The Telegraph and the School Orgy

I lost interest in the Telegraph when it caught technophilia and tried to turn itself into an iPod. I know newspapers feel they have to do this - they'll realise the error of their ways in about five years - but the Telegraph in particular should have stood - hands thrust in cardigan pockets, pipe gripped firmly in teeth - against the tide. Yet it remains an interesting paper that, in so many ways, embodies the intellectual problems of conservatism. Here, for example, Charles Moore remembers 1968, not as the year of protest, but as the year of Enoch Powell's river of blood speech and Paul VI's Humanae Vitae encyclical. Good point - intense social conservatism was also, in its own way, on the streets. And here, Simon Heffer defends capitalism, the events of the week having induced some scepticism about the ability of markets to cope with globalised abuses. Heffer argues we just need to enforce on a global scale. 'Strict economic sanctions... of the sort America has operated for half a century against Cuba,' may be necessary against states that harbour market abusers. And there you have it. The 'freedom' of markets has to be severely limited by state power. Vassals of the state is not quite how the loathsome hedgies saw themselves. Furthermore, the ideology behind that 'freedom' will, inevitably, be in conflict with the social aspirations of conservatism - the hedgies were as much of a threat to Moore's dream of social order as were the 68ers. That's the trouble with freedom; as Kris Kristofferson sang, it's just another word for nothing left to lose. In which context, another story in the Telegraph casts lights on the heart of the matter, the human default mode.