An Open Letter To The UK Conservative Party
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Dear Conservatives,
Your establishment, the Conservative and Unionist Party is the most successful political organisation in the history of western democracy.
A vast majority of the political figures whom you’ve learnt about at school were Conservatives: Robert Peel, William Pitt the Elder and Younger; Lord Palmerston, Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Salisbury, AJ Balfour, Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Harold MacMillan and Margaret Thatcher.
Pragmatism, which is the organising principle of the Conservatives, ensured that it survived the great political, economic and historical upheavals of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.
The ideological schisms which arose from the implementation of corn laws, free trade and global imperialism, which destroyed the Liberal party, left the Tories (the sobriquet for the Conservatives) in a position of strength at the dawn of the bloodiest century, in the history of humankind.
And when the Labour government of 1945 began the Post-war consensus, which was a regime of high taxation and public investments, the Conservatives had no problems in adopting the policies of the socialists, for as long as it was practical to do so.