First steps

This evening I went to my first Conservative Party event, if you could call it that, Mark Field, Shadow Arts Minister giving a lecture called "The way ahead". It took place in one of the committee rooms at the House of Commons. I like the House of Commons. It smells so strange and the wallpaper and carpets are psychadaelically patterned. I met the Andrew Young bloke, who runs the Conservative future website, outside in the corridor. He was suprisingly elegant, in a blue pinstripe suit and brown slip-on shoes. Tall too, where I had imagined him small, probably because the tories I've met (of my age) have tended to be nerdy and bullied looking. There was another Conservative Future boy there, who conformed to that type exactly, he had buckteeth and lank hair that for some reason he had bleached blonde.

Mark Field seemed pretty smooth, if a bit orange, so that for much of his lecture I speculated distractedly as to whether his tan was real or sprayed on. His voice was plummy, but occasionally the stutter I had heard when we spoke on the phone crept in. He began his lecture by talking about the July 7th bombs. He didn't call them 7/7 bombs although for some reason he mentioned 2003 he said it twenty-oh-three, which I have never heard before.

I really wanted it to be a good talk. But, although he had cards he rambled and there seemed to be a vital point missing from his argument. When I looked at his site I saw that he was a prolific speaker and he reminded me of Richard Mason, the prolific author, for whom touch-typing was a subcortical activity. His argument went a bit like this I think:

7/7 was bad, really bad. It happened on my watch you know (I'm MP for Westminster).
Those signs the other day after the Mohamed cartoons, they were bad too.
They signaled for me the "Failure of Multiculturalism".
Because those suicide bombers were British born and, importantly, educated.
But they were part of a radical political cult, more so than a religious one.
Before Luther, Britain lived under Catholicism that did not admit of heresy.
A bit like Islam.

The most important thing about freedom is owning property(?)

Immigrants, my family were immigrants too, but more of them later.
In Britain our social contract is not codified as a constitution
We don't like to write that kind of thing down.
We don't like rules necessarily, that's part of being British.

My mother was an immigrant from the part of Germany that is now Poland you know.
They left with nothing.
It's very important to be able to own land.
In fact, it's essential to the idea of freedom.

I went to Syria and there they moan all the time about Arabs losing their land to Israel.
My parents were immigrants, and you don't hear me moaning about the land they lost.

Somehow we need to encourage moderation within Islam.
It will probably take a long time and be something like the Cold War.

Really I lost the rest of it.

I did ask a question, about whether you could neatly divide Islamic Fundamentalism, as a extremist political cult, from Islam, as a religion. I got very nervous though and also tried to use the words apostasy and Lutheran (which I pronounced accidentally, in what I now find is the obsolete form, Lutherian) in the same sentence, so it didn't go that well. Then I interrupted his answer to tell him that an Islamic society was necessarily a theocracy. This distracted him from answering my question, which, in all honesty, I'm not sure he intended to do anyway, and gave him an opportunity to tell me that Iraq had been a secular Islamic state. That wasn't really what I meant, I think what I meant was that according to the Koran, and Islamic state should be theocracy, I'm pretty sure, I think James told me it. I couldn't remember the word Koranic/Quranic though, that was my problem.

Questions were more interesting. It emerged that he, and another MP present both voted for Iraq. Field did not regret, the other MP did. Several people said that this was just a "changing of the guard", in that where we had had an enemy in the form of Communism, we now need in an enemy in the form of Islamic Fundamentalism. That the issue was emotive, not real and that we should concentrate on our own economy and developing alternative energy resources that aren't nuclear. There's a lot of this around at the moment. In the Independent this morning and in conversation with Tom on Friday I heard the connection made between the New World Order Blair and Bush want to establish and the end of communism. This was not a link I had made before, stupidly it now seems.

I think there's something awful about those who supported the war in Iraq who are now saying it was a mistake. Also that you can back out of a mistake by saying that you're being humble. I'm sure in times gone they would not have called that humility.

After the meeting I walked with Andrew Young who talked about producing web items to feed to bloggers. I pointed out that they'd have to be really funny for media-jaded bloggers to contemplate running them and that such a strategy was likely to be totally transparent. He said that wouldn't be a problem. This is a man who, on his blog, refers to the Liberal Democrat as the Literal Dumbocrats.

(Also, in the same Independent article this morning, I read that the problem with neo-conservatives setting up a democratic state was that they while they professed to prefer small government they were cranking up a huge one in another country. I like this about conservativism so I think a real Conservative government could not have gone to war in Iraq.)