Conservatism is about love

'The market-based legal order of the Brussels bureaucracy helped to fill the legal vacuum created by communism, and was warmly received on that account. But, because of the unwise provisions of the Treaty of Rome regarding freedom of movement, it has led to the mass emigration of the professional classes, and to the loss of the educated young from countries that stand desperately in need of them.'
Sir Roger Scruton

'My thought is that the essential feature of conservatism is love of the actual, love of the things that you've inherited and a desire to reassert that inheritance. Not uncritically you know, but it's in the way that you do with your family, your parents,your brothers, and sisters.You know their faults but you love them and they're a part of you, and it's your primary duty to affirm that love. Then work for any improvements, of course.'

Sir Roger Scruton

'There is now a large constituency of people on the left – middle class, metropolitan, Remain-supporting, interested in foreign policy and identity politics over bread and butter class issues – who quietly welcome the party’s shift to more bourgeois terrain. They never liked the working class much anyway, and in some cases have attempted to equate the phrase “traditional working class” with white supremacism.'  James Bloodworth, in CapX


'The past is a part of us, perhaps the most essential.' Victor Hugo, one of the epigraphs for Sybille Bedford's A Compass Error, which I finally finished rereading today.