True conservatism
Sir: Douglas Murray claims that the Conservative party ‘will need to have some people who are actually right-wing’ (‘The Tories only have themselves to blame’, 6 July). Why? Its name isn’t ‘the right-wing party’. It has no foundational obligation to be right-wing for the sake of it. Rather its mission is to be conservative, and the people who now identify as ‘right-wing’ seem to have no interest in conserving anything, whether it’s our countryside, rivers, values, place on the international stage, parliamentary system, cultural institutions, national life expectancy, economic stability – or anything other than their own positions and status, which many have lost regardless. I’m sure many people who voted for other parties in the election would be sympathetic to a truly conservative agenda that promised to hang on to or restore what is good about Britain, but that is not offered by the current right, whose instinct is constantly to modernise, streamline, strip away, use up, sell off. A truly conservative Conservative party would be better off without them.
James Bench-Capon
Cambridge
The myth of eternal growth
Sir: The big lie of all the major parties in the election campaign, virtually uncontested by journalists, was the promise of eternal growth (Leading article, 6 July). There can be no such thing, on our island or on our planet. Labour’s pledge to build 1.5 million houses in the next five years equates to concreting over 125,000 acres (plus a good deal more for infrastructure): an area the size of Middlesex. Setting aside the horror of such a vision, it is incompatible with the concurrent abstract pledge to net zero.
Such is our addiction to the concept of unending growth that its leading sale slogans of ‘housing crisis’ and ‘cost-of-living crisis’ go unchallenged. If we have a ‘cost-of-living crisis’, why are there so many new cars on the road, why does everyone have an expensive mobile phone, why do we see almost nobody wearing patched-up old clothes? Look back to the Britain that existed even within living memory, where most income was necessarily spent on food, and there was no stigma attached to multiple generations sharing one home (grandparents spared the cost of child care). The Conservative party lost the election because it had ceased to be conservative. True conservatism is about stability, not ‘growth’.
Richard Munday
Much Hadham, Herts
Biden must bow out
Sir: Lionel Shriver’s typically well-argued piece on political narcissism (‘Biden is as big a narcissist as Trump’, 6 July) made me think of the behaviour of Cristiano Ronaldo in Portugal’s Euros match against Slovenia. It wasn’t about his country; it was about him. Portugal should rejoice that he has now retired from their talented national team. He should be thanked for his magnificent contribution and led gently but firmly offstage – as should Joe Biden.
Jeremy Dyer
Poole, Dorset
Liberal blessings
Sir: I have sympathy for Charles Moore’s father and his nine unsuccessful attempts to be elected for the Liberal party (Notes, 6 July). I have stood five times in a general election and in the early hours of 5 July made it across the line with a healthy 2,401 majority. My opponent Michelle Donelan, the former secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, accepted defeat gracefully. It was a pleasure to take part in what was the most friendly and optimistic campaign I have yet run, and I relish the days ahead as we join the fray to hold Labour to account, and become the ‘tail that wags the dog’ with our fair deal-based policies. Politics in the UK is alive and well.
Dr Brian Mathew
Liberal Democrat MP for Melksham and Devizes, Wiltshire
Sense of proportion
Sir: A.W. Harvey is right about proportional representation: it seems to lead to a fairer society (Letters, 6 July). Britain and Belarus are the only countries in Europe with first past the post; the rest have changed to some form of PR. Indeed most democratic countries apart from the USA have PR – nobody adopts FPTP as a better method. A switch to PR was not on Labour’s manifesto, but its party conference last year voted for it. The UK could make this change.
Rosanne Bostock,
Oxford
Road bloc
Sir: Radek Sikorski rightly observes (Diary, 6 July) that if Poland had tried to leave the Warsaw Pact in 1956, ‘we would have been invaded by Soviet tanks’. Aged 26, in late October 1956, I drove from Berlin to Warsaw and on the East German side of the border had to thread my way through columns of Soviet tanks clearly awaiting orders to invade. But the more immediate threat was from Soviet tanks long stationed in Poland which had already started to move towards Warsaw. Every town I passed through, I was stopped by local Polish authorities anxious to know if I could give them any information, even though they soon realised that I was a British diplomat. Only talks between Party Leader Gomulka and Khrushchev, Chinese pressures to de-escalate and the Hungarian Uprising induced Moscow to rein in Soviet troops already manoeuvring inside Poland.
Derek Tonkin
Worplesdon, Surrey
Pillars of society
Sir: Calvin Po (Arts, 6 July) may be interested to know that four of the original Ionic pillars from John Soane’s Bank of England can be found at Templewood, a house built in 1938 for Sir Samuel Hoare MP. That Hoare was able to purloin them for his new home without an eyebrow being raised probably had something to do with the fact that he was home secretary at the time. Those were the days.
Chris Guyver
North Buckland, Devon
Comments