britain any time soon. Perhaps the future has to become a lot scarier before we can take conservatism seriously again.

Filed under: conservatism, conservatives, ukpolitics on February 17th, 2007