Sir: Congratulations to Patrick Cosgrave (20 December) for perceiving that
what the Tories need is not an intellectual dogma to contrast with that of the left, but a contrasting morality.
Religion, I understand him to argue, has `so generally declined' that it can no longer serve as the basis of Tory morality and the party is in danger of trying 'to make do with hard-headed capitalist economics.'
So far so good. But what is the secular Tory morality to be? Mr Cosgrave does not say. He tells us that 'a government is obliged to attend more carefully to the injustices and hardships of society than to anything else, that humanity is the main concern of politics.' But as this is meant to apply to all governments, not only Tory, it does not help us.
He says the Tory leader should 'speak with the accents of concern.' But concern for whom?
For the same people as the socialists? When poor Mr Heath, 'with accents of concern,' claims that coloured colonists, whom he describes as `our fellow citizens,' have as much right to re- main settled in this country as the traditional English, his followers grimace in dismay and search their newspapers for another speech by Mr Powell. Certainly Mr Powell also conforms to Mr Cosgrave's standard, by speaking 'with the accents of concern,' but the concern in his case is for the white aborigines, not the colonists. Is this the answer? Is it that morality, as in the beginning, should serve group sur- vival?
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