Ben Harnwell

The point about this, why did we set this up?

The programme has evolved somewhat.

since 2008 but fundamentally it was to put the spine back in to christian democracy those were the days when i was slightly more naive and believed that what the center right was lacking was spine in fact i i now realize that that's not true at all the center right is part of the enemy of of defending these values because it's performative it goes through the motions especially at election time of dropping the platitudes that we want to hear

And the moment they are elected, they get down to betraying us.

And the point there at the betrayal is this.

I started off with this speech, the note by Toynbee about the 19 out of 21 civilizations.

and dying from within.

And I'd like to suggest the specific character of our own civilizational decline isn't that we're being defeated from without.

And it's not that we're imploding from spiritual malaise from within.

It's that we are being betrayed by our political class.

And that is, I think, something novel and unique to the present

situation.

So going back 20 years and the beginnings of the project that we have at Tresolto, it was the idea that the reason we were losing was because

Christian democracy had lost its spine.

In continental Europe, the center right is basically Christian Democrats, which is based formally, and it's a bit like in Germany, but all across continental Europe.

It's really based or claims to be based on Catholic social teaching.

in the Anglosphere, in Australia, in the UK, that the equivalent, the positioning on the political spectrum of centre-right isn't so much Christian democratic, because we're not culturally Catholic countries, it's conservatism, which was, to take somewhat from what I said at the beginning, the idea of conserving

what is good.

But if you look at the conservative movement in the UK especially, it conserves absolutely nothing.

It goes through the motions.