[T]he defence of property, inequality and differentials has been one of the leading motives of historic Conservatism, and that it is doubtful whether… - Maurice Cowling

[L]ow-keyed respectability...is the real religion of the English people.

The real objection to Professor Gould...is more far-reaching. It is that under the banner of 'liberal values' he consecrates as desirable an anarchy of opinions which ought in no way to be desired. A society ought to have opinions about which there is no fundamental disagreement and in relation to which it is not the business of universities to adopt a liberalising or questioning attitude. If England is a liberal society in Professor Gould's sense, that ought not to be turned, as he turns it, into a matter of self-congratulation. It is a matter rather for gloom and regret that anyone as clever as he is should consecrate the unthought-out pluralism in which we live, and a matter for serious reflection that, so far as Marxists see this, they perform a valuable, destructive function to disclosing the gulf that divides the doctrinaire liberal from nearly the whole of the rest of the human race.

A lot has happened to the student generations of the 1960s and 1970s since they discovered that spontaneous revolutions hardly ever happen. Some have become rich or have taken to conservative reaction; some have taken to liberal progress or to the cautious ambiguities of New Labour. Some have adopted the anti-capitalist sentiment of the Green movement while others have abandoned dirigiste Marxism for libertarian Trotskyism. In all too many (except among the conservative reactionaries and some of the millionaires), there is an entrenched secular orthodoxy which, whether liberal or Trotskyite, is represented as strongly in schools, polytechnics, universities, the media and the social services as on the Labour back-benches in the House of Commons.