Conservative anatomy

A Conservative Telegraph journalist Kate Maltby I think on Question Time last week prefaced her comments by saying: 'I am not a socialist'. She then proceeded to give a long emotive speech in defence of the NHS.Working on the premise of never underestimating the stupidity of a BBC audience she of course got away with it but it is illustrative of conservative 'thought'.

Perhaps I am being too generous toward the woman in question.She could be so confused and muddled in her thinking that she really believes that one can support the   NHS and Not be a socialist. As the NHS is a political ideological socialist construct through and through it is hard to see how this could be the case however especially as the woman was introduced as a historian! So I think it is safe to say she knew exactly what she was doing, namely to completely deceive her audience which is hardly the behaviour one would expect from a historian.

Looking at recent Conservative history this practice of deceit is one of its most salient characteristics -one only has to take a cursory look at how it has systematically misled and lied to the public about the UK's membership of the EU for decades and indeed continues to do so.

So dissimulation is one of the Conservatives sine qua non. As it professes to be anti ideological,pragmatist,non philosophical this gives it an awful lot of wriggle room which is an essential  requirement for political office or so it thinks

This sorry state of affairs does illustrate one thing perfectly and that is the inpossiblity of being ideology/philosophy -free.The quaint/bizarre thing about Conservatives is they truly believe that if you do not explicitly name the premise,ideology and philosophy that is driving your policies that will mean you are not being guided by them.

Although this is hard to comprehend it is of course possible that a person can be so divorced from the conceptual realm of thinking they can put forward policies that are based on an ideology and philosophy that they have never identified so that policies become floating concretes to be applied arbitrarily completely separated from their conceptual provenance and such is the nature of conservatism.