OneHourAhead

Currently passing the time by watching an episode of the series Tory! Tory! Tory!, a documentary about the rise of Thatcherite conservatives in the 70’s and 80’s, available on Veoh.

Peter Clarke (PA to Keith Joseph) says this:

“I think you could say that the young Keith Joseph was not unlike the young David Cameron, that they both thought, in a rather naive way, that the state, organised by gentlemen, could be benign force and it was only the experience of living in Mr Heath’s cabinet both as housing minister and then as social security secretary that inoculated him against this. He saw that the state was capable of immense catastrophes and immense cruelties”

This naivety still spreads like a cancer through the halls of Westminster, and doesn’t only afflict the statist left and the authoritarian right, I think it can be on our own benches too.

But still,  this sums up nicely how I think of the tories and DC and the differences between the beliefs that they hold and the true liberalism that they pretend to espouse but never champion.  They still want big government, they just want it to be their big government. They think that if they were in charge everything would be hunky-dory.  It doesn’t work like that.  Even with all the best will in the world, governments will balls up.  It’s in their DNA.  To be truly liberal you have to give back as much power to individuals and enable them to make their own choices. And they don’t truly believe in devolving power back to individuals and communities - they just want it for themselves and to make sure they don’t have it.

You are better than the state - I really believe this is a position we should be grabbing by the balls.