The Flight Fiasco Revisited
Michael Howard has been making much of his point that the effective termination of Howard Flight’s career in the Conservative Party is about “honesty” and not an attempt to prevent Conservative MPs from speaking their mind. This is only partially convincing. It is true that at the last Conservative Conference honesty was the main theme, [...]
Flight’s Wings Clipped
Today is Good Friday, and to mark the occasion the Conservative Party has taken the remarkable step of crucifying one of its own MPs. Howard Flight’s comments may have been pretty silly in the few weeks leading up to a General Election but it’s not the first time a senior Conservative has opened his mouth [...]
The Worst That Can Happen
Two thoroughly depressing items came to my attention today. The first, a two hundred year old quotation from the Scottish historian and jurist Alexander Tytler, from a lecture in 1801.
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the [...]
The Meaning of Words
From the previous post and Melanie Phillips’ article to which it is linked, it will be apparent that there has been a shift in the meaning of the key terms involved. In America particularly, but also for different reasons in Britain, the term “liberal” for all practical purposes represents a socialist or social-democratic agenda. In [...]
Mugged by Reality
They say that a conservative is “a liberal who has been mugged”, and that a neoconservative is “a liberal who has been mugged by reality”. You could say that this second definition fits me perfectly.
For most of my forty years I have been firmly on the liberal/left side of the political equation. I never understood [...]