WHAT WENT WRONG? (WITH ENGLAND):

The cult of treachery: The 25 letters are in. Iain Duncan Smith will soon be out. The treachery of the flunkeys has triumphed. (Peter Oborne, 11/01/03, The Spectator)

For the greater part of the last two centuries it was axiomatic that three great institutions upheld a large part of the structure of our national life. These were the monarchy, the established Church and the Conservative party. In different ways all three were expressions of identical values: loyalty, decency, tolerance, service, respect for tradition. They all taught that the individual matters far less than the whole.

These institutions were, and theoretically remain, wholly antipathetic to individual greed and naked ambition. They are grounded in a homely native empiricism and suspicion of abstract ideas. Any account of why Britain, alone among the great European powers, did not succumb to the murderous ideologies of fascism or communism in the last century is incomplete without an explanation of the role played by these three institutions. The existence of the monarchy meant that Britain already possessed a potent national symbolism; the kind of fascist or communist display that dazzled continental Europe provoked simple bewilderment here. The presence of a robust, indigenous, sceptical conservatism left no room for the extreme Right to break in from the periphery. When war came, the Church and the monarchy helped to provide an unbreakable social glue that bound the British people together in the six-year struggle against Hitler. [...]

The menace of the present situation lies in the unprecedented catastrophe that has overcome all three at once. The symptoms are so severe that it is hard to see what will prevent the emergence of a republican Britain, with no established Church and a rump of half a dozen loosely whipped Tory MPs in the House of Commons, very likely within the next generation.

These simultaneous crises are linked. The three institutions have forgotten their proper roles, and as a consequence their duties to the British people. Instead they have fallen prey to their own narrow and in some cases demeaning preoccupations.

A conservatism that does not prize and defend the institutions of civil society is not in any sense conservative, is it?

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 1, 2003 12:03 PM