Roger Helmer: A special type of stupid

Roger Helmer MEP for the East Midlands region asked on his twitter feed today:

Why is it OK for a surgeon to perform a sex-change operation, but not OK for a psychiatrist to try to “turn” a consenting homosexual?

At first the question seems stupid – what’s the connection between homosexuality and gender reassignment? Isn’t this blatant homophobia? As David Allen Green has put it, has Helmer not confused “the distinct issues of gender identity and sexual preference”?

Then you read it again.

It’s still stupid.

For a longer discussion on the issue read Heresy Corner, I’m going to keep this brief. Gender reassignment is, as it is well known, the process of altering the sexual characteristics of an individual. That means a therapeutic measure of hormone replacement, replacement of organs, and other secondary sexual characteristics that aren’t reproductive organs (such as facial hair or breasts). As far as is physically possible an individual reflects the gender they have been reassinged to – nowhere in the surgery is there any attempt to mentally reassign a person, to make him/her feel like a man/woman (perhaps because there is no such feeling at all).

The notion that Helmer is comparing this with is the attempt to change, not a set of physical characteristics, but the complex psychosexual structure of an individual, which is far trickier in many ways to reassign, some would say impossible.

I’m of this latter opinion; you can’t try and “turn” a consenting homosexual, you can only try and make a person forget he or she is homosexual, or do things contrary to his or her sexuality (like be attracted to, or enjoy sexual practices with, a person from the opposite sex). And it ought not to be available by national health services like gender reassignment is. However if you want a homophobe to rub you with salts and tell you that you’re really attracted to people of the opposite sex, and that homosexuality is a myth or a lie one tells themselves, then what people get up to in their spare time is up to them – like with homeopathy it will be incumbent upon sane people to promote the truth of such ridiculous practices.,

Once again therefore, Helmer is way off the mark.We can add this to the list of other gaffes and witless opinions such as:

• Homophobia doesn’t exist

• Beating “dumb” cubs over the head was “humane” and that they deserved to die because they were “guilty” of eating too many fish.

• Green climate policies are probably unnecessary

1,2,3,4 everybody…

The working men’s club and the age of austerity

Dr Ruth Cherrington works in the department of translation and comparative studies at Warwick University where her research focus is identity and representation in multicultural society. A few years ago she was the subject of much interest for research she had carried out on the rise and decline of working men’s clubs.

Image courtesy of the wesbite for Bishop’s Stortford and Thorley – A history [http://www.stortfordhistory.co.uk/

The subject for Cherrington has personal significance; she grew up near a working men’s club which she described as being her second living room. Since then she has noticed the gap which the demise of those institutions have created in society.

As homage to this dying institution she set up the club historians website in May of 2008 which provides a detailed history of the club, and gives people the opportunity to share photographs and memories of their times.

Cherrington reminds us in her history that the clubs came to prominence in the nineteenth century as a means to fill a gap; there wasn’t a lot for people to do other than work. Options to go to the pub, watch music and other leisure activities were usually very expensive, rather somewhere was needed that people could call their own, and not simply lined the pockets of landlords.

Cherrington is open about the problems posed by the working men’s club. The name itself suggests there may be problems of exclusion. Throughout the twentieth century the club was seen as somewhere largely dominated by white males, which suggested a strict exclusivity.

That there had been limited or no female membership in the nineteenth century had not been a point of contention; women enjoyed limited rights as it was and people’s attitudes in the men’s clubs – as can be imagined – were not perturbed by this.

Even by the middle to late twentieth century when women enjoyed more political rights the clubs were still very slow to adapt to a changing societal picture, and even though it was not unheard of to have female members, the exclusiveness was certainly a barrier that needed to be reconsidered.

The same must also be said about multicultural society. The national executive insisted that they could and would not tell individual clubs what to do or who to admit as members, but after the 1970s when anti-discriminatory laws were introduced, and society as a whole changed vastly, so too did the face of the clubs.

One of the more attractive elements of the club had been the so-called “club scene” and the “free-and-easy” nights, which were open microphone sessions for budding musicians and entertainment acts to try their luck among a listening, but generally not an easy audience. It has been said that the audiences of the free-and-easy’s did not suffer fools gladly.

Another overlooked part of the club, which Cherrington is very keen to point out, is the community activity and charity attachment. Cherrington makes note of the notion that charity begins at home, a sentiment embedded into Victorian values, which working men’s clubs utilised and reappropriated as charity beginning in our clubs – in what Cherrington calls acts of “mutual self-help”.

Examples of which can be seen by looking at work achieved by the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union (WMCIU). An example of their work was to set up convalescence homes, some time before the creation of the welfare state, which afforded men who may have been recovering from surgery or couldn’t afford to go on holiday, to stay for a week or two by the seaside funded through their subscription.

The clubs were once the hub of local charities who donated good sums of money for special schooling or operations for children where they were not available on the NHS. Cherrington recalls there always being someone passing by in the clubs requesting money for a local charity, alongside someone else selling bingo tickets.

What is worrying about the wide demise of the club is the question of what it will be replaced with, and never has that been a more relevant question. The severe package of cuts has hit community activity rather hard, local sporting centres are either being drowned by expensive private gyms or costs are increasing to keep the centres open at all. Modestly priced places for families to congregate and socialise with friends are all but gone and institutions that bring whole communities together are slow to gain traction – which, I imagine, has a lot to do with how time consuming it is, and how little time people have.

Cherrington sees the closure of Coventry working men’s club – the oldest one of its kind – as a symbol of a dying institution with nothing in its place. She praises charities such as Age Concern and Help the Aged, but notes that with an ageing population these organisations are pushed to bursting point, and are unable to resource for all who need its services. The problem of elderly social mobility, amid the demise of clubs and bingo halls, reduces many elderly people to experience their twilight years secluded and without the social purpose they once enjoyed.

Furthermore, little is available to reconcile the young and the old. In comparison to many countries, there is a noticeable conflict between youth and their elders that really wasn’t apparent in communities brought together by institutions such as the working men’s clubs. The absence of community cohesion is fairly recent and few inspirational ideas have emerged from think tanks and government departments on how to restore it – particularly between the generations.

I’m sure many would have you believe institutions such as the clubs are redundant in today’s society, and closures are not a product of community cohesion in decline, but of people finding different ways in which to entertain themselves. But I’d dismiss that. However my concern about the way in which many of the cuts have been organised, and our rapid descending into mass joblessness and increasing poverty, is that something like the club will be a necessity and not something to fill the hours with at night and at the weekend – and yet such institutions will be absent.

Many commentators and critics are starting to get the impression that what was meant by “cutting waste in public spending to reduce the deficit” was actually a means to, as the saying goes, “starve the beast” that is to say reduce the budget through cuts and breaks which subsequently weakens the role of the state and the social welfare programmes it funds, thereby appearing to strengthen the argument that cuts are necessary and private institutions do things better.

The club, for all its problems concerning who became members and who it excluded, promoted an ideal of “mutual self help” where in society such help had not yet been institutionally founded. We may return to a state where mutual self help is the only alternative – and despite its altruistic good, should not be relied upon since the function of the state, for any decent person, should be to ensure the inalienable right of citizens to welfare.

The return of the club should only be to restore communities and families, the element of the club which preceded the welfare state should be guaranteed by the state alone – since this is its primary function – and this current government is almost certainly trying to creep away from serving its primary function.

Academies will not bring a new culture of independence to schools

The founding rule for academies from day one was that they would enjoy “Greater freedom and independence”.

Academies will no longer be a way of saving failing schools unlike in the Blair days, but for schools keen to show their excellence.

In addition to the “system-wide reductions in bureaucracy”, as it was put by Michael Gove, echoed by many others in the Con Lib coalition, the Academies Bill will ensure schools enjoy:

• freedom from local authority control
• the ability to set their own pay and conditions for staff
• freedom from following the National Curriculum
• greater control of their budget
• greater opportunities for formal collaboration with other public and private organisations
• freedom to change the length of terms and school days
• freedom to spend the money the local authority currently spends on their behalf.

That word again: freedom.

But we’re still unsure by the word freedom, as we are with independence. Forgive my peculiar desire for word play, but is this freedom to or freedom from?

There is a difference; freedom to involves carrying out the above from the school setting itself, creating what the kids are learning, being very creative, turning a blind eye to others because this is the me revolution, and I’m demonstrating the reason why I’m running this joint. Freedom from, however, simply designates a loss, and demands the filling of that loss.

This latter example, I imagine, is the type freedom employed when we look at the new Academies.

My educated guess is that many business-minded people who know a thing or two about the education system (or, indeed more likely, know how to employ – perhaps through unpaid internships – people who know about the education system; recent graduates for example) will be rubbing their hands together devising plans on how to capitalise in on that initial feeling of abandonment school leaders and headteachers will feel on the advent of their schools being granted academy status.

Consultancy is a business model that will thrive even in times of economic hardship and budget squeezes. Cambridge Education, for example, is an educational consultancy that a local authority can outsource the running of a school to, like which can be seen – in a way that  has dubiousness written all over it – in this insightful article written by Respublica researcher Sandra Gruesco.

But something even more strategic than consultancy is emerging in the business world; that of so-called intelligent services. In brief, this is a type of service that an organisation can buy into or become a member of as a way of gathering information necessary for the success of the service they provide.

It’s not consultancy, since this will often require one to one activity with an individual offering advice and expertise. Rather, the intelligent service provides best practice examples, stores them up on a database in the form of an article, for example, and makes the database public for a fee.

Such a service was once provided by the local authority, and is currently a service offered by trade unions in addition to legal advice. But a void has been allowed for enterprise to fill that gap, creating the potential for curriculum to be varied and part of the market place; competition perhaps for Avail – who run the Consultancy for Schools programme as delivered for the Department for Education (DfE) by a unique team of education and programme management experts.

Academies themselves are not without their own network organisations. United Learning Trust is one example of an Academy Trust Network, and is largest single sponsor of academies in the UK with 17 academies currently open.

A person who I spoke to recently – an assistant head for an Academy school within the ULT network – spoke not about the dawn of a new culture for schools, reinventing the wheel and loving it, but rather the assurance of the school that information will still be available to them from the network.

This kind of attitude might explain away Gove’s recent embarrassment when it was revealed the disparity between schools that wanted to become Academies and those who simply “expressed an interest” – which you would have to do in order to receive information about what Academy status would mean for the school you work in.

Schools are naturally places that want to feel aligned to something; be that other schools through the state or within networks. This is the preferred method; academies will only gain popular appeal if other schools in the local area are doing it, because schools won’t bring on their own abandonment themselves.

The culture of freedom in creating curriculum would be far more impressive, were it not for the fact that this will not happen. What critics may have once called top-down curriculum creation from the state will simply move houses to these largely unaccountable trusts, charities, or worse, impatient consultants or idealistic entrepreneurs.

For all his talk, Gove’s moves will not create a new culture of freedom and independence. It will move the dependence elsewhere, and those places could potentially be unaccountable pits set up solely for profit creation – now given new legitimacy by the abandoning state. But hey, that’s the big society.

Big society and Thatcher revised

Big society is characterised only by what it is not; that being “top-down, top-heavy, controlling” government.

There are plans to give people more say in how local money is spent, but guarantee that you will be listened to will probably be as likely as it is now.

You can get a group of people to lobby this or that and you have every bit of chance to be heard; big society might just be a name to this, but the option to gather a group of people to either demand spending on a school, to stop the closure of a post office, or oppose the building of nuclear generator outside your house exists today.

Is it possible that what was meant to be a rejection of Thatcher’s famous comment that there is no society is a return by other means; since big society is empty and vacuous and is predicated in the negative (that is, by what it is not and not what it is) perhaps there is no such thing as big society.

David Cameron insists that big society will be something like the following:

a broad agenda of decentralising power, expanding the voluntary sector and encouraging people to take more responsibility for their lives and neighbourhood.

I’ll say it’s broad: state cut back, working for free and “responsibility” – a word used as if created anew. But it has been uttered before of course.

Margaret Thatcher, in that speech, which big society is supposedly a rejection of, said:

There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.

Exactly the same; a game of guesses and fingers crossed that better off people will help the lesser off under the guise of self-responsibility; in other words Victorian philanthropy.

Opposing cuts: the need for strategy

Sunny Hundal today talks about the need for a strategic approach to opposing the cuts agenda, one that isn’t simply preaching to the converted, or the left talking among themselves.

I rather agree. So I put forward my own suggestions.

First of all we have to ask whether the cuts programme is fair and necessary. Answers to both I feel are no, and are backed up by fantastic polemics laid out by compass and Nick Isles on, among other things, the real nature of “capital flight”.

Second of all we must ask is opposition to the way in which the cuts programme has been meted out a solely left wing issue. The answer of which is: no of course not; this isn’t merely political tennis, these are issues affecting the lives of people who perhaps have no interest in political factions.

Third: should we allow the “usual suspects” of the left wing, trade union activists and leftist fringe parties for example, to voice their opinion, and to help appeal to a popular audience by engaging in a left narrative? Definitely, though if we are to make it a popular narrative, not simply a left wing one, appealing those people assumed in my second point, it cannot be too dogmatic, which is why I both share Sunny’s concern about certain trade union plans, but hope also that trade unions will work to counter the cuts agenda.

Fourth and last: Can we expect to build a movement that has one commonality – that of an anti-cuts agenda? Not necessarily, and this is neither doomy nor impossible, but a movement cannot be predicated on what it is not alone, it has to assert ideas into how it will produce, not simply counteract. This will be tricky (and always has been for the left since the peasants revolt, to the Spanish civil War through to opposition over the Iraq war) without having a narrative and will require some thinking.

Providing that the movement is not too evangelicising to begin with, it will not simply preach to the converted, it will ask questions as to why the agenda for cuts has been carried out so disproportionately for working and struggling middle class families. It will be a popular movement, but it will have a left wing backbone too, and though this latter point should not be forgotten, it ought to be remembered throughout how off-putting it can be if the politics sounds too preachy.

Andrew Lansley, the milk rapparee

The Milk snatching is back.

Mehdi Hasan has it like this:

But earlier this morning, Downing Street beat a hasty retreat from the suggestion in a letter from a junior health minister that a UK-wide scheme offering free milk for under-fives could be scrapped as part of the coalition’s ongoing and draconian drive to make immediate spending cuts.

But the catchphrase for Lansley will be harder due to the fact Lansley hardly rhymes with anything.

So I have gone with the following: Andrew Lansley, the milk rapparee – that’s a keeper that is!

n.

1. A freebooting soldier of 17th-century Ireland.
2. A bandit or robber.

[Irish Gaelic rapaire, variant of ropaire, cutpurse, from ropaid, he stabs.]

Some historians see the rapparees as an Irish version of the “social bandit” described by the historian Eric Hobsbawm—who is an outlaw but not regarded as a criminal by his own community.

Michael Gove, Burke and Empire

Change is a term supposedly linked to progressive politics now, but only inasmuch as both words have been so far diluted as to be palatable for all angles of political shooting.

To be progressive, regardless of what we can read of its literal meaning, was always synonymous with enlightened politics, as opposed to retreat, back into a politically Victorian-like nightmare. The term was always loose, but now even further so, particularly in the dawn of such oddities as progressive conservatism.

It takes a brave leftist to admit that the word progressive can only justifiably be used in opposition to ‘right wing’ if one considers the sum of the right wing to be reactionary, which, sadly, we haven’t got the privilege of believing anymore, stricto sensu. The fact that we have to admit there are conservatives who are a part of enlightenment politics, says more about what enlightenment politics is, or rather is not, which is the solution to all our problems.

Enlightenment politics is, in short and simplified, the realisation of human liberty, but this is not enough in itself. Problems as important as how one should infer policing inside that liberty, how one ought to govern that liberty, and opinions on who one thinks should enjoy that liberty, which wakes us up from any such delusion that with enlightenment thinking follows political convergence.

Establishing what really counts as progressive, even if it means waking up to the fact that in this pack includes conservatives (who are gay now, keen on fair trade products, environmentally active, chuggers and chuggees, vegetarian, tolerant of Sarah Teather etc) and liberals alike, should make it a lot easier to identify who is lagging behind.

One modern day politician who is lagging behind on this front is Michael Gove MP, the secretary of state in the new department of education.

During the 2008 Conservative Party conference Gove called Edmund Burke the greatest Tory ever, and there are reasons today to suspect that this Burkian backbone will follow Gove as he makes his radical changes to the educational system.

Edmund Burke is in many ways a revolutionary figure; supporter of the American revolution, led a faction of old Whigs, conservative in colour, against the Whigs of new, clumsily laying down their support for the Jacobins in France, was and still is admired as much on the conservative right as he is by those within the classical liberal tradition. Before Disraeli’s finest years – poster boy for the new red, green and compassionate Tories – Burke was the original liberal conservative.

Burke, in his heyday, argued in favour of a free market in corn during a parliamentary debate on the prohibition on the export of grain on 16 November 1770, arguing not for tariffs but for the natural price “which grain brings at an universal market.”His insistence of the organic society, bestowed upon us by God, stemmed from the freedom of the market from tariff and regulation. God, for Burke, made the free market just.

This didn’t please everyone of course. Marx said of Burke, in Das Kapital: “No wonder that, true to the laws of God and Nature, he always sold himself in the best market.”

You can hear echoes of Burke’s market utopia in some of today’s laissez-faire thinkers, such as Dr Eammon Butler, director of the Adam Smith Institute, who, in his response to the financial services authority in 2009, said that:

“Financial institutions were, and remain, completely bound by regulations … Adding more checklists or employing more regulators would not have prevented the crisis … the FSA should be scaled back to what it can actually achieve, and more weight given to existing market-restraint structures, such as the Financial Reporting Council, and the Accounting Standards Board, and non-executive directors”.

The banking crash was not due to light touch regulation, the fetish of consumer debt by the City or even a supposedly left-wing government gagged and consumed by the filthy rich and their scrag ends lining the pockets of zealous minsters in the era of the have and the have yachts, of course it was due to too much regulation, suffocating the organic market, and thus crucifying God with forms and procedures.

For Butler, as for Burke, the invisible hand is being severed like that of a petite thief in down town Riyadh. But what Marx picked up in the quote above is that market utopia in curbing regulation and tariff is a dangerous delusion; the market is always manipulated, and comparisons of its freedom with some Rousseauian wet dream is a categorical error.

But in spite of this Michael Gove constructs the image of the perfect Tory in Burke – well, if he insists.

Gove recently told reporters that, as a conservative, he has no ideological objection to firms making a profit in children’s education. Now this might be fair enough. It doesn’t take a philosophy king’s command of logic to recognise that it doesn’t necessarily follow that profit-making providers equates a bankrupt education system – it takes an honest leftist to admit this. But the pursuit of profit, and the privatisation of teachers – a tool in Gove’s box – won’t necessarily improve the provision of education either. It would seem that if this is part of Gove’s free-school approach, where providers backed with private financiers compete against parents to manage schools with regulatory body ratings of ‘outstanding’, aren’t we simply thrown straight back into that pool, where the marketplace is dominated by power? Is this Gove’s returning gesture to Burke’s organic market structure, that owes less to nature and more to state sanctioned finance sector hegemony?

The parents in Gove’s free-school idea, nicked from the Swedes, then put through a shredder, aren’t even able to save a school if the head or governing body want to opt-out of ‘free’ status, so says Fiona Miller, education campaigner and spouse of Alistair Campbell. The secretary of state has the right to close a school and the parents are left only with the option to protest the decision, much like before – is this change? I dare say parents had more power when schools weren’t, in the most perverse way the word can be used imaginable, free.

As well as being known for his support of a free market for corn, Burke might also be remembered for his promotion of the British Empire. He once stated that “The British Empire must be governed on a plan of freedom, for it will be governed by no other”. What first comes to mind is that if an empire needs a bit of telling on its promotion of freedom (hence the word must), but yet it cannot be governed by anything other than freedom, then it frankly hasn’t got its priorities right. But this aside, the British Empire, it turns out, didn’t always have freedom as its plan, it had cultural hegemony as its plan and I make no apologies for my thinking this. Many good people are suspicious of cultural relativism, and I count myself among them, but maybe, just maybe, the culture that we tried to import, on the basis alone that we once saw ourselves as bearing a culture, and being arrogant enough to think it needed foreign backing, might not be a good sample of the kind of thing we want to be putting on our national CV.

I think that is a sound opinion, and I hope you do too. But I know at least two men who don’t. One of them, Mr Gove, the other, now in the employ of Mr Gove, one Niall Ferguson.

Ferguson has been characterised as the Jamie Oliver of History, but I’m not entirely convinced that this is true, because as far as I can tell Oliver can at least tell his mange tout from his lady fingers.

In Ferguson’s opinion history is a discipline that won’t be jeopardised by propagating too strong an opinion. Barely concealing his apologies for the British Empire, and criticising the American Empire for not being enough like the former, is one thing, but even basic knowledge can remind one that history is at least the one subject where a relaxation of emotional attachment to a political ideology is vital.

In fact, the first lesson of relaying the objective facts lent to us by history is to leave agendas aside (they can obscure our understanding, and drag historical literature down to the level of Chinese whispers).

Well this simply isn’t on the menu for Ferguson, who will now be in charge of deciding what goes in and what stays out of the curriculum of history for children (perhaps this is why the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority – a non department body – has been scrapped by the new coalition government).

Gove’s reason for allowing this is because he believes in traditional history teaching. We can guess what this means (Tudors, Saxons, Smurfs, Pingu etc) but is Ferguson the architect of traditional history, or is he to history what Mao was to the open society.

Recently in the staggers, the fantastic Laurie Penny said on this very subject:

Andrew Roberts, another historian lined up to advise on the new curriculum, has dined with South African white supremacists, defended the Amritsar Massacre and suggested that the Boers murdered in British concentration camps were killed by their own stupidity. It looks like this “celebratory” curriculum might turn out to be a bunting-and-bigotry party, heavy on the jelly and propaganda.

It won’t necessarily be the bright spark of the bunch who works out that there is perhaps more to Gove’s appreciation of Burke than simple free market conservatism. There is a warped view of the market and a penchant for the empire about our least favourite minister. I wish him the very worst.

Do your country a favour…

…think of the common people!

If you’re on twitter, the lads of LO (who has come out for the LibDems, the doughnut) and BC fame want to tell you about the party set up specifically without the intention for the common people. Follow the hashtag #commonpeople for chatter and fun.

And do watch the video:

Since Duncy-Smith’s and Michael Howard’s’ election defeats the Tories have had to try and re-brand. Their best efforts are a softie softie catchy monkey Etonian called David Cameron (whose popularity doesn’t fluctuate too far from Michael Howard’s) and “Boy” George Osborne (who isn’t allowed on the telly anymore because everyone hates him) – but trying to change their party with the supposed progressivism of Camborne has been harder – they still are the nasty party.

Epistemic Closure and the End of Conservatism

David Cameron had his chance last night to show why he would be a good prime minister for this country; to show that in the four and a half years he has been leader of opposition he has the intellectual pounce, the stomach to lead and to tackle the oncoming stresses and strains that this country will have to cope with in the coming years.

And again he fluffed it.

The immediate polls put him in the lead by a two points (and I’m not simply being partisan when I say I really cannot see how he came off best) but he was unable to answer many of the questions put to him (particularly on the question of tax cuts for the richest 3,000 estates), he was unable to swipe away criticism from both the Labour and liberal camp, and constantly appealed to “the last 13 years” as an answer in-itself, to score political points against Gordon Brown’s substantial and perceptive analysis of what has been good in the last few years under a Labour government, and what can be done to ensure nobody needlessly suffers in the future on the frontline.

It is still quite amazing that the Conservative party has not been able to secure the kind of punch that one would naturally assume after 13 years of being out of office – after all this is the safest place to play politics, criticising the incumbent. Cameron’s appeal to “the last 13 years” is obviously his weapon of choice, but he surely ought to be asking himself about the last (nearly) five years on the other side; it ought to be remembered that the most trustworthy polls put Cameron on at 34% – as the Mirror puts it: “almost exactly the vote for the deeply unpopular Michael Howard at the last general election.”

In America at the moment a current turn of phrase, “epistemic closure”, is trending by conservatives to describe the debasing of modern conservatism’s glorious legacy, first used in this context by libertarian writer and Economist blogger Julian Sanchez as short-hand for “ideological intolerance and misinformation”. The idea is to show that conservatism has hit a wall and is appealing to low, base politics of xenophobia or ad hominem attack, as opposed to its rich, great tradition.

British conservatism has had a fair deal of “epistemic closure” in recent years also, and it’s something for the left to consider when we vent our criticisms on the right wing. When we think of conservatism today we might erroneously think of Thatcher and Major – but they were merely leaders of the conservative party. For those that believe the lie of neo-liberal capitalism (that it opens up a space for us all to become a little bit rich, and turns the fixed triangle shaped class system into a flexible circle of freedoms) in the conservative camp would’ve surely hated what Thatcher was doing by listening to those woolly Austrian and Chicago-school libertarians.

We know now they had little to worry about.

But the Thatcher/Major legacy, truth be told, will be less seen in the scheme of things as expressions of conservatism, and seen more as a new and epochal means to counter working class empowerment and intolerance of the foreign other.

For this reason I had some respect for Respublica and Phillip Blond. Aside from all bloated, first year philosophy course, flower eating nonsense that he talks about on virtue and politicians (see Mr. Sagar’s cutting analysis), what Blond did succeed in doing was to show that conservatism in this country was not the sum of the Thatcher/Major epistemic closure, but something that could be committed to community and civic participation, and not simply at the beck and call of the markets (which is rightly seen as a perversion of conservatism of the type Disraeli would have aligned himself to).

Cameron was keen to pal-up with Blond in the early days, with that timeless gag about voting blue was to go green though with Blond to vote blue was to go red. With Blond’s hat-tipping to one nation conservatism, and Cameron’s “progressivism” (by which has always meant an emotional relationship with the NHS, and therefore informing the decision to keep it) the Tories had the chance to sweep up the centre ground and remain Europhobic enough to keep the right from joining the UK Independence party. In short, drop the nasty party image.  Cameron had five years to do that – and he failed. He now sits at same lonely table as the unpopular Michael Howard who may or may not be thinking what we’re all thinking.

If I was interested in politics to score points then I, as a Labour supporter and socialist, would not care a hoot about conservatism. But this is not the case. Conservatism is not the sum total of xenophobia, big business and nastiness; this is its own expression of epistemic closure. But what almost five years of David Cameron as leader of the opposition and leader of the Conservative party has shown is that the return to real conservatism has botched. And this does not bade well considering the conditions in which that project was tested – 13 years out of office, a melee of leaders of all shapes and sizes, a global recession, and still they couldn’t exploit this enough – to think everyone in their camp assumed it would be a walkover.

Cameron himself is the embodiment of conservative closure; and if he is allowed anywhere near office after May 6^th, we can only expect stagnancy and immaturity.