British Social Conservatism Revived?

A great comfort to many of my socially liberal interlocutors in college bull-sessions was the seemingly inevitable leftward drift of Western Europe, reflected in the increasing permissiveness of elected officials across the political spectrum. But The Economist says that Britain’s Tories may be bucking the trend .

The watershed moment in this supposed “mini-revival of social conservatism” is a speech given this July (“in a church, no less”) by Tory leader David Cameron. In it he gave a condemnation of moral relativism reminiscent of the world’s most prominent “social conservative,” Benedict XVI. Since then, other Tories, perhaps keyed in to Briton’s growing unhappiness with the current state of society, have joined in:

On August 4th Michael Gove, the party’s schools spokesman, deplored the portrayal of women in men’s magazines. Conservatives such as Iain Duncan Smith, the party’s former leader, and Ed Vaizey, its arts spokesman, have also criticised the British Board of Film Classification for giving the new Batman film a lenient 12A rating.

Of course, as the article notes, the British electorate remains overwhelmingly socially liberal, and the Tories cannot simply remake the nation overnight. But the piece ends on a note of cautious optimism that they may be developing a new, viable style of social conservatism, “not a heavy-handed approach,” which could even be replicated here in the U.S.