Many times have we heard the mantra from all those on the liberal-Left that if a party embraced real conservatism it would be unelectable and in the wilderness. Why should that be the case?

Maybe one answer is that so many have now been successfully brainwashed by the liberals and the socialists with their dogmas? How many times have real conservatives chatted to young folk under, say, 30, who insist they are conservatives when in fact it soon becomes patently obvious that they are in fact liberals, at best.

I believe that there is a rational, understandable, and good case for conservatism to be made and which is both understandable and recognisable as a basis for a stable society, something neither the cancerous anything-goes anarchy of liberalism nor the doctrinaire dogmas of socialism could ever provide, both being dictatorial and detached from all we have known and accepted for centuries as our culture and heritage, the very foundations of any society.

This can be summed up thus: the ethos of conservatism is tradition, defence of social tradition, and emphasis on the values of community, kinship, hierarchy, authority, and religion; add also conservatism’s premonition of social chaos surmounted by absolute power once individuals have become wrenched from the context of these values by the forces of radical liberalism or socialism. Conservatives began with the absolute reality of the institutional order as they found it, the order bequeathed by history. (1) We are lucky to be able to build on the achievements of our ancestors, and the important thing is to maintain them and not throw them away. (2)

Conservatives should have an affectionate regard for their nations’ institutions, whether monarchy, church, or state, and a passionate loyalty to their indigenous nation, with the thousand sacred associations which all this involves, arguing that these institutions have served us well and are part of our heritage and culture. It is not necessary to copy others. ‘Modernisers’ and ‘progressives’ are not conservatives because they wish to change, for political reasons, those things where change is unnecessary. Conservatives want natural progress and evolution which, by prudent legislation and by consistent efforts to educate the unlearned; to support the feeble; to raise the humble; to ameliorate the condition of those at the bottom of the social scale; to teach people the lessons of steady and graduated progress so that, first of all under the guidance of others, and lastly on their own accord, that they may learn to be happy and God-fearing and free in a structured society normal to man and nature; and to train them above all so that they and their children may learn to become fit inheritors of their noble patrimony. (3)

Real conservatives believed that you had to work to live, and that the State owed you nothing, that respect for authority was essential, and that traitors and murderers should be hanged by the neck until they were dead. They believed in their King, in the House of Lords (in Britain), in being properly represented in parliament, and they believed in justice. Indeed political leaders used to attempt to reflect these attitudes in their orations. (4)

Over the past two thousand years and beyond, our European societies have seen their faith, the family, and their hierarchies as the bedrock of their societies. Whatever happened, these remained. These were the eternal forms of social life. However unsatisfactory they may seem to be, there is no way of escaping these necessary things, which until the French and Russian revolutions (and the past fifty years of Western Leftism) sustained us all. The alternatives offered by liberalism can be essentially divided into two: one part being a greedy world-wide team of industrialists who see us all not as real people but as economic units who exist merely to churn out their profits, and the second part being their deconstruction of all morals and established values, whether it be the advancement of secularism or the destruction of the family and all it ever stood for; a society wandering in the wilderness; and then socialism, an evil creed whose principal tenet is envy, and hate of hierarchy, of our heritage and cultures. We saw the most extreme examples of this in the Communist countries, where this dogma resulted in the deaths of some 143,000,000 people. Clearly this is not the way forward and is one of the reasons those states collapsed. But it does not mean that liberalism is the answer. We need to renew the family, reconnect with the best of all those things that the deconstructionists have attacked and debased, rebuild an aristocracy, and revive the sense of nation and religion, or otherwise we shall surely die. (5)

This brings me to one of the most pressing issues of today: race and nation. While it has been condemned because of its association with Hitler and the excesses of his party, it nevertheless remains a crucial and honest issue. Race is not a social construct. Equality is. Even the Bible tells us of the Tower of Babel where God dispersed the peoples into separate entities. Evolution and history have clearly demonstrated very significant differences between the races. The ideal nation is one which possesses those characteristics which distinguish it clearly from others, and is free from external control, being sufficiently strong to maintain that freedom. One of the chief objects for which this freedom is required is the unrestrained enjoyment of the characteristics mentioned in the first point; we could add a third, namely, acting as a single entity possessing interests and pursuing policies designed to promote those interests. (6) This formula is entirely incompatible with mass immigration into Europe by people of other cultures and races who have made no contribution to our civilisation as we know it and who have nothing to offer us. Moreover, there is the eternal issue of the sheer numbers of outsiders who are entering our lands every day. It is a conservative’s prime duty to maintain the social cohesion of this ancient continent.

There are a great many conservatives who have consistently pointed out that admitting non-European aliens to Europe will mean its demise and ultimately its destruction. As I have pointed out above, our traditional societies have evolved here, amongst our peoples and by our peoples. Thrice British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin said, ‘Let us keep this thought ever in our mind: that each one of us, so far as in him lies, will strive to keep these islands a fit nursery for Our Race’. (7) Clearly Baldwin did not see citizenship as a mere paper qualification. And in 1971 the British parliamentarian J Enoch Powell said, ‘In your town, in mine, people see with their own eyes what they dread, the transformation during their own lifetime or, if they are already old, during their children’s, of towns, cities, and areas that they know into alien territory.’ (8)

In 1990 another fellow parliamentarian stated, ‘If mass immigration is not halted it will permanently and irreversibly change the nature of the British people.’ (9) These people are not ‘Nazis’ or ‘fascists’ and so on, but just ordinary people who believe that the very existence of their nation is threatened by ‘invasions’ of vast numbers of aliens. It is entirely legitimate to identify Europe and the British Isles as a distinctive cultural area, and unrestricted Third World immigration as a challenge to its existence.

The immigration scenario across Europe in 2015 has reached epic and disastrous proportions and the views of real conservatives are demonised and dismissed because the institutions have been conquered by the Left. Schools, colleges, universities, and the media are almost completely in their hands and have been now for at least five decades. But we can fight back. Just as they saw ‘education’ as their tool we too can educate people into becoming more aware of truth and what the liberal-Left are doing to them and their countries. Conservatism does have a future because of its simple goodness and patriotism; and because of its belief in the people and their past and their future, if we adhere to traditional values. There is no necessary conflict between evolutionary progress and tradition.

We must denounce liberalism, the sickness that has reduced Britain and the civilised European world to the level of a debased and demoralised polyglot slum, and the degenerate nature of our Leftist ‘progressive’ society, which has been reflected in so many ways. Real conservatives must provide a lead for all by speaking out and making others aware that there is another way. Today we have the Internet, providing an opportunity to reach out to millions with our messages of honest common sense.

There never was a time when a restatement of the principles of conservatism was more necessary. We have never believed in standing still. We have always moved ahead steadily. But we equally believe in building on the strong and tried foundations of the past, not jettisoning all that our fathers have bequeathed to us.

1 Robert Nisbet (1966), reprinted in Monday Club News 12 April 1991

2 Roger Scruton

3 Adapted from a speech by George Nathaniel Curzon at Stapenhill, England, on Tory principles, February1884

4 After Judge Gerald Sparrow (UK)

5 After Gustave Thibon in ‘Back to Reality’ (1955)

6 From Nationalism (Royal Institute of International Affairs, Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 261, ‘The Nature of Nations’

7 Stanley Baldwin at the Hyde Park Empire Day Demonstration, 24 May 1929 (cited in his book This Torch of Freedom, 1935)

8 Speech originally delivered in 1972, reprinted as ‘Immigration’ in Empire Windrush (Victor Gollancz, 1998)

9 Nicholas Budgen, MP, 17 January 1990