What I Saw at NatCon U.K.
by Dan Hitchens, First Things:
[…] As I searched the venue for a coffee urn that hadn’t been drained dry, I found a man on a similar quest: Danny Kruger, MP for Devizes. “My thesis is that this is the anti-‘Imagine’ coalition,” I said as we descended to the basement, empty paper cups in hand. “As in John Lennon. Everyone here cringes at ‘Imagine.’”
“Oh yes,” he said. “I’m actually covering that in my speech.”
And he did, inveighing against Lennon’s “dystopian fantasy” of no countries and no religion. Kruger is one of those mysterious examples, still never fully explained or investigated, of a serious political thinker who has managed to break into the House of Commons. His speech was eloquent on the tendency of Thatcherism to “eat itself,” consuming the social institutions on which a functioning market depends; on human nature—“We are related before we are alone”—and on the basic unit of society: “The normative family, held together by marriage, by mother and father sticking together for the sake of the children and the sake of their own parents and for the sake of themselves: this is the only possible basis for a safe and successful society.”
(The political establishment, of course, regarded this as a shocking sentiment. The next day the prime minister distanced himself from such outrageous comments, and the following day the deputy leader of the Labour opposition sneered at the John Lennon line.)
Kruger is critical of the Tories of 2010–19: They presided, he said, over the hollowing-out of local government and the continuation of a “butler economy” over-reliant on financial services, while failing to check the “new religion” that mixes “Marxism, narcissism and paganism.” Another internal Tory critic among the speakers was the excellent MP Miriam Cates, who last week revealed that she wept at a government policy designed to nudge mothers into the workplace and children into nurseries.
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