Conservatism is the new fascism. So says Kathy Gyngell, the co-editor of one of Britain’s last genuinely conservative news outlets, which is why in disgust she is changing its name from The Conservative Woman to TCW Defending Freedom.
In a piece titled Farewell to the Contaminated C-Word, Gyngell expresses her horror at ‘the fascist depths to which [Boris Johnson’s] government, hiding behind the name Conservative,’ has plumbed.
One look at yesterday’s newspaper headlines should be sufficient for readers to understand why we are no longer prepared to risk the reputational damage of having the word conservative, albeit with a small c, in our name. We think it is irreversibly contaminated.
I know exactly how she feels. Some commentators, notably Peter Hitchens, have been warning for years that the Conservative party abandoned conservatism decades ago and that its complete destruction is the only solution. But many of us have for years clung naively to the hope that somehow the right of the party might one day reassert itself, as it did in the era of Margaret Thatcher, and that the ‘Wets’ who have been dragging it ever leftwards would finally be consigned to oblivion.
Fat chance. Hitchens was right all along. Those of us who believed that the Brexit vote might have given the right of the Conservative party a fillip were wrong: there really is no ‘right’ of the Conservative party. Nor, for that matter, is there any conservatism within the Conservative party.
This became obvious recently when Jacob Rees-Mogg tweeted out his support for the green agenda. When even the supposed standard-bearers of the party’s right no longer bother to disguise their true allegiances, you know that there is no hope of redemption for the Conservatives.
Rees-Mogg is a particularly egregious example. But as Gyngell correctly points out, not one MP in the entire party has shown any ideological backbone or moral courage because not a single one has resigned ‘in protest against this lying discreditable sham masquerading as a democratic Conservative government.’
Every single one of these men and women has signally failed to take the only real stand they could, and still can – which is to dissociate themselves totally from this corrupted government and the party that so blindly supports it. If there is one thing they should know by now it is this: they are fooling themselves if they think their morally depraved government can’t sink any lower. Each and every time it does. That is the fixed pattern.
And the tragedy is you won’t read these sentiments expressed anywhere in what passes for Britain’s mainstream ‘Conservative’ press. That’s because it is now entirely bought and paid for by the government.