After the wind, the whirlpool. Mr. Macleod, the chairman of the Conservative Party, has been talking about “the whirlpool of change.” The first task of Conservatives, he said, “is to welcome change, to understand it, and to move in sympathy with it.” There speaks a true progressive. We are not invited to decide whether any particular change is a change for the better or a change for the worse: we are merely told to welcome it because it is change. Mr. Macleod is, in a sense, quite right. The political situation is certainly in flux; which makes it all the more necessary to steer by unchanging principles, rather than just going with the stream.
The two most spectacular developments, Britain’s application to join the Common Market and the revival of the Liberal Party, have now come together in a peculiarly paradoxical way. The result is anybody’s guess, but the present tangle is well worth a glance.
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