A farewell to conservatism
The following article features in our October 2024 print issue, available to subscribers.
I am reminded, almost constantly, of the great Shelley poem, Ozymandias, in which a man of his own time comes, almost my chance, across a cautionary relic of the great bygone. In a barren and stark wasteland, he discovers a plaque that reads: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” It is a tale of collapse – inevitable, hopeless collapse – and the hubris of rulers who declare themselves, yet do nothing to ensure that the generations beyond them see what they had seen.
Conservatism is dead. That is, conservatism has failed in its basic purpose, ran aground, fallen out of the public imagination, ceased to inspire, and so expired.
This is, however, not something to be mourned, for conservatism in the year of our Lord is a siphon for ideas, an abyss for revolutionary sentiment, Bedlam for the inspired, and extinguisher of the authentic fire of rage that all who wish to see England live another day feel.
Do not mourn the death of conservatism, because there is nothing left to conserve – only the Blairite appetite for atrophy and ash, thrust into the wind by the wake of a small boat hurtling across the English Channel. Do not gather in the churchyard, in mourning clothes of black, for the graves have been dug up, and the church is but a pile of rubble and ash.
Conservatism is dead, and it has foregone its right to be mourned.
It would be trite for me to say “14 years”… but this is undeniable when discussing the legacy of ‘conservatism’. To further illustrate how far an ideology, with really only one precept – to conserve – has fallen, the writer Evelyn Waugh decried the party over 80 years ago for having failed to turn the clock back, even by a minute. One needs only hear the utterance of the average Conservative politician to know, that there is nothing left to see. Suffice it to say that there is nothing left to conserve, save for the treacherous parliamentarian, the incompetent civil servant, the servile King, and the indefatigable tides of demographic shift, economic stagnation, moral discombobulation, and civic decay.
So what happens next?
I do not believe that England, as it were, is dead. I’ve said this before in my column – that for as long as there are Englishmen, breathing English air into English lungs, there shall be an England.
But this is not something that requires protection, rather resuscitation. It is a twitching, slightly damp corpse, playing host to just about enough life for a last-ditch attempt at revival.
England’s soul is immaterial, and therefore immortal and anti-fragile – it lives in every field and hedgerow, every note of Elgar, every line of Shakespeare – but her body is beaten and warped, and replete with tapeworms and maggots, early to the feast.
And yet, somewhere within, hiding in a deep recess and waiting for the sun to shine again, the Barbary lion, armed with the trident of Britannia and the willing words of a thousand generations, lays in wait, and can roar again, if it is allowed to.
The Conservatives will not let it, for they see fit to preserve nothing but the Hyaena, who robs the lion of his kill, and starves him slowly, leaving only enough standing to say that this is still England. The Conservative roars, but only a whimper comes out. They are, quite simply, atrophy driving at the speed limit.
If England is to survive, and if the lion is to roar once more, then the answer lies in us – those who still believe in the lion. If conservatism is dead, and no longer worthy of our time and expense, then something new must come.
It is no secret that recent events in America present us with a lucrative opportunity. Not only are both the richest and most powerful men in the Western world staunch Anglophiles, ready and willing to help us in our hour of need, but their passage to power represents a blueprint, tried and tested and proven to be effectual.
The phoenix-from-the-ashes rise of Donald Trump is not a conservative success story. His platform, when viewed in explicitly semantic terms, is not one of holding onto the past, or of protecting what is. His is a rhetoric of rediscovery, of reforging a dormant empire, of restoration.
It is the latter of those words that I have found myself returning to, time and time again, when I consider the bright and effervescent future that Americans may now dare to believe in – and the future that we too may allow ourselves to see, if only.
Restoration.
England cannot be conserved, because there is nothing to conserve but its own terminal malaise. England can, however, be restored.
Where the incoming Trump administration must choose its steps masterfully is in the striking at the very heart of the instruments of malaise; the civil service, the education sector, the public square itself. Ventures such as the ‘Doge’ (Department of Government Efficiency), and tailored assaults on formerly elite universities and the military establishment, as well as the mainstream media, represent a serious commitment to the first step of civilisational correction – ousting those who drive and profit from the ongoing collapse.
Alas, we do not have an incoming government who have promised to steer the ship back into the sunlight. We, for now at least, are stuck in the choppy waters of Starmocracy.
There is, however, hope here.
The Starmer government has become, perhaps, the most hated in modern British history and has done so in record time.
There is anger – a sincere sense that successive governments have let us down, and turned their backs on us, and now the assault is full-frontal and ceaseless. I do not believe that this government will, or can, win again.
This is where perspective becomes key. We may be stuck with this regime for five years, but we also have five years to strategise, to build, and to put an alternative before the British people, who by then will cry out and line the streets to have their country back.
So this is my pitch to the English, those among us who dare to dream that one day we can reclaim what was not only lost, but taken without consent.
Let go of conservatism. It has served you no good. Let go of the feeble arguments about the rate of change, or the hypocrisy, or the correct speed limit for national collapse into obscurity that can only rival the long-forgotten empires of old, who once declared themselves to be sovereigns of the world and all creation.
Let go of the twee, impotent and ineffective aesthetics of a dying nation, and embrace the vitality and the virility of a nation reborn.
Somewhere in our populace are the distant progenies of Bacon, of Drake, of Raleigh, of Wren, Brunel, Newton, Shackleton, Wordsworth; men who went forth and conquered, built, innovated, created, captured, all for the glory of England. They loved England with sufficient passion as to do great things in her name. We are no different, but our challenges are.
Restore England. Do not worship the ashes of an extinguished fire, build a bigger fire, and let it illuminate the world with our brilliance, our genius, our vision and our might.
Scatter the atrophist and the leacher, who gain their sustenance from feeding on the corpses of our forebears. Reimagine England as a beacon to the world in an age of insanity. Dream of the stars, for it was we who conquered the earth.
And so I return to the beginning, to Ozymandias, “King of Kings”. Let this guide and motivate you, dear reader.
In 100 years, will England be at the forefront of today, or a cautionary tale of yesterday? Will our relics sit in a pantheon of our achievements, or will they break the collective hearts of tomorrow’s poet? Will the sacrifice of our soldiers in yesterday’s war be in vain? That is for us to decide, for if we stick to the pathology of conserving the forces of our own destruction, then Ozymandias is our fate.
And so, if I dare speak for the rest of us. We are not conservatives, rather we are Restorationists.
No matter how dark the night, how bleak the day, how insurmountable the task may feel, how wicked and treacherous the politician, how inept the civil servant, how vast the conquering army – England will always be worth fighting for.
