Tony Devenish is a Westminster City Councillor and was one of the Conservative candidates for the South East region at this year's European election.
Whilst I hesitate to repeat the Thatcher Cabinet Minister John Biffen’s career-limiting 1987 plea for ‘consolidation’, the last four years have shown that the Conservative Party is modernising but - unlike New Labour's abandonment of Clause IV and so on - is holding to timeless Conservative themes.
There is no need in our party for a so-called Clause IV moment. Despite the occasional ‘silly season’ style tabloid headlines, few can argue with the view that the party is both offering constructive solutions to the hole Gordon Brown has dug for UK Plc - as well as selecting parliamentary candidates who increasingly mirror contemporary British society to argue the case for sensible modernisation.
The Conservative Party has indeed changed considerably over the last four years, as I witnessed as an MEP candidate who visited seventy constituencies over fifteen months. However, whilst it is to be welcomed that ‘we are all modernisers now’, we do need to recognise and respect a plurality of views. And those views include those of people who perhaps live outside the M25, do not work (or aspire to work) full-time in politics or the media (parodied so brutally but realistically in The Thick of It), and yes, may well be conservative with a small ‘c’ and (like me) north of forty years of age.
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