What is Conservatism?

What is Conservatism?

Conservatism is by far the most difficult ideology to pin down unlike socialism and liberalism which are clear and have very distinct cornerstones, Conservatism is almost a living ideology constantly changing and moving to adapt with the times.  There is a reason the Conservative party is one of the oldest parties in the world, and why it survived when the Liberals died, it is because of the flexible nature of Conservatism.  On a basic level  Conservatism is keeping (conserving) what is good and what works and changing what fails to work.  The Conservative party is rather like a chameleon it has an uncanny ability to change its skin to suite the political background of the day.

Many people today associate Conservatism with Thatcherism, and while Thatcherism is a strand of Conservatism, it is only one of many strands of Conservative thinking albeit a rather dominant one.  If you look back through history, you will see a constantly evolving Conservative party the Conservatives passed legislation for trade union rights and health projects before the Labour party was even formed.  There have been large changes in Tory ideology over the years with Disraeli’s One nation Conservatism to Macmillan’s “middle way” which lead to the entrenching and expansion of the welfare system and more recently the party was gripped by Thatcherism which saw the state rolled back and the private enterprise grow.  It is fair to say all these distinctly different strands of Conservatism are Conservative in their nature as they identify a problem and change what causes the problem while not changing programmes and institutions which that group believe work.

To conclude Conservatism is the ideology of common sense in my opinion because of how it works, it identifies what is working and what is failing, it then tries to improve that what is failing while leaving that what is working.  This is why there are so many strands of Conservatism and why traditionally the Conservative party has a large core support because it is a broad church inviting many different ideas.  In my opinion the reason the Conservative party failed to adapt between 97 and 2005 is because it forgot its roots and rather than changing the strand of Conservatism that governed the party as it had always traditionally done in opposition it stuck with Thatcherism and failed to keep up with changes in society.  It is my opinion that the Conservative ideology is vast and almost to lose to even be a real ideology, it is so much harder to define than socialism or liberalism but that is why it works so well.  The Conservative party survives because it has and hopefully always will be a party of competing ideas.