REMEMBER TONBRIDGE
Sta,—One would like to attribute Conservative sulks at Tonbridge to anger at the Govern- ment's illiberal and barren Cyprus policy, but I think you are probably right in asserting that 'bourgeois' resentment at the Govern- ment's failure to arrest inflation is the main cause. If so, it is a pity, because it is in its attempts to grapple with the almost intractable problem of inflation that the Government is most deserving of sympathy—indeed, my sympathy does not go beyond its activities in this field. However that may be, the stresses to which you allude prompt the question whether the skirts of the Conservative Party do not in fact house disparate members. The Party has, of course, its humane and intelli- gent men and women—the liberal leg—but look at the Right leg—the ear-trumpet and bath-chair brigade! And somewhere in between or round about is the inert central mass, protected from dangerous thought by the sport and cheesecake of the popular Con- servative dailies. Small wonder that the Party finds itself from time to time doing the political equivalent of the splits.
Surely the truth is that it is in the nature of political Conservatism to be dragged along in the wake of progress. Conservative poli- ticians, who are opposed to a welfare society dare not think aloud. Perhaps it is no accident that the Conservative Party is largely a hang- ing party, as its dim-witted women noisily confirmed at their recent conference; no accident that stupidity in Cyprus should dispel respect for Britain• throughout the world; no accident that the backwoods peers should have made that virgin mass-descent on the House of Lords at the behest of a previous Conserva- tive Government in order to confer the benefit of commercial television upon us (which was
dashed unfair on the poor chaps. who were doubtless just coping with news of the pro- gress of Maxwell and Hertz).
Certainly Tonbridge is, as you say, a warn- ing that the Government cannot ignore. But it should also serve as ii warning to.the country that social justice at home and racial justice abroad demand something More than Con- servative expediency. It is high time that unfashionable quality, principle, reappeared in politics. I have a notion. that it is somewhere at about this point that we Liberals come in. —Yours faithfully.
L. A. JACKSON Wootton Cottage, South Road, Weybridge Surrey
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