There’s much gnashing of teeth about the future of the right today following Liam
Fox’s resignation. I think this is misplaced. Fox was a passionate advocate of a certain strand of Conservative thinking. But his appeal and relevance was always going to be limited by his
tendency to believe that it was, in political terms, always 1987.
The future of the right now, as Matthew Parris says (£), rests on the 2010 intake. They are, generally speaking, an impressive bunch. At Tory party conference, I chaired an event on the future of the party with four of its most able members. Strikingly, the panel, which spanned the ideological range of the intake, all agreed that the state was too big, that powers should be repatriated from Europe and that marriage should be supported. These are hardly the position of a shower of Wets.
Perhaps, the biggest challenge for the right now is to find a way to secure the future of the property owning democracy and to foster a popular capitalism. Both of these tasks are going to take considerable intellectual effort. But the right should take solace from the fact that it won’t face the same internal opposition within the Conservative party that the Thatcherites had to face in the ‘70s and ’80s and the Eurosceptics did in the 1990s.
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