As the Conservative
Party conference is underway in Birmingham I thought it would be appropriate to
consider if the Tories really are conservative anymore.
First of all ponder their present attitude
to England’s green and pleasant land. In
the last century Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin said: "To me,
England is the country, and the country is England". Would our
current Prime Minister or any of her Cabinet colleagues agree with him? I doubt it after reading Peter Hitchens’
article in the Mail on Sunday on
September 2. He wrote:
“The Concrete Party's desecration of beauty.
A gloomy, grey shadow now falls across what has until now been an
unspoiled part of our beautiful country.
I have often bicycled across the quiet counties that lie between Oxford
and Cambridge, and found great peace there. It is the intensely English
countryside through which John Bunyan tramped as he imagined his great book The
Pilgrim’s Progress, with its Celestial City and its Delectable Mountains.
They soon won’t be delectable any more. Our Government, which seems to
have sold its soul to the developers, is on the brink of ordering the building
there of something called the Oxford-Cambridge Expressway, another hideous
stripe of concrete which will tear up trees and scar hills, and create a long,
wide corridor of noise, stink and light pollution.
Everyone knows that such roads solve nothing, and simply attract more
traffic. But they will make billions for the builders of box homes in ugly,
bare estates alongside the new road.
Yet the decision already seems to have been taken. Did anyone who voted
for this Government think they were voting for the desecration of English
beauty? The ‘Conservative’ Party should be forced to change its name to the
Concrete Party.”
Conservatives
say that they are the party of “law and order”, but can they really make that
claim. According to reports in the media
more than 600 police stations have closed in the past eight years. Bath, for example, is the largest city in the
ceremonial county of Somerset with a population of around 90,000 yet it has no
police station; the last one was sold to the University of Bath nearly 3 years
ago.
The number
of police officers in England and Wales peaked at 141,647 in 2009 when Labour
was in power. The BBC website states:
“Since September 2009 – the last set of Home Office figures before the
Conservatives came to power – there has been a cut of 22,424 police
officers.” The Tories have decimated the
forces of “law and order”. This is not
what one would expect from a conservative government!
“As a global power, we have the responsibility
to sustain our fine armed forces so that they can defend the realm, our
overseas territories and our interests around the globe” said the 2017
Conservative Manifesto. However, actions
speak louder than words! In November
2017 Johnny Mercer, MP for Plymouth Moor View, expressing concerns about cuts
in defence spending said he would not “be prepared to see something the size of
Belgium in the UK’s armed forces”. I
doubt if Belgium, fine country though it is, considers itself to be a global
power!
Lord
Michael Ashcroft, an influential conservative, and Isabel Oakeshott have just
published a book about the state of Britain’s armed forces called White Flag (Biteback Publishing). After
eight years of defence cuts what on earth could they be thinking?
Defence, law and order, and the English landscape, three areas where the Conservative Party in government does not seem to be very conservative.
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