Over the past couple of years, David Cameron’s Tories have sailed under a flag of convenience marked “progressive conservatism”. For most commentators, the important question has been just how “progressive” this new ideological confection is. Many on the left have taken it for granted that talk of Cameronian “progress” is just that - talk - and that the Conservatives’ commitment to, in their leader’s own words, the “progressive end of making British poverty history” is entirely rhetorical. On the right, the intellectual outriders of Cameronism have laboured strenuously to establish its “progressive” bona fides.
Read the rest of my essay on the meaning of conservatism in the New Statesman.