Letters From A Tory Daily views on British politics and the Conservative Party from a centre-right thinker who writes letters on his blog to politicians, journalists and many others.

Dear Gerard Baker,

This week has been a watershed in terms of hostility towards China’s actions in Tibet, but you have rightly gone beyond the issue of street protests and identified the terrifying reality of the situation: democracy is starting to lose its grip.

As you described, historically speaking the ‘enemies’ of democracy and freedom have always shared one thing in common – they were weaker than us and thus always carried around a sense of vulnerability.  When more liberal agendas were pursued by regimes around the world, the inevitable result was democracy beginning to take hold.  However, even though China has become more economically liberal and has benefited enormously in financial terms, you have rightly spotted that “the success of limited capitalism has not been matched by political freedom” – which is extremely worrying.  Because of the economic might that China possesses in terms of trade with the US and EU, they are no longer at risk of being pressured to pursue more liberal policies, meaning that the leverage of liberal economics as a precursor to democracy and freedom has been extinguished.  Like you said, Russia is also capable to resisting Western pressure and Putin has been happy to exploit this.  The resolve of the West against Russia and China has indeed been weakened by the focus on Islamic extremism, leading to human rights violations being ignored and the possibility of freedom evaporating.

The Western world has lost the desire to encourage democracy around the world and has retreated to being selective about which countries it tries to instigate democratic values in.  I don’t think that Western countries have a ‘right’ to start forcing democracy on every country, but freedom is certainly worth fighting for and it is quite obvious to both of us that the desire and ability to spread freedom is starting to fade.

Yours sincerely,

A.Tory