Reading about all these other lands where phony appeals to superstitious self-righteousness are political poison makes me feel like an embarrased kid forced to ride the short bus to school because of overcrowding on the regular one.

Ancram is not the only practising Catholic among leading Conservatives: Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Howard’s immediate predecessor as Conservative leader, is also a practising Catholic, as is Edward Leigh who, like IDS, is a prominent member of the “Cornerstone” group among Conservative MPs, a faction reportedly considering whether it might run a candidate in the forthcoming election for the Party leadership and which tends to flourish claims to right-wing credentials.

However, Michael Ancram has recently announced that he will not not be seeking to run as a candidate for the leadership and has instead signed up to support Malcolm Rifkind’s bid. Now Malcolm Rifkind has made much of his espousal of One Nation Conservatism, arguably the original inspiration for compassionate Conservatism with roots going back to Disraeli, Britain’s PM in 1868 and 1874-80 who wrote in his novel Sybil (1845) about:

“Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets. The rich and the poor.”
http://www.ibiblio.org/disraeli/sybil.pdf

Malcolm Rifkind was foreign secretary at the end of the last Conservative government here until the election in 1997 which brought Tony Blair and New Labour to power. He has made clear his scepticism and reservations about the Iraq war from the lead-up to the present, urging caution upon any British government before making open commitments to support the foreign policies of US administrations. Malcolm Rifkind is also a Eurosceptic. He also happens to be a jew but makes little of his faith and ethnicity in public pronouncements on his political views.

The resonance in Britain of the reports that President Bush was motivated by divine guidance in starting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq can perhaps be better understood in terms of a series of tragic court trials in Britain over the last ten years or so in which the various accused were convicted of having killed at random members of the public while apparently acting under divine guidance. Each had a prior history of diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia and had been released into the community to make their own way but had lapsed in regularly taking their prescribed medication. They were usually committed to secure mental health hospitals.

With due respect to Tom here, it seems to me verging on nonsense to suppose that Michael Ancram should be taken as characteric or representive of Conservative opinion and values just as it would be nonsense to suppose, say, Ian McCartney or David Blunkett are necessarily representative of New Labour values. It was Tony Blair himself who said in a keynote speech to the Chicago Economic Club in April 1999 on the Blairite foreign policy doctrine:

“If we can establish and spread the values of liberty, the rule of law, human rights and an open society then that is in our national interests too. . . If we want a world ruled by law and by international co-operation then we have to support the UN as its central pillar. . . ”
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/international/jan-june99/blair_doctrine4-23.html

We are now better placed know what importance Blair gave to that when it came to the crunch in 2003.

What great transformation could a god-appointed authority achieve if it could simply force the unwashed pot-smoking mob to behave according to the high standards of the Moral Elite!

Not just Hume, either: that’s pretty much the space occupied by all British moral philosophy in the 18th-c, with its negotiation between the idea of an innate moral sense and a more contingent model of self-love extended to society. (See also Adam Smith’s views on the social function of theism.) The founding sugar-daddies certainly embraced such notions, but that philosophical tradition in the US is offset by the influence of yer Jonathan Edwards-style Puritanism.

As for Ancram transplanted: well, the old-school monied Republicans of the New England shoreline aren’t doing too badly out of Bush, even as the party’s base has shifted away from them. I suspect that Ancram would be in the position of a Chris Shays or Olympia Snowe, derided as a Republican In Name Only. That’s to say that most Republicans are to Ancram’s right, whereas most of the Tory leadership contenders are to his left.

How about this from David Hume in 1748: Of the Original Contract ?

“All moral duties may be divided into two kinds. The first are those to which men are impelled by a natural instinct or immediate propensity which operates on them, independent of all ideas of obligation, and of all views either to public or private utility. Of this nature are love of children, gratitude to benefactors, pity to the unfortunate. When we reflect on the advantage which results to society from such humane instincts, we pay them the just tribute of moral approbation and esteem: but the person actuated by them feels their power and influence antecedent to any such reflection.

“The second kind of moral duties are such as are not supported by any original instinct of nature, but are performed entirely from a sense of obligation, when we consider the necessities of human society, and the impossibility of supporting it, if these duties were neglected. It is thus justice, or a regard to the property of others, fidelity, or the observance of promises, become obligatory, and acquire an authority over mankind. For as it is evident that every man loves himself better than any other person, he is naturally impelled to extend his acquisitions as much as possible; and nothing can restrain him in this propensity but reflection and experience, by which he learns the pernicious effects of that license, and the total dissolution of society which must ensue from it. His original inclination, therefore, or instinct, is here checked and restrained by a subsequent judgment or observation. . . .

“We shall only observe, before we conclude, that though an appeal to general opinion may justly, in the speculative sciences of metaphysics, natural philosophy, or astronomy, be deemed unfair and inconclusive, yet in all questions with regard to morals, as well as criticism, there is really no other standard, by which any controversy can ever be decided.”

Btw David Hume (1711-76) was a Tory and an agnostic. Go into a good academic bookshop nowadays almost anywhere and most will still be stocking his seminal texts.

Thankyou kindly – and good spot with the dodgy link. I’m going to blame my unfamiliarity with the fancy-dan Wordpress interface again, but I guess I’ll not be able pull that one off indefinitely.

I hate to say it, but I think they were booing because they think they have at least as good or better understanding of right and wrong as Americans do. I think you’d probably get this reaction anywhere you suggested to inhabitants of country X that inhabitants of country Y are morally superior to then.

what a pleasure that you have broken radio silence at last.

Your link to the background piece about Ancram is a bit bloggered, though. This should work, or else cut & paste:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/1400263.stm