By Margaret Thatcher

Tony Blair shifted the Labour Party so far to the right that at the last election there appeared little to distinguish Labour from the Tories.

Presented with two apparent conservative parties, the British people chose the newer one, with the nicer face and better script, and with such a distant record as to inspire the hope that for once rehabilitation had worked. And one of Thatcher's laws came into play: conservative governments which increase taxation lose elections.

The Nineties were, for many conservative believers, something for a let-down. It wasn't so much that the policies went wrong, in fact some were rather good. IT was that there was a quite deliberate positioning of right-of-centre governments towards the centre rather than the right. We believe in free, limited democratic government but we scorn the association of vox populi with vox dei, knowing that no majority vote can make good bad or bad good. True democratic government can only work with a God-fearing nation.

We understand that in some areas government has to be strong. We are not squeamish about the use of force to defend the nations security. We appreciate the majesty and rituals and pomp of the state. But we also believe that what is public ultimately exists for what is private - the family is the basic institution of our society, without which all else collapses. We view the world in which we live as in need, not of re-ordering according to master-plans devised by enlightened expert, but of constant renewal according to timeless truths and rich traditions.

We are unashamedly patriots. So here we stand. Rock solid. Rooted in a clear, tried, tested view of the world and the heavens and everything in them. We must hold to our convictions. One temptation to be avoided at all costs is the desire to be what we are not - in search of approval from those who are sworn ideological adversaries, while showing a reluctance to listen to our proven friends.

Nothing would be more foolish than for conservatives to seek refuge in aping our opponents' policies, rhetoric - or Heaven forbid - even identity. If people really want social democracy, they won't be voting for us conservatives in any case. It is essential to be distinctive. Adaptation for the conservative party does not mean becoming less conservative - it does not necessarily mean becoming more conservative. It means expressing one's fundamental conservatism in different ways. It would be absurd to deviate from the conservative fixed points which are now accepted in theory, if not always fully in practice, even by our opponents.

We must question remorselessly government's involvement in the provision of health and education and social benefits, because there is no eternally valid ordinance that private enterprise shall in these areas go "this far and no farther". And we must be alert to the dangers of over-regulation and creeping control, which any number of fashionable and politically correct agendas demand and which any variety of power-hungry politician will eagerly supply. All this is necessary. But equally all this is not enough to bring conservatives back to power.

The international conservative position today is sound but unimaginative. It is sound because there is no need to a fundamental rethinking of basic principles, as had to happen in the Seventies. It is unimaginative because conservatives have been slow and timid in applying those principles to new challenges. We have to go back to the very heart of our Toryism - to our belief in tradition, in legitimate authority, in not tinkering with what works. We have to be prepared to use language and arguments which are alien to the new media class and we must do so in the sure knowledge that is we lack the courage to raise these fears, no one else will.

There is a threat to our national identity. I have followed controversy in America about immigration and ethnicity. In Britain we too know the consequences of mass immigration. We must recognise the priceless asset of a common language which forges national unity out of the multi-ethnic variety, and so makes democratic debate possible - the more so because the English language is soaked in the values of liberty.

Nationalism is always a bit uncomfortable for other nations, often neighboring other nations. It can be abused, like other powerful political emotions. But national pride offers people a genuine identity in a world of cardboard cut-outs. We should promote a sense of national identity.

The undermining of our traditional education system is now a very grave danger. It threatens the collective memory of our society from which its habits and even its identity flow. We should be warned. A society only needs one generation to abandon the task of learning and transmitting its culture , for that culture to become an alien, lifeless, irrelevance. A powerful, radical left-wing clerisy is bent on destroying every past generation would have understood to be the central purpose of education. Only be ensuring that we have the right teachers with the right training and the right ideas will we stop the rot. Otherwise, the cultural revolutionaries will drown our for ever that Lincoln called "the mystic chords of memory" with their jarring cacophony.

Closely linked to educational failure is the systematic attack on the traditional family. The unconditional supply of benefits to those who were thought incapable of coping undermined the incentive to work and provided an alternative and seemingly endless income from government. It undercut the family unit, promoted habits of idleness and delinquency and permitted single-parenthood to become a financially sustainable, alternative way of life. The dependency culture poisoned and weakened society as a whole.

On top of all that there has been a full-scale and deliberate assault on the institutions of the family itself - on the innocence of childhood, on the man's role as bear-winner and home-maker, on the binding sacramental nature of marriage. The exaltation of violent and explicit sex increasingly coarsens the content of films and books and - eventually and inevitably - life itself.

This is not progress. It is not liberation. It is decadence. We have a duty to fight the attack on the family that threatens the West at its foundations. Western civilisation would not be the first to reshape others in its own image, only to discover that it has lost the identity, confidence and will to survive.