This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, September 13th, 2007.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What should Conservatives in Britain believe?

Former Conservative Party Deputy Leader Michael Uncrum suggests a return to what he says

are longstanding conservative principles, low taxes, civil liberties, and smaller government.

He visited the Cato Institute this week.

According to BBC, former Conservative Cabinet Minister Michael Portillo

says he's a great admirer of Margaret Thatcher but to invoke Thatcherism now makes the Tory party sound

old-fashioned and divided. Well I think he should have read my pamphlet first because I didn't invoke thatcherism.

What I did was to invoke the principle that a party should have a set of beliefs as part of the

program that it then develops its policies around because that gives it a personality

and people will vote for it. And what I was saying in the pamphlet, which unfortunately Mr Portillo had

not read before he responded, is that we've got a lot of very exciting ideas coming

forward from policy commissions set up over the last 18 months by David Cameron but

I wanted to see a shape around which those policies could now be developed and I set out what I believe to be the very clear and basic fundamental principles and beliefs of conservatism through the ages.

The great thing about the Conservative Party is that it's it's always changed

but it's changed in the way it articulates its principles it's stuck to its

principles we're not an ideological party we never have been but we we do believe in people, we believe in the

individual, we believe in freedom of choice, we believe in all the different

freedoms I set out in the paper, we believe in deregulation and the

smaller state and we believe passionately in maintaining our sovereignty.

We believe in the family. We believe in protecting the environment. All of these are conservative principles of long, long standing.

...