Markets Conservatives and Gardens

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made

By singing:--"Oh, how beautiful!" and sitting in the shade,

While better men than we go out and start their working lives

At grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with broken dinner-knives

(Kipling )

Labour with their usual cynicism are playing a heads I win, tails you lose game . For years Brown told us he had cured boom-and -bustism (Got that 50% right eh ...) Now the failure of world banking is the fault of the Conservative Party because in some dimly remembered way they are the Party of markets ,America and all that sort of thing…. . There is no coherence to this , it is merely yet another base appeal to prejudice like slapping ID cards on those nasty foreigners first, slagging of the Poles in Crewe or whining about the darkies on the housing list in Barking .To them it serves a higher cause , to me its faintly disgusting
The relationship between markets and Conservatism is actually altogether more complex .Conservatives see markets as human system not a doctrine and well understand that lack of proper regulation of markets can easily halt all activity . This is usually due to the erection of barriers by participants and their active wish to subvert competition .These activities are like weeds . The market is a garden, not a wilderness and its activities emerge from a civil society and a level of trust.
Also important is the embedding of past experience from bank failures to the South Sea bubble into "gardening " practice . Institutions that evolve are preferred to day 1 year 1 plans . At the conference Conservatives should emphasise that neither they, nor Margaret Thatcher ,ever really thought that any book least of all one by Hayek had all the answers .The Conservative Party is not , at its root , a Party of the market , it is a Party of Conservatism which is suspicious of any dogma .
More than this, it is positively fearful about the destructive potential in any powerful force removed from human scale . International capitalism is exactly this sort of phenomenon and has failed precisely by being insufficiently Conservative . The effort now must be to resists the left’s wish to throw the baby out with the bath water, however, and take considered steps to encode this experience into developing the regulatory framework .Hubristic notions of world solutions are to be approached with a degree of scepticism had our own institutions been sound not a single bank would have failed.
It is beyond the ken of politicians to erect all encompassing global plans although some simple beginnings might be made .Institutions here are what should be strengthened and with unerring accuracy Cameron has found the Conservative fault ,line . Brown`s new fangled regulatory system failed .A development of the powers of the Bank of England was required and he undermined it just as he undermined the treasury.