I have posted this thread on Twitter this morning:
We know that Boris Johnson's days in Number 10 are numbered now. We can't be sure how many there still are. That his tenure will end well before the time of the next election is, however, seemingly certain. But my question is, so what? What then for the Tories, and us. A thread…
The Conservative Party is often described as the most successful party in democratic politics in the world. And it is true, it has dominated UK politics for longer than anyone now alive, and long before that.
But, what if Johnson goes? What happens then to a Party whose main reason for being has been to win power in the interests of a select part of society? Can it still do that?
For those who want a short answer, my suggestion is that it is in deep trouble now. Its centre cannot hold because it is not clear that it still has one that functions. Its left has also gone, and the right is riven by disagreement.
The Tories are in disarray. Like all successful political parties in UK first past the post politics they have been a messy coalition. My suggestion is that the disarray is because the coalition within the party is failing.
They have represented the established church, the aristocracy, trade, the farmer and so rural communities, the armed forces, the Unionist as opposed to the nationalist, empire, colonialism, monarchy, and a low tax, low regulation, family orientated, chaste libertarianism.
That there are obvious stresses of value within the Tory coalition has always been obvious. From the moral purist to the chancer, from the privileged to trade, from the rural poor to the factory owner, the conflicts are clear. But they managed them, somehow.
The difference is that they no longer do so. They could so long as difference was tolerated. And now it is not. Johnson killed tolerance when he expelled approximately 20 Remain supporting MPs in 2019. The coalition ended that day. So did the Party.
To secure success the Tories did not just compromise with each other but had embraced something more powerful, which was profound managerialism. There might have been a charismatic frontage, but worldly experience filled government ranks.
The likes of Dominic Grieve and David Gauke represented that wing. So, in the past did the likes of Michael Heseltine, Ken Clarke and Justine Greening. They brought real world skills to their jobs that meant the extreme views of some Tories was balanced by delivery.
This element within the party has now been repelled, and expelled. Only the extremities and unskilled are left. Only one election has been fought by it on that basis. It won more convincingly than it had for decades. But we now know that was chance. The chance was Boris Johnson.
Johnson is a profoundly flawed character. A liar, who is unable to recognise or respect boundaries whether personal or otherwise, he combined all those flaws with what seemed like a wit and charm that hid his political vacuity.
Amongst his many flaws Johnson does not know who, or what, or why he stands for anything, bar himself. Brexit was evidence of that. Pro-Brexit simply for reasons of self-promotion, he delivered a deal he very obviously did not comprehend. He likely did not read it.
The same hollowness is apparent in all he promotes. Levelling up does not exist as a policy. Covid policy has been almost non-existent, bar three word slogans. Vaccination happened despite rather than because of him. And there is nothing else.
Nor is there anyone else. Johnson sacked those who disagreed with him, and those who challenged him, such as Jeremy Hunt, are on the backbenches. The cabinet comprises people who in earlier generations would have struggled to get a junior post, so bad are they.
As to heirs apparent, there are really none. Sunak does not tick Tory boxes. His dedication to austerity is too Osborne-like to appeal to a party that rejected Cameron. Truss is hidden away because every time she tries to speak it is apparent she is a random word generator.
And Hunt was a disaster as health secretary, failing to put in place the measures required to manage a predicted pandemic.
In the absence of alternative people to coalesce around there is only dogma, something the grand Tory compromises of old that sustained it in office always sought to avoid. Being a Tory was enough in those days, asking why was not popular, and answers were not forthcoming.
But now dogma rules. English nationalism is strong. So too is the libertarianism of Ayn Rand. It is, however, coupled with a distaste for democratic freedom of which Stalin would have been proud.
Business either does, or does not matter, depending on who you ask, but whatever the belief in business is it comes straight from an economics textbook and has little to do with the real world of 2022.
Morality is a commodity, but of decidedly uncertain value. As Groucho Marx would have it, if you do not like those on offer there are always some more to be had.
Rural life is viewed through the window of a National Trust tearoom through which questions may not be asked.
The colonies still exist, except they are now called Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The indifference to those who live in those three countries is staggering.
Racism is a threat to Tories, not something to be opposed.
LGBTQ rights fit into the same mould, because ‘normality' is prioritised in a way where nothing that is normal is considered to be so.
‘The other', whether it be the EU, the migrant already here or the refugee seeking a home, has a role only to the extent that they can be weaponised as a threat.
Drugs require a law to be declared upon them, when most taking them probably come from positions of privilege and would often vote Tory.
The church is merely of use as a theatre for state pageants. It must otherwise be quiet.
All this being noted, what does it suggest? That the current Tory party is made up of very frightened people who neither know what they are frightened of or why.
What is more, the Tories have no clue as to what to do about the threats that they think they perceive. So, they sloganise because their fear otherwise defies description.
The difficulty in all that is that the dogmas on display proliferate and the only people capable of coalescing around a view are those with the most paranoid worldview. They are now readily identifiable on the far-right of the party.
The one characteristic they have is their willingness to blame everyone and everything for all that is wrong. The result is that everything from a face mask onwards represents a battle to be fought by them, but why even they do not really know. All they need are enemies.
The difficulty for these people with little attachment to reality is that a majority of their supposed colleagues can see how absurd they are, and will not support them. But, those other MPs also have nothing to offer.
The rump of the Tory party, the supposedly moderate MPs who reject the far-right posturing of one third of their colleagues, are MPs without either knowing why they are Tories, as is normal in their party, and without the real-world skills to make up for that absence of insight.
Where do the Tories go when faced with this schism between those living in fear of the twenty first century and those who have nothing to offer it in terms of ability to govern?
The only thing that is likely is that Tory MPs will not agree with each other. Those who are crazy will not countenance an engagement with reality. The majority do not know how to promote anything realistic.
That leaves no room for compromise, because the two remaining wings of the Tory party (those with competence having been expelled) have nothing to bring to a negotiating table that the other will consider, even if they could find a table to sit around, so incompetent are they.
Removing Johnson is not an answer in that case. To get elected Johnson gutted the Tories. What he cut out was the ability to compromise that made it function. As is apparent, because Covid has been as vexatious for him as Brexit was for May, that capacity has gone.
But with it has gone the ability to govern. Whoever follows Johnson, and someone surely will, is unlikely to be any more successful than Johnson was.
The modern Tory party might have been created by Johnson but it was not made in his image. All he did was provide it with a fascia that delivered a single electoral success. Underneath, however, he has left it deeply wounded.
The church has gone. The Unionist realises the game is up. The English nationalist is a minority. The aristocracy is history. Trade is alienated. Rural England has been sold short by Brexit. The armed forces hate being used as they are.
There are just the dogmatists and the bewildered left. And they can agree on nothing, except the need to generate fear itself. Even that is being seen through now as the stories they have told are not the ones they have been willing to live by. The fear-mongers have been rumbled.
Can I see the Tories surviving this? In the short term, no. Of course I cannot. In the longer term might they rebuild? The evidence is that they have always done so before, although this time the rifts are very deep.
What happens in the meantime? A broken Union. A broken democracy. And a broken England, friendless inside and outside its own Union, let alone the EU, has a mountain to climb. Can our politics do what the Tories can't and find the compromises required to start again?
I doubt this is within the reach of Labour alone. It too is tribal, divided and internally divided. A bigger purpose is required. I am not confident that Labour is the singular alternative in the place that we are.
Is there a bigger narrative that can be built? I have to hope so. The negotiating table has to be at the heart of our hopes now. Who will turn up and what will they agree upon? Survival, with dignity I hope. That's the agenda we need. We are a long way from it but I can hope.
Hope is all we have right now when the Tories have created am unimaginable mess. And amongst the hopes must be one that people will not forget this moment, not for a very long time to come.
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Bravo. Excellent.
I agree with your view of the Tories…. but, bizarrely, there is another narrative. Polls suggest fewer than half of Tory supporters think Johnson should resign – what ARE the other half thinking? They cling to the idea that Johnson is a flawed hero that has delivered Brexit and navigated COVID better than other countries. Do not underestimate they solidity of this core group…. nor the ability of the progressive left to shoot itself in the foot… nor the ability of the UK press to say that fiction is fact. I remain worried.
The beginning of the end for the Tories was Blair’s election victory in 1997. As a result of that we got Tory Party members choosing the leader (albeit from a short list of two)… and look at the list they chose? Hague was the last chosen “in a smoke filled room” and since then we have had Duncan-Smith, Howard, Cameron, May and Johnson. The reality is that when political parties allow too much say to their members we see entryism (UKIP, BNP on the right, Marxists etc on the left) and the voting public does not like it…. although, we know that when push comes to shove (and with the help of the press), the UK public prefers far right over far left. (Yes, I know some will respond that Corbyn’s policies were not “far left” but his history was on the far left and the public did not like that).
The challenge for both parties is to harness the power of their membership without giving them too much control because their self-selecting nature means they tend towards extremism! There are some self-corrective forces; after Major there was a lurch rightwards to Duncan-Smith then lack of electoral success drove a march towards the centre (ish) with Cameron. (Labour went through the same re-invention in the 80s/90s). With Labour moving left again with Corbyn, Tories were able to shift right and still win. Thankfully, Labour is moving to take that centre and centre/left ground and will win next time. Yes, this means compromise – but without it all you get is failure.
But, whatever ones view about Labour it is clear that only a resurgent Labour Party can dispatch the Tories. A winning Labour Party then needs to deliver electoral reform…. and the challenge for members like me is to get that in our manifesto.
For the sake of accuracy, May wasn’t actually elected by party members: she was effectively crowned by default when Leadsom conveniently dropped out of the two horse race.
The hubris leading up to, and subsequent embarrassing losses at, the 2017 snap General Election perhaps tells its own story here.
Your point stands, however.
A very thoughtful post.
As you say, the Tories are the great survivors of British politics – because they know how to manipulate our democracy and don’t mind at all if they tread on their own politicians throats to stay in power, as well as the opposition.
They do have a number of options however: the Tories are good at making silk purses out of pigs ears of human beings. And it takes money and that is something that they are never short of these days it seems, especially these days with their ‘overseas connections’ shall we say?
Jeremy Hunt could be whisked out as gentler Tory as means to moderate matters. He could be marketed as the ‘Great Healer’, the righter of wrongs and Boris’ excess. I can see him bringing back people like Grieve etc. Why? Well, at least he seems self aware that Tory policy harmed the NHS. He hasn’t come out and said it, but he advocated better (for the Tories anyway) funding etc. And Jeremy – well – he’s been obliging has he not? To anyone it seems. Just give him the chance and he will do anything for The Party.
Priti Patel is obviously marketing herself at the moment – as a female PM, the presentational aspects of that might be used to gain favour.
And Truss – well I would not rule her out, she could be marketed using her background to appeal to the obvious myth of social mobility plus the ‘Wow, she’s woman!’ selling point.
But you are right essentially – it’s hard to know what they will do next. Stumble on until the next election (?), because I tell you they will fight like feral cats caught in bag. It will be vicious.
But there is another more sublime reason why perhaps its hard to call.
It’s because we don’t really know what the rarely seen puppeteers behind the Tory party are thinking and doing and what THEY want and are willing to pay for that we can’t see.
I really do fear what the Tories could do to this country between now and whenever the next general election is. We could be waiting just under 35 months should they go to December 2024. That is a long time to do even more damage than they already have.
The opposition parties need to be planning now for how they will contest the next general election and planning how they will work together. Unless they do, then the Tories could retain power.
Craig
Agreed
How can Labour and the Lib Dem’s possibly form a pact when the Labour Party itself is a broken disjointed mess?
Because they might need to do so
Let us hope that the Labour/Lib Dems / Greens / even the Monster Raving Loony Party are all so thoroughly disgusted that they unite to remove the Tories one and for all.
They’ve had the rub of the green for far too long.
Absolutely agree re the need for progressive parties to work together and plan now for the next GE. We can see that the current tory party is a disaster, and I’ll be delighted when Johnson goes, but lets not kid ourselves that makes anything better.
The phrase ‘same shit, different areshole’ comes vividly to mind. Every single one of the current cabinet are just appalling. And most of the current crop of tory MP’s don’t seem any better. The latest outrage, which feels very personal to me, is the grotesque anti BBC nonsense produced by Nadine Dorries, surely one of the most sprectacularly stupid people ever to be in Parliament.
The trouble is, as plenty of commentators here have noted, is that there are still around 30% or so of the English electorate who still, despite everything, would probably vote for them. Combine that with FPTP and a Labour party a large proportion of whom would still apparently prefer defeat by the tories to co-operation with other parties in an ABC alliance, and………..
I have to say, everything seems very, very bleak. And then look at Ukraine where it seems Putin is going to start another major war in Europe, the USA is heading towards, quite possibly, a second civil war, and the climate emergency. Awful, awful, awful.
Really? A pact of some kind with the LibDems?
A right wing Labour/Lib Dem coalition?
What policies ? The deficit, borrowing, taxes. None of them have policies we argue are necessary, and we’re meant to support them?
The problem of the left is its fear of having to explain non classical economics. We allow the neolibs the floor.
The left needs leadership and a programme of political education. I’m fed up getting plainly false info from so called respected sources.
The left is not going to get a say on this – the Corby project is dead and it’s time to accept it
We have to persuade the centre to not be neoliberal
That is the challenge – not being on the left
this moning ?
Edited
Thanks
The problem of representative democracy is that it requires political parties in order to function; but political parties are not essentially, or necessarily committed to democracy, because political parties are representatives not of people, but in the end of factions. David Hume understood this better than anyone; unfortunately, better than any political reformers since.
The only half-solution to this problem is proportional represetation, to oblige political parties to compromise with the electorate (resentfully) , rather than internalise the supposed coalition merely to bury compromise under the weight of the dominant faction. For the avoidance of doubt, there is no full solution to the problem. Political parties only have a contingent connection with democracy, and not one anyone should ever wish to rely on. Political parties are treacherous and unrelaiable by nature.
FPTP is the Gold Standard political process of factionalism, and therefore suits the political parties in Britain to perfection. For the avoidance of doubt, ‘Party’ is too easily corrupted ever to be trusted by anyone; which has, of course never stopped anyone exploiting the opportunities Party presents (not least to the psychopathic personality incapable of compromise). Note also that even at its best, any ‘Party’ system is by nature flawed. But we have, as yet, few convincing alternatives in any democratic system that is in use, or has functional credibility.
Parties and professional politicians, necessary for representative government, are the enemies of democracy. Democracy includes giving the citizens an instrumental role in governance not a once in 5 years sop where we elect people to represent their parties, or as John suggests, certain factions within their party.
Every party when in power and faced with public disquiet, or worse, “surrenders” just enough to neuter the clamour for fundamental change and the public return to their affairs satisfied and unaware that they’ve been hoodwinked yet again.
So, at some point Johnson will be offered up as a sacrifice and normality will resume. Only if a GE can be forced and a coalition fight the Tories with a cast-Iron commitment to PR is there any chance of real change.
I think the tory party voters are getting older and dying out and not being replaced as much by the next generation. That must be a major obstacle to future wins.
There haven’t ever been that many tory members and without the Youth wing maybe it would have been a lot fewer.
That would favour the politicised young of the next generation of voters who generally are rebels ,idealistic, peace loving and favour Fairness and Equality etc.
What this is showing not just here but in most of the ‘mature democracies’ which don’t have real Proportional Representation is that a controlled Two Party , electorally rigged polling system is broken. People have seen through the facade and seen how both sides are delivering the same ends with minor diversions. The destination is not allowed to be changed.
The great populist movements and results they have brought into that arena appears to be uncontrollable. Whether it is BrexShit here, the Gillette Jaunes and all the other populist parties throughout Europe or the freaky Tea Party and Fundamentalist Christians and Ordinary Joe’s and Karen’s of juvenile USA staying off-piste with Trump – throwing the Republicans into a bind. They can’t control these voters and bring them back to a safe Republican Presidential candidate. The Dems are being seen through by these new voters who have seen the continued failure of delivery of promises no matter how many shiny happy ‘radical’ but groomed young politicians coming off the conveyor.
So I declare the Two Party stitch up to be over.
A suitable new ‘Shock’ should be sufficient excuse to suspend it. Perhaps as soon as a couple more weeks even.
They are going to need a Bigger Stitch Up.
I worry that when a country has truly messed up with domestic policies the solution is a nice little war. Or, functioning as an acolyte in a bigger war.
So much can be shelved, hopefully forgotten about. Patriotism is required. What’s not to like?. You can even end up with a knighthood e.g. Tony Blair
In a sense the problems brought by Covid could have been a rehearsal for what will be needed to combat climate change. If so we have reverted to type and failed miserably.
The idea of going beyond winners and losers in a situation is out-with our experience as a society. Social class, neoliberalism, warfare, empire all follow a familiar pattern – winners and losers.
We are nowhere near accepting the idea that either we all win or ultimately
we will eventually all lose.
If a new and more severe variant of Covid should emerge how much have we learned? Very little I think. The idea of competing over infection and vaccination rates is obscene but maybe it is a forerunner of the disastrous competition that will occur over the world’s diminishing resources and inhabitable territory.
All for one and one for all or ultimately we will lose the lot.
I’m hoping by 2024, we, Scotland, will have voted to be an independent nation once again, and will be well on our way to achieving that aim.
This is a very good summary, as always. One or two points though. I think people tend to underestimate the tribal element in British politics. There is a tribe, which cuts across class boundaries, which has or will always vote Tory. This “bedrock” support is probably larger than that for other parties and will only change with a seismic shift. They may grumble and in extremis abstain from voting or even go so far as to vote LibDem in a by election, but they remain faithful to their tribe and only want a new more traditional Tory leader (Jeremy Hunt has my bet) and they will be happy. This is indeed very largely made up of older people and there is always the hope that they will die off and fade away, but I remember that being said in the 1960s and even the 50s and it hasn’t happened. There is unfortunately a steady, and indeed increasing, flow of old people who are naturally conservative, which can be ruthlessly exploited by the Conservative Party.
I also disagree about the “Jeremy Corbyn Project” which I see as far from finished. JC himself will probably not return as a leader but has an important role as an elder statesman. The recent capitulation by the BBC admitting that he has never said or done anything antisemitic, which could cause them problems as people recall their previous statements, may have been brought about by the threat of legal action but that admission, combined with the total disaster that followed not voting for him is beginning to have an effect. I would also hesitate to point out that the Left may be calming down with its internal squabbles and looking towards reconciliation and collaboration, there have been too many false dawns, but there are some signs and JC’s final role could be as a catalyst.
Of course no change is going to be possible without Proportional Representation and other changes in the way we govern ourselves and run our lives. The future of the planet is quite simply not compatible with capitalism, or at least any currently existing form. The capitalists are not going to carry out the needed reforms so if there is any hope it must lie with us proles. The climate clock is standing at about 7.5 years to a disastrous tipping point, that is only two elections, maybe just one away. That is not much time to experiment to see if something else such as softer capitalism of the sort now espoused by Labour will work (spoiler: it won’t), we need change now; tomorrow may be too late.
On Tories now –a big YES of agreement and recognition to this:
“ ‘The other’, whether it be the EU, the migrant already here or the refugee seeking a home, has a role only to the extent that they can be weaponised as a threat.”
And THIS:
“The one characteristic they have is their willingness to blame everyone and everything for all that is wrong. The result is that everything from a face mask onwards represents a battle to be fought by them, but why even they do not really know. All they need are enemies.”
That’s the nub of it right there and it is the same for the populist-compromised, conservative Right all over the western world. Especially so for Trump’s Republicans.
To put it in even simpler terms: they know what they are against, but have no real idea of what they are for. They stand for nothing and do nothing but bitch about other people.
They are 100 per cent negative and reactive. Without enemies they have no identity of their own. In power, they are an opposition pretending to govern.
So what’s underneath their seemingly aimless conversion of near everyone else into “the other”? It’s a demographic thing and the Americans have a simple term for it – “White Fright” – a fear among tribalistic whites that they will become a minority in “their own” country. A fear of being replaced, or overwhelmed, by “the other”.
Beyond all that the Tories have got a real demographic problem – a vast majority of young people don’t vote for them and never will. That die is now cast. It’s a slow-motion time bomb that will eventually obliterate the conservatives in the UK and elsewhere. The young will replace the old. That’s an inevitable replacement issue and no amount of fascist-lite, populist hysteria will solve that one .
Marco –
I don’t know about your last point… When I was a lad, we had “That Bloody Woman” in charge. My family came from a mining town in Scotland, so everyone I knew and every fibre of me hated the Tories. I swore I’d never vote for them and I didn’t know anyone else who would.
Fast forward to, well, the rest of my life really (except for that bit in the late 90s where the Tories dressed up as Labour for a while) and we KEEP VOTING THEM IN.
I know, it’s a mystery to me too. Just observing that if there was ever to be a dyed-in-the-wool “Anything But Tory” crowd, it’d be young people who survived Thatcher. Yet here we are.
Dismal, isn’t it?
If we for one minute get away from talking about personalities and look to see what Tories have always stood for, we can see that they all follow the same pattern.
Tories represent one class always have done and always will.
So what is that class, well it all changed in 1970, when the 1% recognised that with automation they didn’t need an ever expanding workforce, so all those things like tea breaks, holidays, sick pay, and any other benefit gained by negotiation became surplus to requirement. So at that time there was a ready made formula that would steadily and surely get such overheads out of the way, namely Neo-Liberalism.
What also became apparent during the 1970s was how properties could be sold off for greater returns than actual production, Norman Davis of Norton Villiers motorcycles was very prominent in the mid 1970s in selling off rather than taking on the foreign competition, something British industry has done ever since.
As Naomi Klein explained in her book “The Shock Doctrine”, with the change from maintaining full employment in 1970 to the Neo-Liberal dogma of the market knows best, shocks to the system became the norm, and with each shock the remedies were the same, working people must adapt and accepted change as though it were inevitable rather by Neo-Liberal design.
Alongside all of this politicians and academia also adopted and accepted that Market dogma was the order of the day and that resistance to it, appeared to go against the greater wisdom; and so the Labour Party slowly began to change which over time blurred the differences between the parties; leaving some to say that there was no difference between them.
As technology progressed and the political landscape changed all the shocks to the system was blamed on change, and that capitalism was constantly changing to meet each crisis, when in fact all the changes were coming from Neo-Liberal think tanks that altered peoples perception of the real world around them, and with always a promise of better things just around the corner.
As the state was being systematically dismantled power and wealth shifted dramatically upwards and rewarded the very people that instigated everything in the first place, so for them it has been a win, win, situation, with a complicit mass media, and compliant politicians. Anyone who stands against the new norm is vilified, slandered, derided and mocked, as we saw with Tony Benn, and latterly Jeremy Corbyn.
So when we see politicians over the whole of this last decade or so, lie, cheat, and laugh at the stupidity of the people that put them in office, we need only today, look at how Starmer gained office as the leader of the Labour Party, to see exactly how the whole establishment knits together, where people today feel utterly powerless to get the kind of change we need, as we did after the second world war.
In essence, we are not powerless, but with an utterly corrupt mass media that controls what people see and hear, those that offer a proper alternative, are shouted down or never heard.