“British Conservatism has broken with three of its most important traditions. It has stopped thinking; it has stopped ‘conserving’; and it has lost its suspicion of ideology. Historically, the Conservative Party has been a party of ideas, but not of ideology. Today, that relationship has been reversed: a party in thrall to ideology is reduced to boardroom banalities and half-remembered hymns to a Thatcherite past.” It strikes me that Robert Saunders’ New Statesman argument about the closing of the conservative mind maps fairly closely onto the Australian Liberal-National Coalition. Just look at the Morrison government, with no real ideas — just ideological slogans about cutting corporate taxes, punishing refugees, bashing unions, and fetishising coal.
16 June 2019