Although the Brits don’t have a real conservative movement, they do have conservative politicians—like Alan Duncan, for instance, who visited the Cato Institute to talk about the erosion of freedom in Britain. As described by James Pinkerton it involves three problems.
First of all, there is Tony Blair. His style of headline government lowers the tone of debate: "the headline matters more than the deed." The danger of this sort of thing becomes obvious when the government gets to be good at spin but fails at the boring stuff of keeping people safe from criminals. It thows money at schools and hospitals without doing the boring stuff of reforming them.
Then there is the brute power of government, made more acute by the special powers we have given to government to prosecute the war on terror. This is a
trend that was visible even before 9-11: the short-circuiting of due process. That is, raison d'etat was displacing the rights of Englishmen.
Thirdly, there is the problem that, with all these powers, government doesn’t do anything very well. In fact it tends to encourage the opposite of what it intends. For instance,
The redistributionist welfare state was created to narrow inequalities, but in fact, in the way that it works, it ends up widening those inequalities. That is, if people are rendered ill-equipped to work, they will likely end up with even less earning power.
Duncan has written a book about it: Saturn’s Children: How the State Devours Liberty, Prosperity, and Virtue. Oh, and by the way, Duncan is gay.
Gay? In the Conservative Party? How did that work? “It just wasn't an issue -- no special privileges, no special penalties. Everybody minds their own business.”
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