It’s more complicated

✒ YOUR correspondent CN Westerman has a very one-sided view of Conservatism when he characterises Conservative policies as ‘deprivation, malnutrition, inadequate housing and future resentment in just some of the children committed to our love’ (Letters, May 20).

I can assure Mr/Ms Westerman that no such policies featured in the last Conservative manifesto.

A standard A-Level politics text by John Kingdom identifies four different strands of Conservatism, including liberal Conservatism, associated with a commitment to free trade and a small state – the strand with which Margaret Thatcher and Boris Johnson were thought to favour – and one-nation Conservatism, which supports relatively high levels of state spending to fund health and other welfare services, and is more closely associated with Harold Macmillan and Edward Heath.

The pandemic has thrown these never neat divisions into even more confusion, as we see the government of small state Brexiteers spending vast amounts of money on e.g. PPE, vaccines and the furlough scheme in order to defeat coronavirus, and consequently contemplating higher taxes to pay for this.

The columnist for The Times, James Forsyth, comments: ‘As one cabinet minister puts it, ‘It is a kind of Faustian bargain. The Tory right defeated the One Nation Tories on Europe but had to become One Nation Tories on the economy.’”

So a true picture of today’s politics is much more complicated than CN Westerman would have us believe!

Nigel Currie Horfield