by James Price, The Critic
There were grounds for optimism about the future of England in Westminster this week
A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.
From this profoundly moving passage of T.S. Eliot emerged the name of a conference in the heart of Westminster, called “Now and England”. Organised by the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation, and pulled together by the Stakhanovite Cambridge Theology Professor Dr James Orr.
You might have thought that a conference, held in a stifling, un-air-conditioned room, hosted by a Cambridge don and named after a line of elegiac poetry might have been a mournful, melancholic affair.
You would be wrong — gloriously wrong, in fact. The event was full of people talking about new initiatives, and debating fundamental questions about identity and philosophy in a way that would have had CCHQ’s party conference organisers glancing nervously at what the lobby was writing, and their Labour peers reaching for a dictionary to try to keep up.
Speaking were the usual mix of academics, MPs, and journalists, but there was a much more entrepreneurial spirit to the contributions than normal. The first speaker was Robert Jenrick, who came almost literally from down a mountain to speak (he had spent the weekend completing the three peaks challenge).
His wide-ranging speech veered ever so slightly off his shadow brief, covering immigration, energy costs and, err, the economy. Quoting Scruton liberally, he also became the first MP to describe himself as an “Anglofuturist”, an exciting new idea that holds the radical contention that England should once again be really good at stuff and nice to live in by embracing both technology and tradition — think thatched-roofed space stations and small modular reactors underneath every cricket pavilion (thanks to Calum Drysdale and Tom Ough for those!).
The next session was on paper, again, an unlikely source of dynamism. But almost all of the panellists used their slots to advertise new organisations and projects that are actually trying to change policy, change the academy and inspire people.