Are the Conservative Party truly conservative?

This is a question I have been pondering after hearing the opinion of Peter Hitchens on the Tories. He essentially says that they are not represented as true conservatives. I would like to gauge your opinions on this matter as I want to write a blog post about it, but need for views and opinions.

This is a question I have been pondering after hearing the opinion of Peter Hitchens on the Tories. He essentially says that they are not represented as true conservatives. I would like to gauge your opinions on this matter as I want to write a blog post about it, but need for views and opinions.

This is a question I have been pondering after hearing the opinion of Peter Hitchens on the Tories. He essentially says that they are not represented as true conservatives. I would like to gauge your opinions on this matter as I want to write a blog post about it, but need for views and opinions.

They are entirely neoliberal — they are not philosophically conservative at all. A conservative doesn’t put money above everything else like they do. An actual conservative is also not hyper-capitalist like the Tories are — it wasn’t until Thatcher that we started equating being conservative with being a zealot for capitalism.

They give the label of ‘conservatism’ a very bad name, but unfortunately very few people dive into conservative philosophy to discover its intellectual and historical roots. If people did, they’d rapidly discover that there’s absolutely nothing conservative about the Tories.

They don't seem particularly hyper-capitalist to me. At best middle of the road Keynesian interventionist types.

This is a question I have been pondering after hearing the opinion of Peter Hitchens on the Tories. He essentially says that they are not represented as true conservatives. I would like to gauge your opinions on this matter as I want to write a blog post about it, but need for views and opinions.

How can a party that supports gay marriage be Conservative?

The Thatcherite Conservative Party has far more in common with Victorian Liberalism than its own historical analogue, it was permitted to become this way because the Labour Party was so transfixed by its socialist ideals that Thatcher was permitted to take the country in that direction (not a bad thing, I am extremely sympathetic to Thatcherism).

That the Conservative Party is more focussed on economics than social conservative is also not surprising. People who vote Conservative typically care about the economy above all else and also typically care about power over principle (hence they pander). With Labour lacking a coherent acceptable alternative vision (Starmer has none and Corbyn's was not acceptable) the Tories basically had the choice of gambling on radicalism or going for the safety of pandering.

As their vote share has never suffered there seems little incentive for the party to change and indeed unemployment over the next year aside, it looks like they've probably survived Covid.

The true social conservatives don't really have anywhere else to go, no properly presentable face and no properly alternate brand. The best they had was Farage who at best would stop the social rot rather than cure it.

Completely agree 👍

What do you think about my hope that with the gradual collapse of the labour vote, a split could develop in the Tory party between its more liberal and socially conservative groups?

You could have made that argument before it was legalised, but now it has been, opposing gay marriage is no longer, strictly speaking, a conservative position, but rather a reactionary one.

That word is nothing but an insult and ought to be dumped along with the N word etc. It serves no objectively useful purpose whatever.

Still less should it be used to describe indignation at the cultural putsch carried out by the Cleggeron in telling consort with Hollande in France....

Were the reign-of-terror-ists of 1795 France now conservatives???

I doubt such a split will occur externally anytime soon and internally I doubt you'll get the circumstances to force the change you want, so long as the Tories are in power when Labour is weak they'll choose the safe option.

What you need is something as big as Brexit to damage the party enough to make them panic or for Labour to be in power and be truly nuts. Only then will the party gamble as per 2019 (though you need better judgment than electing a populist leader since they will pander over time).

This is a question I have been pondering after hearing the opinion of Peter Hitchens on the Tories. He essentially says that they are not represented as true conservatives. I would like to gauge your opinions on this matter as I want to write a blog post about it, but need for views and opinions.