Time & Perspective Quote by Iain Duncan Smith

Conservatism here gets framed as an inheritance that needs renovation, not demolition. Duncan Smith’s line is doing two jobs at once: reassuring the base that core principles remain intact, while carving out permission to ditch the baggage that’s made the brand electorally toxic. The phrase “throwing them away” paints change as betrayal; “shed associations” recasts change as hygiene. Same action, different moral valence.

The subtext is intraparty triage. “Beliefs and values” functions as a safe abstraction - roomy enough that listeners can pour their own priorities into it (family, nation, markets, tradition) without forcing a policy confession. What he actually targets is less ideology than reputation: the “associations” that “bind us to past failures.” That’s a quietly brutal phrase, suggesting Conservatism has been chained to mistakes not because its ideas are wrong, but because its symbols, allies, and recent record keep dragging it under. It’s a call for selective amnesia: keep the creed, change the cast.

Context matters because Duncan Smith emerged from a period when British Conservatism was struggling with post-Thatcher identity, leadership churn, and the long shadow of “sleaze” and internal warfare. This is the rhetoric of a party trying to launder itself without admitting fault at the level of first principles. “Hold faith” borrows the language of loyalty and covenant, implying that the real threat isn’t Labour or the press but apostasy from within. It’s a neat political move: define modernization as fidelity, and dissent as desertion.