At the beginning of the month it was conveniently revealed, on the wink and the nod, that Mr Steve Hilton, the Director of Strategy in Downing Street, and Oliver Letwin MP were privately in favour of EU withdrawal. Yet, as I noted in the case of John Redwood, until individuals make their alleged privately held views public, such speculation is not worth a cursory glance.

This morning it was the turn of the Daily Mail to play willing fool as it dutifully repeated a leak claiming Steve Hilton had suggested:

…the Government should abolish maternity leave and scrap all consumer rights laws to help kick start the economy. [He] also suggested that the Prime Minister should abolish all job centres and ignore all European labour rules.

This afternoon we had Tim Montgomerie recounting the thoughts of the great sage and former MP, Paul Goodman who once described Steve Hilton as ‘Edmund Burke beamed into contemporary San Francisco’. It must be that Mr Goodman was referring to another Edmund Burke, rather than the Whig MP who proved so prophetic in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, because as far as I can determine then there is little in the way of similarity between him and Hilton. To compare the two as equal is to do the memory of the father of conservatism a great dishonour.

If, as David Breaker recently wrote, Steve Hilton is ‘a traditionalist in disguise,’ then I’ll be the first to say that it is an incredibly good one. Hilton had me completely fooled. I, along with many others, honestly thought that he was just another liberal social democrat purporting to be a ‘conservative’. How silly of me.

I recant. Now I see Mr Hilton’s vision of the ‘Big Society’, his pursuit of an ethnicity-based candidate selection process for the Tories, and push to waste more money on the NHS as intrinsically conservative in nature. Truly he is the heir to Edmund Burke!

On a slightly more serious note, all these faux leaks tend to have one real aim, which is to deceive conservative-inclined members of the electorate into voting for the Conservative party. Once again, as Helen Szamuely highlighted, there is a common theme in all this:

…the presentation of the Conservative Party as the one and only truly eurosceptic political organization in this country, for which all ‘true’ eurosceptics should vote.

Much is suggested, without any supporting evidence, that a Conservative Government shod of its Lib Dim partners would be more conservative in its policies and approach. Yet, it is a false hope. A majority Conservative administration would differ little in its policies from the Coalition or indeed New Labour.

With ‘traditionalists’ like David Cameron and Steve Hilton at the helm, who move so freely between the metropolitan classes and the liberal elite, then the Conservative party are run by a group where conservativism is viewed as repellent and the leftist creeds of climate change, equality and diversity are worshiped. This is why Cameron and Hilton are as they are, and shall remain forever so.

During the past few days there has been much discussion of her legacy in the media and on the internet, with Boris Johnson in the Telegraph, the Conservative History website, and even the BBC getting in on the act.

However, with all the fawning praise and, conversely, criticism from the Left, very little in the way of analysis has been given to Thatcher’s Governments from a conservative perspective. How about the traditionally conservative argument that Thatcher’s governments did nothing to stop the social and cultural revolution that has been taking place in this country since the late 1950s?

Firstly, we have to establish the solid fact that Mrs Thatcher was certainly not a conservative – she was a liberal. Her free market ideology was influenced by the economist Milton Friedman and the author Friedrich Hayek, both of whom described themselves as liberals and explicitly said they were not conservatives.

Furthermore, conservatism has not traditionally supported the ideas of any particular type of economic system, free market or not. Traditional conservatism has sought to maintain social stability through maintenance and gradual progression, rather than rapid transition, of the current social order.

The market system which Thatcher imposed upon Britain radically altered our society in a very short period of time – some of the effects of which we are only just beginning to feel now. It was an economic revolution rather than a slow and gradual process.

Thatcher was responsible for among the greatest surrenders of British sovereignty to the European Union. She signed the Single European Act in 1986 which was particularly unconservative, because wisdom suggests that although the nation state is not the only possible solution as a form of political order, it is a tried and tested solution that largely works and the only environment in which democracy seems permitted.

The EU, whose aim it is to sweep away the old order of nation states, democratic traditions, and accumulated knowledge, and replace it with a new, untested supranational construct in which sovereignty is passed to a higher level than the nation, is fundamentally alien to conservatism. While she did, in the end, perhaps wake up to the undemocratic and destructive nature of European integration – it was by then too late.

Margaret Thatcher was uninterested in the defence of selective education and Grammar schools, despite the fact that she had attended one. Instead her Governments submitted to the equality agenda and destruction of these schools.

During the sixties the Labour party began to pursue their Comprehensive school agenda with much more vigour, despite it being acknowledged that the pursuit of equality of outcome would lead to a decline in educational rigour and standards. Yet, it was in her capacity as Education Secretary under Edward Heath that she approved more applications for Grammar schools to be turned into Comprehensives than any previous period.

Further, this surrender to the Left and the educational revolution taking place in Britain extended into her own Governments where she refused to reopen or build a single new Grammar school.

It must be made absolutely clear that if you do not have selection by ability, which is by far the fairest method of selection, then you do not remove it altogether but simply replace it with another means by which schools choose their pupils. Academic selection now takes place in Comprehensive schools by wealth (by means of catchment areas where only the richest can afford the properties prices of houses near the best schools and poorer families are forced out), by religion and by the use of ‘interviews’ where the middle classes benefit at the expense of the poor.

Thatcher’s Governments failed to reverse the creeping levels of political correctness entering our society, or to protect marriage or prevent an enormous growth in the size and power of the public sector. She failed to reform the National Health Service when she had the opportunity, or the BBC whose progressive influence on British society has been so damaging since.

Her Governments did not seek to challenge the liberal-Left on its social and moral agenda, and her decade long rule helped to undermine personal responsibility and British liberties. In so many ways Margaret Thatcher continued the liberalisation of our society that begun in the late fifties, through her economic reforms and her indifference to the cultural agenda of the Left.

The strange, reverent cult that has built up around her image and legacy certainly needs to be examined more closely, because I do not necessarily believe that Margaret Thatcher is deserving of some of the praise she seems to have won.

The title of the dissertation is ‘New Leader, New Conservatives?’ The document was submitted for review on the 1st May 2009 and I will receive word of the grade in the middle of June. The abstract for the dissertation is as follows:

Since the election of David Cameron as Leader of the Conservative party, very little scrutiny by academics and the media has been afforded to the nature of its policies and the political agenda of the party leadership. This study argues that David Cameron has fundamentally re-aligned his political party, and attempts to rectify the notion that the Conservative party still pursues conservatism in any meaningful way. In doing so, this study shall highlight how the Conservative party in Britain has surrendered itself to the neo-liberal Leftist political consensus.

At roughly ten thousand words, it might take a little longer to read than most of my usual blog postings. I hope, however, that you will feel it is worth the time and effort. The content of the document has not been added to since it was submitted and therefore represents the dissertation in its original form.

Download a copy of the dissertation (.pdf – 487kb)

I would imagine that a number of people may not necessarily like my conclusions. However, I am hardly alone in taking this point of view. If you disagree with any point that I’ve made or have any remarks then please leave them in the comments area.

The motion was passed, in the final division, by 205 votes to 17, with the majority of those opposing the measure being from the Conservative backbenches, although there were a few opponents from the other parties.

Unfortunately, leading only rather minor opposition to the motion, Christopher Chope MP reminded those assembled Members of Parliament that, before they voted, they should remember:

The fact is that we have never used this Chamber for anything other than parliamentary debate. We do not even use it for parliamentary meetings or party meetings.

We should not abandon or abandon lightly the traditions of this House, which have meant that this Chamber is the one for those who have the privilege of being elected as Members of the real Parliament, not members of a mock parliament, whether it be a youth parliament, a Muslim parliament or any other parliament.

As Christopher Chope rightly says, traditions should not be lightly abandoned, whether in Parliament or anywhere else. However, this is exactly what we as a nation have been doing, right across the board, for the past sixty years – and to our great cost.

It goes without saying that allowing the Youth Parliament to use the Commons chamber would set a precedent, and demeans the role of Parliament. Having said that, over numerous decades our MPs have been doing a good job of undermining Parliament anyway, so, I suppose, why would they suddenly stop now?

Perhaps, in a few years time, when the Commons have finished the process of passing over our powers of governance to the EU, we could turn the Houses of Parliament into a Museum for Democracy? For a small fee, visitors would be able visit what was once the Mother of all Parliaments, wander its luxuriously panelled corridors and wonder how exactly it came to pass that hundreds of years of freedom and democracy were frittered away so easily and in such a comparatively short period of time.

Well, unsurprisingly Tim’s efforts at actually rebutting Peter’s article were somewhat poor to say the least. Again unsurprisingly Mr Hitchens took the opportunity to reply to Tim’s criticisms – and he did so in stunning fashion.

It is worth reading both pieces and the comments in the section below each one. Take note of the fact that those that disagree with Peter generally do not argue against his points but just personally attack him and then dismiss him. Very telling I think.

Anyway, here is my favourite comment from Hitchens’ reply. It’s perhaps just as good as his previous statement that ‘you can’t be in Europe and not run by Europe any more than you can be in Wormwood Scrubs and not run by Wormwood Scrubs’:

In my view, the word ‘Eurosceptic’ means ‘a person who adopts anti-EU rhetoric in opposition, and then surrenders to the EU in government’. This is inevitable. You cannot be in the EU and not run by it, any more than you can be a little bit pregnant. If you don’t like being run by it, you must leave, as all serious students of the subject long ago realised. I don’t think there’s any serious dispute about which side of this fence Mr Cameron is on.

If Tim at ConservativeHome started to regularly post more critical articles (which ConHome’s sycophantic pages currently lack,) in a similar thoughtful vein to Peter’s piece then I might actually be tempted to started visiting and commenting on the site again. Just imagine it – reasoned, reasonable discussion rather than mindless wittering and blind allegiance.