Ten Progressive Conservative Principles & vice versa
The task of politics to create healthy governance that provides a framework for healthy business, healthy communities and healthy families. To do so a government has to create trust, harmony, purpose and balance.
To do that it has to reframe the economy beyond GDP to invest in existing local value local resources and local capability rather than extracting value from people places and planet like absentee landlords and bureaucrats. Rather than distributing local value transformed into money to absentee landlords and shareholders who don’t share we need an imaginative politics that integrates the best of conservation and progress..
The inner logic and rationale of both neo-liberalism and libertarianism lack any gesture of conserving, conservation or conservatism. Their adoption by right wing parties is a betrayal of the principles of conservatism as outlined by Russel T Kirk in his essay ‘The Imaginative Conservative’.
In adopting abstract, anti conservative ideologies, recent Tory governments have betrayed every principle of intelligent conservatism leaving the nation a false choice between a cancerous economy and a cancerous state. In contrast the principles of imaginative conservatism which are consistent with traditional Christian and British values can offer an integrative frame for harmony for true conservatives and progressives
The Integrative Priniciples of Intelligent Conservatism
1. There is an enduring moral order consistent with all true faiths
A society in which men and women are morally adrift, ignorant of universal human values, and largely intent upon gratification of appetites, will be a bad society. To grw the economey we need t grow character, local agency, collaboration and creativity.
2. Human society is not machine, to be treated mechanically but more an organism to be tended in the spirit of Life .
Just as humans are not machines human society and relationships cannot be understood as machines. Society is more akin to an orgnism and needs to be tended in the spirit of Life. The body social is a kind of spiritual corporation. Continuity is the means of linking generation to generation and the foundation of stability and flourishing. Consequently intergenerational policies that allow authority to have legitinmacy are crucial for the imaginative conservative.
3. Extreme Individualism Is A Dangerous Utopian Construct
The Burkean imperative states “The individual is foolish, but the species is wise”.To conserve the family, to conserve the community and to conserve the nation requires socio-civil and ecological perspective and progress.
4. The Principle of Prudence Before Taking Action is Paramount
Consequences flow from every action well intentioned or otherwise. An intelligent conservative will always meaures actions by the prudence principle. For example Brexit was a national act of self harm manioulated and orchestrated by powerful separatist interests and naive critiques. Balanced, quaitative journalism and media are an essential part of a flourishing democracy. Its capture by monoploistic, or sectarian interests whether puoic or private is not in the oublic interest if open reflection.
5 Society Requires Noble, Honest & Able, Service-focussed Leadership
A healthy diversity of views and balance of interests is healthy in any civilisation. The problem with our politics today and the greatest arguement for Proportional Representation is that the types of potential intelligent leaders we need are prevented from entering the system. They will not accept the terms of vassalage or lack of integrity demanded as a cost of entry by all existing political parties.
6 Prudent Reform Is Achieved Through Principled Pragamatism
if the old institutional and moral safeguards of a nation are neglected, then the anarchic impulse in humankind breaks loose: “the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”
7. A Stable & Productive Society Requires A Frame of Human Obligations As Much As Human Rights
A sound economic basis for the person, the family, and the common wealth is much to be desired. It can only be pursued through distinguishing what is truly productive from what is extractive. The limiting of agency at the level of place and lack of protection from extractive predators exporting progits outside f our local centres of population has suppressed real frowth as well asopportunities for participation and contribution and a sense of belonging.
8. Local Agency, Voluntary Community & Cooperative Volition Are Essential For A Sustainable Flourishing Society
Intelligent Conservatism is about principled pragmatism, decentralised agency not centralised control in the name of abstract ideology or bureaucracy. In a genuine community, the decisions most directly affecting the lives of citizens are made locally and voluntarily.
Whatever is beneficent and prudent in modern democracy is made possible through cooperative volition. If in the name of an abstract Democracy, the functions of community are transferred to distant political direction— real government by the consent of the governed gives way to a standardizing process hostile to freedom and human dignity.
9. Balanced Restraints Upon Power & Excessive Human Passions Create Civil Society
When every person claims to be a power unto himself, then society falls into anarchy. A state in which an individual or a small group are able to dominate the wills of their fellows without check is a despotism, whether it is called monarchical or aristocratic or democratic.
10 Balancing Permanence & Change Is A Key Aim of Service Leadership & Dynamic Meaning Making
Reasoned and temperate progress is a part of free and vigorous society. “Change is as essential to the body social …. just as it is essential to the human body. A body that has ceased to renew itself has begun to die. But if that body is to be vigorous, change must occur in a regular manner, harmonizing with the form and nature of that body; otherwise change produces a monstrous growth, a cancer, which devours its host.”Consequently nothing in a society should ever be wholly old, and that nothing should ever be wholly new.
This requires restoring agency to local people so they have the power to grow nurture protect and husband local capacity, amenity, civil society and well being – the real wealth beyond money.
Our politicians have promoted the false premise that there is only a binary choice between false constructs of left and right. Sadly journalism in the UK has followed them down this road to nowhere. The solution is in a new integration of the best principles of conservation and progress.