Its been ages since I have had a political rant. Recently I’ve been focussing on writing about the events around me. This is what has seemed important to me: my friends have been leaving, I’m going home soon myself, and I can’t help but feel morose about it. Now that campus is virtually empty, and nobody is about, I can focus on other stuff. My parents took my clothes home last night, leaving me just enough for the week, so I can’t have fun dressing up either. Boo.

Anyway, I was eating breakfast in the wes earlier, and David CaMoron was being interviewed on bbc news. In his ‘reasonable’ ‘jovial’ manner,, he was attacking labour’s tactic of ‘top down’ government. Naturally as a conservative, he thinks that institutions should be controlled by the people, not the government. When he said this, I realised just how stupid he and the philosophy he expounds is. The government, in a liberal democracy, IS the people. the people elect the government to control the institutions by proxy. If we allowed institutions such as the NHS to be run independently, as in free market capitalism, they would be run for profit. The result will be streamlined, cost-efficient, but also uncaring, unfair and open to mistakes. It’s executives would care more about their purses than patients. In short, it would be catastrophic.

People who vote conservative fail to understand this. we need government to help things run. People on their own are selfish, but working together we can be so much more. Thus we need governmental control for efficient administration. Conservatism, as we found before ’97, does not work. Frankly, I find it a sham philosophy – the only governing principals behind it are greed, fear of difference and fear of others. It means clinging on to the status quo – sort of an ‘I’m alright, sod you’ mentality. It’s exponents, of course, claim that it is ran my ‘social Darwinism’, i.e., left to its own devices, society will improve, but this is to misunderstand Darwin. He was describing nature, or rather it’s unconscious mechanisms. If we apply pure Darwinian principals to society, there would be a huge waste of talent – it would be a case of survival of the greediest and most opportunistic, not the ‘fittest’.

More pertinently to this blog, where would it leave us cripples? If society was based on conservatism, I think we would be screwed. We, without support such as direct payments, would not be able to keep up (I’m talking literal, physical support). It is the government which should be expected to provide this support on two counts: A) expecting people to pay for their own support would lead to an unfair, inhumane lottery of life. B) under the social model, it is society which disables us through it’s barriers; it follows that society should be expected to remove those barriers.

Why don’t people see conservatism for what it is? It is a sham, poorly thought out, centred on the self; it is as worrying as it is ridiculous. Why it didn’t die out in the late nineteenth century would be beyond me, had I not factored in people’s inability to understand new ideas.