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Walk in the Old
Paths Page 19 Politics is the theatre of
reinvention. The Conservative Party has revamped its logo, got itself a
photogenic leader with a video blog and excellent fashion sense, and
found an eco-friendly message. Will it be enough to convince voters? Daoud Rosser-Owen sounds a note of
caution. In an open appeal to Tories, he makes a powerful case for the
party to not forget its past.
Behind us, and with us, stand great men and women. In these ranks are Churchill, Salisbury, Disraeli, Palmerston (for a time), Pitt, Burke (eventually), Samuel Johnston, Clarendon, the Great Montrose, Archbishop Laud, Bishops John Jewel and Lancelot Andrewes, and even King Charles the Martyr, but especially Richard Hooker the famous Rector of Bishopsbourne. Equally with them are George Grant, Eugene Forsey, Stephen Leacock, Donald Creighton, Milton Acorn, Mazo de la Roche, Sir John Alexander Macdonald, and Bishops John Strachan and Charles Inglis. And we should not forget C. S. Lewis, Cardinal Newman, “Lewis Carroll”, G. K. Chesterton, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Truly “we stand on the shoulders of giants”. But can we honestly say that, looking back down those paths illumined by these Greats, we can now look forward with an equal assurance and certainty to a new, clear, Tory way, and boldly walk in it? There used not to be a Tory unfamiliar with that verse from Jeremiah (6: 16), “interrogate de semitis antiquis quae sit via bona et ambulate in ea” (ask after the old paths where is the good way and walk in it) that hints at Matthew 7: 14: “Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it”. The Tory Way - that began, as both Feiling and Hearnshaw said, with the wedding of King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn - married the values of religion, the Common Law, and the “ancient customs and usages of the people”. This was King Charles the Martyr’s phrase said at his show trial when he held that we must protect the people from the tyranny of Parliament: a trust that he, in effect, laid on us the heirs of his “Court Party”. David Cameron has suggested that we need a new Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights 1689 was meant to preserve those gains of the Civil War that trammelled arbitrary rule by the Executive. We have just lived through the most egregious decade of destruction of the “ancient customs and usages of the people” by revolutionists whose political philosophy is wholly alien to the British Way and which has been inspired by the misnamed “neoconservatism” of America. This is a political perspective that is neither new nor conservative. It is a formulation by American ex-Trotskyites of their New Left’s “long march through the institutions”, and has nothing to offer to us. Seduced by the rosy shine on these Apples of Sodom, this “neo-conservative” philosophy has been embraced by the Democratic and Republican Parties in the USA, and Mr Blair’s New Labour; and, surprisingly, by the Conservative Party in Canada. Do we really wish to repeat the destruction of the traditions of these parties, and embrace this alien philosophy? We reject the corrupt and demented teachings of Leo Strauss, and the perversities embraced by his erstwhile students. And, anyway, American political concepts and traditions do not speak to us. Their Whiggery derives from the French Enlightenment and the terrible Revolution that followed it, with their ideas that man and society can be improved and perfected by governments’ tinkering. Through Burke, Pitt, Carlisle, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey we rejected those at the time. We stand for older and more enduring values. We believe in religion, religious morality, and that without it civil society cannot survive. We believe that man is imperfect, that our political environment has evolved organically over time to accommodate our nature and the unique qualities of our culture. We used to believe that sovereignty belongs to God, which He expresses temporally through the Monarchy and the structure of society. And we believed that society is a living thing, an organism of the Divine Creation, that can only be harmed by parasitic constructs. We do, indeed, need a new Bill of Rights to restore what has been destroyed in the past nine years, and to protect our Constitution from further such razzias: Mr Cameron’s idea should be taken forward to fruition. And further, we must restore Civil Liberties and the Common Law to what they were before 1997 – that is true conservatism. We must not connive in the abolition of those measures protecting the liberties of Britons that have been painfully achieved over 900 years of our forebears’ work and sacrifice, simply because the previous Administration did it - and so it can’t be undone. Who says so? The first Writ of Habeas Corpus was served in 1305 - 701 years ago: by what arrogance are we allowed to dispense with it, when it was meant to protect against just the sort of arbitrary arrest and detention that finds its existence so inconvenient now? Double Jeopardy was outlawed nearly 800 years ago (if it is to be amended, why not with the established Scottish usage of “Not Proven”?). Who gave us the right to tear up Magna Charta? The use of Star Chamber courts and arbitrary arrest and detention in government oubliettes was abolished by the Civil War and enshrined in the Bill of Rights. Who gave us the right to restore them? Are we really at such a threat from putative and unproved “Islamic terrorism” that we must destroy our ancient liberties to ensure our safety? There is no absolute safety. To believe so is a religious unbelief that our forebears never countenanced. They knew that there is no refuge from death: when your time comes, you go. Is our social environment so much more dangerous now than in Jack the Ripper’s, or Dickens’, or Mayhew’s time; or in the days of Dick Turpin and the Highwaymen; or, more recently, during the 32 years of actual Irish terrorism, so that we need a raft of unusual and anti-liberal legislation to demonise communities of the Queen’s subjects on almost wholly specious grounds? Have we lost the Faith our forbears held to, to replace it with the parvenu heresy of Dispensationalism? We are getting ready to put behind us the disillusionment that led to the electoral defeats of 1997, 2001, and 2005. In these opening years of the 21st Century, is it not opportune to consider where the country should be going, and what the role of government is: and especially the next Tory Government? What did we do with Disraeli’s “One Nation” that derives from his political novel, Sybil, or the Two Nations? Canada’s first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, was deeply influenced by the ideals of the One Nation movement. In The Globe and Mail, on Saturday, 8 May 1982, George Grant stated that, “One cannot understand the Conservatism of Canada without thinking of Disraeli”. This is equally true of the United Kingdom. In his 2000 Macmillan Lecture, Damian Green MP stated, “My answer to the question posed tonight, ‘Who needs One Nation Conservatism?’ is first the Conservative Party, and secondly the British people. The current public debate on this topic is most peculiar. Many of those who for years have led the forces of One Nation Conservatism are now excoriated as dinosaurs by certain commentators. At the same time the One Nation label has never been so much in demand…”. Anthony Charles Linton Blair has missed few opportunities to cast himself in a conservative light to the electorate. Yet in recent years he has been the most active divider of the nation, the most assertive promoter of the notion that Her Majesty’s Muslim subjects are not to be trusted because they are would-be terrorists. We Tories know that this is an outrageous calumny. But are we to remain silent? Are we to endorse the perverse view that Islam, which helped form the Western Tradition from which the Tory Way sprang, is an inimical and alien civilization? Traditionally we have believed that government is necessary for the furtherance of the Common Weal, for the maintenance of the Queen’s Peace at home, and the defence of the realm from foreign threats. We have embraced ideas of the Welfare State as being a means to promote the common weal, and agreed to levels of taxation as a means to effect Churchill’s safety net designed to catch those who fall and his ladder back up. We had police constabularies to administer the Common Law on our behalf and, eventually, the Law as a whole with our consent. The Police is not a Standing Army of occupation at war with the Queen’s subjects. It is not an instrument of government repression. Magna Charta held that it was the right of the freeborn subject to go about his lawful occasions without let or hindrance. In what way is the United Kingdom in 2006 a more lawless and dangerous place than England in 1215? And what of our foreign policy and the role of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces? We finally divested ourselves of our Empire, which I’m proud to have served, by the end of the 1960s. It is an anachronism still to be following an imperial profile in our foreign and defence policies forty years later, especially with the end of the threat in Europe from the Warsaw Treaty Organisation. Lord Palmerston, once a Tory, held that “England has no friends, only interests”. Her Majesty’s forces are for the defence of the Queen’s realms, and, by extension, British interests abroad where real British interests are really threatened. It has been accepted as a modern duty to add to this disaster and humanitarian relief. But it is no business of ours to involve ourselves in others’ wars. Others’ illegal wars of aggression should be anathema to us. Although we were related by blood and history to France, Spain and Portugal, and Germany, we were never overawed by them nor considered it an imperative to throw in our lot with any of them if our real best interests were not served thereby. So it should be with the USA, with which we are also related by blood and history, and the European Union which is our neighbour and with which we trade. We have very much more to share with our cousins in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand – and, if the truth be known and admitted – in the Republic of Ireland than with either of the above nascent empires. And as Tories in the United Kingdom there is a common crisis we share with the Tories in Canada that we should be urgently addressing. Let us, therefore, in the words of the famous Gaelic motto “cleave closely to the renown of our forebears” during this Conference, and draw inspiration from it. Let us find once again the Good Path – the true Tory Way – “and walk therein”. Daoud Rosser-Owen is the Amir of the Association for British Muslims, and a member of the Hammersmith and Fulham Conservative Association. |