We are not born free, nor do we come into this world with a self-identity and autonomy of our own. We achieve those things, through the conflict and … - Roger Scruton

In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses.

[W]hile it is a long-standing principle of British law that the fomentation of hatred (and hence of racial hatred) is a serious criminal offence, it is not clear that illiberal sentiments have to be forms of hatred, nor that they should be treated in the high-handed way that is calculated to make them become so. On the contrary, they are sentiments which seem to arise inevitably from social consciousness: they involve natural prejudice, common culture, and a desire for the company of one's kind. That is hardly sufficient ground to condemn them as "racist" – an accusation which has no definition in law, and against which there is now no defence. To be accused of racism is to be guilty of it: this is the great achievement of liberal thinking about nationality. One of the most important conservative causes in our time must surely be the attempt to undo the apparatus of censorship and intimidation, which has effectively silenced the appeal to national identity.

Attitudes to death go hand in hand with attitudes to sex. And it is in the sphere of sex that some of the greatest of medical confusions have arisen. I refer in particular to the "sex change" – again, an operation which has exhilarated the public, with its implication that sexuality is an elaborate accident, which can be tailored to the individual need. A person's sexuality is no longer regarded as part of his essence. It has become an attribute, which he might change as he changes his clothes. The possibility of thinking in such a way shows a deep change in perception. The obligation to accept one's sex has dwindled, in the same way as the obligation to accept one's death. Consequently people call upon doctors to help them, demanding painful, expensive and dangerous operations, whose moral effects cannot really be envisaged in advance, and whose premise is a kind of delusion which, however it might arouse our compassion, ought not to inspire our connivance. No doubt the time is not far distant when sex-change operations will be obtainable on the National Health, granted on the advice of "experts" able to discern the "real" gender identify of the soul sheathed within each human envelope.