Badenoch must leave the way open to a reunification deal with Farage
Be honest—this is ridiculous.
During her ebullient performance yesterday morning on Desert Island Discs, Kemi Badenoch took the chance to warn against multiculturalism, and the identity politics which it fosters:
“You ask people to retreat into groups, into tribes, rather than find the thing that they have in common. Identity politics is a recipe for conflict.”
She went on to speak of the need to bring groups together, and the importance of preserving a British identity. This is absolutely right. It would be disastrous if Britain were to become Balkanised into competing factions, each of which believes itself to be so righteous it is justified in despising and exterminating the others.
Glimpses of this sectarian mentality can be found throughout our history, but the Conservative Party is one of the institutions which has thrived by refusing to set tests of the purity of its members’ beliefs.
The party has avoided the error of claiming to possess an infallible cure for the nation’s ills. It prefers intelligent adaptation to circumstance, the doing of the best one can in a fallen world, the choosing of what seems at the time like the lesser of two evils.
It is allergic to all forms of utopianism: it shrinks with horror from the vainglorious claim that mankind can be perfected.
As Sir Ian Gilmour remarked in The Body Politic, published in 1969, “The Tory party has emotions but no doctrine.” He went on to observe that the nearest thing it has to a doctrine is is an anti-doctrine: the belief “that all political theories are at best inadequate, at worst false”.
The Conservative Party in its modern form is above all the creation of Sir Robert Peel in the 1830s, when he published that dull and prudent statement of intent, the Tamworth Manifesto, which showed that the Tories understood modern realities and now accepted the Great Reform Bill of 1832, which they had bitterly resisted.
But before long the Conservative Party split over the Repeal of the Corn Laws. Peel and most of his ministerial colleagues, who at that point included the astonishingly gifted William Gladstone, had come to the view that repeal was the right policy, and in 1846 they got it through with the help of the Opposition.
Peel and his colleagues had failed to carry with them the great inarticulate mass of Tory backbenchers, most of whom were landowners and regarded the abolition of the Corn Laws as a monstrous betrayal of the programme on which in 1841 they had been elected.
These Tory backwoodsmen lacked the ability to make their case, so turned to Benjamin Disraeli to make it for them. His assaults on Peel were so brilliant and so wounding that he destroyed Peel’s career.
He also very nearly destroyed the Conservative Party, which was unable to win another majority until 1874, 28 years after the split …
Be honest—this is ridiculous.
During her ebullient performance yesterday morning on Desert Island Discs, Kemi Badenoch took the chance to warn against multiculturalism, and the identity politics which it fosters:
“You ask people to retreat into groups, into tribes, rather than find the thing that they have in common. Identity politics is a recipe for conflict.”
She went on to speak of the need to bring groups together, and the importance of preserving a British identity. This is absolutely right. It would be disastrous if Britain were to become Balkanised into competing factions, each of which believes itself to be so righteous it is justified in despising and exterminating the others.
Glimpses of this sectarian mentality can be found throughout our history, but the Conservative Party is one of the institutions which has thrived by refusing to set tests of the purity of its members’ beliefs.
The party has avoided the error of claiming to possess an infallible cure for the nation’s ills. It prefers intelligent adaptation to circumstance, the doing of the best one can in a fallen world, the choosing of what seems at the time like the lesser of two evils.
It is allergic to all forms of utopianism: it shrinks with horror from the vainglorious claim that mankind can be perfected.
As Sir Ian Gilmour remarked in The Body Politic, published in 1969, “The Tory party has emotions but no doctrine.” He went on to observe that the nearest thing it has to a doctrine is is an anti-doctrine: the belief “that all political theories are at best inadequate, at worst false”.
The Conservative Party in its modern form is above all the creation of Sir Robert Peel in the 1830s, when he published that dull and prudent statement of intent, the Tamworth Manifesto, which showed that the Tories understood modern realities and now accepted the Great Reform Bill of 1832, which they had bitterly resisted.
But before long the Conservative Party split over the Repeal of the Corn Laws. Peel and most of his ministerial colleagues, who at that point included the astonishingly gifted William Gladstone, had come to the view that repeal was the right policy, and in 1846 they got it through with the help of the Opposition.
Peel and his colleagues had failed to carry with them the great inarticulate mass of Tory backbenchers, most of whom were landowners and regarded the abolition of the Corn Laws as a monstrous betrayal of the programme on which in 1841 they had been elected.
These Tory backwoodsmen lacked the ability to make their case, so turned to Benjamin Disraeli to make it for them. His assaults on Peel were so brilliant and so wounding that he destroyed Peel’s career.
He also very nearly destroyed the Conservative Party, which was unable to win another majority until 1874, 28 years after the split …
Badenoch must leave the way open to a reunification deal with Farage
Be honest—this is ridiculous.
During her ebullient performance yesterday morning on Desert Island Discs, Kemi Badenoch took the chance to warn against multiculturalism, and the identity politics which it fosters:
“You ask people to retreat into groups, into tribes, rather than find the thing that they have in common. Identity politics is a recipe for conflict.”
She went on to speak of the need to bring groups together, and the importance of preserving a British identity. This is absolutely right. It would be disastrous if Britain were to become Balkanised into competing factions, each of which believes itself to be so righteous it is justified in despising and exterminating the others.
Glimpses of this sectarian mentality can be found throughout our history, but the Conservative Party is one of the institutions which has thrived by refusing to set tests of the purity of its members’ beliefs.
The party has avoided the error of claiming to possess an infallible cure for the nation’s ills. It prefers intelligent adaptation to circumstance, the doing of the best one can in a fallen world, the choosing of what seems at the time like the lesser of two evils.
It is allergic to all forms of utopianism: it shrinks with horror from the vainglorious claim that mankind can be perfected.
As Sir Ian Gilmour remarked in The Body Politic, published in 1969, “The Tory party has emotions but no doctrine.” He went on to observe that the nearest thing it has to a doctrine is is an anti-doctrine: the belief “that all political theories are at best inadequate, at worst false”.
The Conservative Party in its modern form is above all the creation of Sir Robert Peel in the 1830s, when he published that dull and prudent statement of intent, the Tamworth Manifesto, which showed that the Tories understood modern realities and now accepted the Great Reform Bill of 1832, which they had bitterly resisted.
But before long the Conservative Party split over the Repeal of the Corn Laws. Peel and most of his ministerial colleagues, who at that point included the astonishingly gifted William Gladstone, had come to the view that repeal was the right policy, and in 1846 they got it through with the help of the Opposition.
Peel and his colleagues had failed to carry with them the great inarticulate mass of Tory backbenchers, most of whom were landowners and regarded the abolition of the Corn Laws as a monstrous betrayal of the programme on which in 1841 they had been elected.
These Tory backwoodsmen lacked the ability to make their case, so turned to Benjamin Disraeli to make it for them. His assaults on Peel were so brilliant and so wounding that he destroyed Peel’s career.
He also very nearly destroyed the Conservative Party, which was unable to win another majority until 1874, 28 years after the split …
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