What is a Conservative?

 This is a question I would love to hear the candidates to lead said party address thoughtfully. What is the Conservative Party for? What do you want to conserve and why?

We want to hear big ideas in this leadership election. 

But one of the defining features of conservativism is in fact fear of the big idea. That's its big idea! 

It is pragmatic, traditional, conservative! It values what we have. It wants to keep the best, not risk it for the sake of an ideology. It knows that it is hard to build a thing and easy to wreck one. So above all it should be careful and cautious when it comes to the things that matter to us. By all means we must embrace new technologies and industries that can make money, for example. But a real conservative ought to have cared rather more about the mining communities that Thatcherism changed beyond recognition. 

Conservatism is for the common law, not a written constitution.

Its value of tradition thus gives votes to the dead. 

That's why it is monarchist, although strictly speaking its irrational. 

The Conservative Party must certainly be more low tax, small state, free market, pro-business than any of the serious alternatives. It must conserve personal freedom by getting the state out of people's lives as much as possible. But there is far more to life than money. We need to hear about the social as well as the economic. In fact, love and family and all that matters to us most is best kept apart from the need for cash if it all possible. You don't want to buy your sex or sell your children!

A Conservative Party worth the name would be for the little platoons and for place and habit. I'm not sure it would make a great slogan, but in short the Conservative Party ought to be for conserving what Burke might have called virtue and a society which makes it seem more possible.