Iain Dale's Top 100 Conservative Blogs

Get in! I've just discovered that I turn up in Iain Dale's list of top 100 Conservative blogs at 99! Given that I don't post as often as I should, and haven't done as much politics as I'd like to, this is cool, assuming that there are in fact, more than 100 Conservative blogs in the world.

Some of our old favourites pepper the list but I'm really not sure about Conservative Home as No.1. For me it seems more like a chat-site, or a media hoover, and less like the kind of Conservative intellectual revival that some of the other blogs on the list represent. My personal favourites are linked to from here, so I'm not going to go into them now. I do notice that Biased BBC is not on the list. That can hardly be because it isn't conservative: more likely because it can be way over the top sometimes.

It is good to see a genuine, if sporadic, reappearance of conservatism as a thought-through worldview, capable of being defended and advanced; the clear question for me now is whether this can be translated into practical policies. I'm really not sure about Cameron - at least, about how far he has thought about policies. He has done the key thing, to make the Tories appeal outside their core vote, the only surprise about which is that it has taken so damn long to get to that point. But the Tories cannot just "go green" - so much of the environmentalists' world view is anti-individual, anti-success, anti-progress. If he is to make this a centrepiece of his policies he must combine it with a strategy that does not seek to punish individuals for (say) putting rubbish in the wrong bin, but positively encourages the "right behaviour". Tories should stand up against the punishment through higher taxes and prices and advance the cause of the market in developing green technologies, or at any rate provide incentives rather than penalties. The "progressives" advocating taxes on everything, surveillance of bins, the use of the courts to enforce recycling policies, and the closure of power stations are showing their loathing of ordinary people (Mr Brown's "hard-working families) .

Apropos of nothing, no-one has yet wondered aloud how much CO2 has been expended jetting Al Gore across the US and the world showing his wretched film on climate change. He says himself he has given the lecture hundreds of times. I notice no criticism of him for this, but "hard working families" cop the outrage of George Moonbat if they go on holiday once or twice a year by plane.

Conservatives cannot go back to the past on social policy and Cameron is right to change that. Whatever your views, being perceived as anti-women, anti-minorities and anti-gay has been tremendously damaging. I don't think the Tories as a party have ever hated anyone in the way they are often accused of doing, I just think they were very slow to realise that identity politics was an essential part of modern political discourse. But Conservatives should demonstrate that there are not merely two diametrically opposed views: the tolerant and the full of hate, the right and the wrong. There are shades of opinion and people should not be coerced by employers to support worldviews they disagree with. Maybe this would just make them seem like hypocrites in the current climate, but I don't see any contradiction between having a full set of legal rights (including gay marriage, and the right to children) and the right of an individual to disagree with these. Conservatives should challenge the view that says disagreement on these issues is inseparable from physical attacks and is motivated purely by hate.

I'm sure all of this is discussed by better minds than mine all the time. But my little political handbook at the moment is After Blair by Kieron O Hara, which lays down the possible route of a revived, coherent, modern Conservatism. Well worth a look; I hope Cameron has already read it.