I'm an intellectual Thatcherite, just as I was an intellectual Powellite, and I think it important that the Conservative party should be in good hand… - Maurice Cowling

The Conservative party has a serious social purpose which cannot be satisfied by the mere expression of opinion. Its task – in opposition as well as in office – is to do what it can to prevent governmentally controlled changes in the existing social structure. This objective is fundamental. In relation to it everything else is tactical... [T]he Conservative party has a particular commitment to private property – and to inequalities in ownership – as the linchpin of the social and economic order and one of the buttresses of the moral order that is under attack, and this has been so ever since the Labour party became the chief party of opposition.

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.

The objection of substance to this position is that, in the hands of those who actually believe it, as Mr Lane has shown at the Race Relations Board, it becomes an exercise in liberal fascism, dedicating itself to the improvement of the nation's mind whether the nation's mind wishes to be improved or not, and showing itself only too willing to suppress expressions of opinion that conflict with it.