Mark Garnett, Senior Lecturer in Politics at Lancaster University, has a
bone to pick with commentators on the British conservative tradition and
the British Conservative Party. In this wide-ranging conversation, he
discusses how so often what the Party’s ideology is taken being the same
thing as conservative political thought. But for most of its history, the
Conservative Party has been anything other than conservative. Instead, we
might understand the Party’s changing ideology in terms of the overlapping
and competing perspectives of liberalism, nationalism and pragmatism. And
we might also think again about what ‘conservative political thought’
actually has been in England the past two centuries.