Letters: what Biden and Ronaldo have in common

True conservatism

Sir: Douglas Murray claims that the Conservative party ‘will need to have some people who are actually right-wing’ (‘The Tories only have themselves to blame’, 6 July). Why? Its name isn’t ‘the right-wing party’. It has no foundational obligation to be right-wing for the sake of it. Rather its mission is to be conservative, and the people who now identify as ‘right-wing’ seem to have no interest in conserving anything, whether it’s our countryside, rivers, values, place on the international stage, parliamentary system, cultural institutions, national life expectancy, economic stability – or anything other than their own positions and status, which many have lost regardless. I’m sure many people who voted for other parties in the election would be sympathetic to a truly conservative agenda that promised to hang on to or restore what is good about Britain, but that is not offered by the current right, whose instinct is constantly to modernise, streamline, strip away, use up, sell off. A truly conservative Conservative party would be better off without them.

James Bench-Capon

Cambridge

The myth of eternal growth

Sir: The big lie of all the major parties in the election campaign, virtually uncontested by journalists, was the promise of eternal growth (Leading article, 6 July). There can be no such thing, on our island or on our planet. Labour’s pledge to build 1.5 million houses in the next five years equates to concreting over 125,000 acres (plus a good deal more for infrastructure): an area the size of Middlesex. Setting aside the horror of such a vision, it is incompatible with the concurrent abstract pledge to net zero.