The green and the blue

For as long as I can remember, the word ‘conservative’ has been used in intellectual circles as a term of abuse, while to call someone ‘right-wing’ has been the next thing to social ostracism. This habit has persisted throughout 50 years in which the Conservative party has had the largest overall share of the vote. But the habit is not new. It took root two centuries ago, when the French Revolution excited British intellectuals to think that they too might get the chance to cut off the heads that contained less brains than their own. John Stuart Mill, when a Liberal MP, spoke for the intellectual majority by denouncing the Tories as ‘the stupider party’. An intellectual who emphasises his leftist credentials has a career advantage that will compensate for any amount of obscurity, confusion or mendacity in what he writes.

Still, when the environment came to the top of the political agenda I allowed myself the hope that respite was to hand. If the intellectual class is talking of conservation, stewardship and the duty to future generations it could not be long, I felt, before its members would see the point of Burke’s argument, that society is not a contract between the living only, but a bond between the dead, the living and the unborn. They would surely allow themselves to recognise the effect of socialism on the natural environments of Russia, Eastern Europe and China and of uncontrolled immigration on the urban environment of Britain and France. They might even begin to acknowledge the work of the romantic Tory John Ruskin and his many disciples in saving the English landscape from destruction during the 19th century. And how can they consider the history of this matter without recognising that there has been, at every point, a battle between civil society and the state, with the ‘little platoons’ of home-loving volunteers on the side of conservation, and the great machine from elsewhere, often programmed with socialist software, scraping away our settlements and habitats, for the sake of goals that nobody understands and few people want?