Margaret Thatcher Centre Freedom Festival: Day 2

Today was only a half day. We began with a session entitled Defeating Net Zero and other enemies of Freedom in which the panellists exposed some of the stupidities of government policy. Like so much of the weekend’s discussion the policy is as much the former “Conservative” government’s as the present Labour one’s.

Defeating Net Zero panel

Catherine McBride OBE, an economist and member of the UK Trade & Agriculture Commission made the point that, if emissions matter, they matter everywhere. We have deindustrialised the UK and sent our emissions to China. On any analysis, that doesn’t help the planet at all. We pay people to plant trees in Scotland where they will die from lack of CO². What we should have done is planted them along our motorways, including on the central reservation where they’d not just absorb CO² but help screen drivers from the bright LED headlights of oncoming cars, which are themselves a consequence of net zero policies.

As a nation, we have only three  natural resources: coal, oil and natural gas. We’ve decided not to use them. Meanwhile Europe is giving Russia more for gas than it’s giving Ukraine to fight Russia. If we don’t want to use our gas ourselves we could have sold it to our European neighbours rather than having them become more reliant on a hostile country. There are countries where solar makes sense. The UK is not one of them. Solar operators are only making money from subsidies. It’s a government-sponsored Ponzi scheme. We ourselves import fracked LPG from the US while concreting over our own frackable reserves to ensure we can never get to them – even perhaps in some future military emergencies when we couldn’t import what we need for our own war effort. This is, she said, insane. 

Christopher Howarth of the European Research Group explained that for a new government to undo Net Zero in 2029 is an extremely difficult proposition. It’s not embedded in any one piece of legislation but in many acts of Parliament. The most recent revision to the target didn’t even have a proper debate in Parliament. It was done by statutory instrument and there was no vote at all.The few opponents who might have voted against didn’t even know it was happening. Even when it becomes apparent the damage that Net Zero is doing to our national economy (while making zero difference to global emissions) it will be hard to undo it in a country where it’s desirability is taught in the National Curriculum as fact.

I found many of this weekend’s discussions interesting and educational but the best speech of all was from Claire Fox (Baroness Fox of Buckley) an “old Lefty” (her words) from my home town in Wales. Claire used to be a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party and the editor of Living Marxism magazine. She remains on the Left but is reviled by her new identarian comrades because she regards freedom of speech as – not a right-wing excuse to allow hate speech to flourish – but part of the essential inheritance of the Enlightenment. She finds it infuriating that people tell her she’s now a Conservative because she believes in free speech. It’s a value that’s central to our civilisation and does not belong to the Right. 

She warned us that we were in danger of falling down the same rabbit hole as her tribe. It’s all too easy (and tempting if you’ve been under attack for a long time) to join in with the identarian game, but if we start to pursue remedies based on our identity groups being oppressed we will legitimise the whole “woke” movement. We must resist the temptation to pick up their weapons and try to win arguments based on reason, not identity-politics points-scoring.

She gave the example of the current row over the Netflix drama Adolescence. Before she realised it was going to be politically controversial she tweeted that it was a good drama. She is now getting hateful comments from people who want it cancelled because the protagonist is a white, working class teenager and they consider that an attack on everyone in that group. Whatever the producers’ reasons for casting it as they did, calling for the show’s cancellation and condemning it without watching it is a dangerously familiar, irrational approach.

She thought President Trump was going in for cancellation of his opponents too but warned that “sticking it to the libs” can and will backfire. We must hold onto the idea that words are not violence. The only reason the Left is arguing that they are is to justify the use of actual violence against words! 

Gawain Towler, former Head of Press for UKIP, the Brexit Party and Reform UK followed on from Claire and commented that he’d been horrified by the tactics used by both sides of the Reform UK split. Calling in the police, leaking private WhatsApps and other such attempts at mutual cancellation were indeed echoes of the civil wars on the Left. He made the interesting observation that there was too much talk about hate in politics whereas what really drove most people in politics – in his experience – was love. On the Right, people loved their country and their way of life and the very British tradition of not seeking a perfect society but of muddling through in an imperfect one, which was ours and which we loved. He didn’t explain what it was that those on the Left loved (apart from spending other peoples’ money) but he made it clear that civilised political debate needs an acceptance that one’s opponents are humans with whom we disagree, not monsters. 

Organising for Freedom panel

The closing discussion on Organising for Freedom was interesting in that it came closest to addressing the problems facing the divided Right in Britain. There’s not much doubt that the British electorate is going to be ready to ditch Labour at the next election, but would the parties of the Right be ready to offer them that option? I asked again how the Conservative Party was going to win back the trust of the electorate. I said its traditional voters were furious they’d wasted fourteen years of opportunities and were bound to ask – even if offered an excellent programme – why they should believe it would be implemented based on past non-performance? I was disappointed with the response. Mumbling about acknowledging error and apologising really didn’t cut it for me. The panel was much happier talking about reforming the Conservative Party’s organisation than its ideology. 

People seem to have forgotten that Margaret Thatcher was not just an excellent PM but a cunning Leader of the Opposition. She’d circumvented the Tory Grandees, Central Office and the Conservative Research Department (none of whom were her friends). She’d assembled, together with Sir Keith Joseph, a team of academic advisers and policy wonks at the Centre for Policy Studies and produced a programme for a future Conservative Government. I led my university’s student Conservatives to control of our student union for the first time in its history during her period in opposition. We were enthused both by her leadership and the policies the CPS was producing. All of us had read, for example, its pamphlet “Why Britain needs a Social Market Economy.”

In a Britain where net zero, critical race theory and gender fluidity are taught as fact at secondary school, some similar effort is going to be needed to win the trust of the electorate in general and particularly the young.

I have funded my two daughters through bachelors’ and masters’ degree courses at the Universities of Cambridge, London and the LSE. Ideologically, they might as well have attended KGB staff college under Beria. A lot of students these days tick ideological boxes to win their degrees while privately dismissing the crap they’re taught, but still some of it sticks. The challenge of winning them over is greater than Thatcher ever faced. I think it’s a legitimate criticism of Margaret’s legacy, much as I admired her, that she took on the wrong foes. Rather than fighting the soon-to-be-irrelevant coal miners, she should have fought the Marxist infiltrators of our schools, universities and – most-insidiously – teacher training colleges. The Education “blob” is at the heart of the Leftist deep state and a primary cause of our national decline. 

It was an interesting weekend and it’s always uplifting to be among like-minded people of goodwill. However I heard nothing to convince me that Reform UK and the Conservative Party will have united or allied and agreed a programme to give voters the weapon they’ll want by 2029 (if not sooner) to beat Labour to an electoral pulp.