Quote Originally Posted by Idaho View Post
This country is a work in progress. It is a different place to what it was 10, 25, 50, 100 or 500 years ago. It will be different again in another 50 years. Conservatives believe that the country should be stuck in some half remembered/half made up past. I hope that it is totally different in 50 years. Unrecognisable even.
No, Conservative believe in the natural development of society, and sometimes in applying the breaks when change is traumatic - this has been the case since at least Disraeli. What Conservatives do not believe in is change for the sake of change. It's not quite fair to say that this is what the Left believes but I think it is fair to say they believe the country MUST ALWAYS change.

That's rather what you said.

I grew up in a small hamlet and went to school in a small town called Torrington, you may have been there. On balance it's a nice place but since the glove-making industry collapsed it's had very little going for it and this has got worse since the dairy closed and the meat-packing plant burned down. Even so, I don't think the down needs to change - it doesn't need 50 Muslim immigrant families transplanted in to upset the 99.9% white and nominally Christian population, for example, that would just make everyone unhappy - including the transplanted. What it could do with is some money pumped into the hospital and some form of local industry to give people jobs.

To suggest the country is unrecognisable in 50 years is to say that you want me to have no recognisable country to live in - I'll be 78 and if I can't still go to the pub for a decent pint of ale or go to the Cathedral for carols at Christmas what am I going to do as I slip into my dotage?