The Tories were once the party of reliable, uncontentious and boring middle England. Now Kemi Badenoch claims they are the saviours of a form of Western civilisation that is a figment of her imagination. What hope have they in that unaccustomed role, or are they lost in some unknown political space?
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
Are the Tories lost in the current UK political space that they're trying to occupy? Let me explain that.
The Tories have existed for over two centuries now in their currently recognisable form. They like to claim that they, as the Conservative Party, are the longest established and most successful political party in any democracy in the world. And there are some good reasons to think that is true. Over that period of more than two centuries, they have either formed the UK government, or been the official opposition and therefore have always been incredibly close to the seat of power within the UK. If anything represents the UK establishment it is in a very real sense the Conservative Party. And when you look at its membership until very recently, they were also the UK establishment.
The Church of England at Prayer was one way in which they were described. Middle England - and I very much emphasise England, because the Tories are not a party of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland - Middle England is represented within the Conservative Party by those people who are the - and I'm going to use this term in inverted commas – “Pillars of the community” who uphold the society in which they live by being the church warden or the local justice of the peace sitting on the magistrate's court who or who are the small business person who has been running the family business for generations and who employs a small number of people in the local shop or whatever it might be that provides them with a comfortable living.
They might also be, the local farmer, although by and large farmers don't get involved with politics. But the point is this, the Conservatives have occupied a very safe, non-dogmatic, traditional role within UK society. And they're no longer doing that.
Kemi Badenoch has now said that Western Civilisation is at threat. Apparently, the threat is from the Labour Party, who are, as far as any person other than Kemi Badenoch in the UK is concerned, so indiscernible from the last Conservative government that it is literally impossible to tell that there was actually a general election that changed the people in office last July.
They're pursuing the same policies, use the same fiscal rules, impose the same draconian laws on those who wish to protest, are saying that austerity is just as necessary as any Tory Chancellor ever has. Nothing has changed as a consequence of voting Labour into office, except that the Tories now claim that we are living on the cusp of a societal breakdown because the Tories are no longer there. Well, in fact, if we analyse it, Kemi Badenoch is actually accusing her Tory predecessors of being part of the rot that she is now seeking to address.
And this is where I come to that conundrum, where I ask that question, are the Tories lost in space? Because the space that Kemi Badenoch wants to occupy is very obviously lost on the far right of politics.
She obviously adores Trump and everything that he is doing.
She sees her natural allies as being on the far right in Europe
She is talking their talk about cutting expenditure.
She talks their talk about migration.
She promotes a politics, which is very obviously based on hate just as they do.
Her attitude towards people in this country who are on benefits is, for example, just appalling, as if there is nobody who is in need of state support.
Her attitude towards business is that it can do no wrong, when very clearly it can.
She denies climate change, when it's very obviously real.
She hates experts, which is one of the characteristics of the far right.
She's trying to push the Tories into a space which is wholly ideologically driven, in a way that no other Tory leader, bar one, has done over the last two centuries and that one was, of course Liz Truss, who was the biggest failure as a prime minister that this country has ever seen.
Badenoch is trying to replicate Truss's outright fanaticism for hardline, pro-market, anti-people reform, and most particularly, Badenoch is trying to replicate Liz Truss's hardline ideological program which was based upon a hatred of everything to do with the state, everything to do with what it can supply, and everything and everyone who the state supports.
Whether that's by caring for the arts, or by caring for people who are in need, or by caring for people who require health care or social care which would be otherwise beyond their means, or simply by providing people with an education, the value of which she very clearly questions - and in fact, which she wants to reform so that it becomes completely uniform as a form of indoctrination - All of those things she wants to decry in the way that Liz Truss did.
She's coming straight out of Tufton Street, that road around the corner from the Houses of Parliament, where the right wing think tanks that have for the last 50 or more years promoted far right views in this country are located, and she's picking up their narrative and claiming this is what Western civilization is.
Well, it isn't. Let's be clear about it. Western civilization was civil. And they are promoting policies based upon hate and nothing else. And hate is not the basis on which the Tories have always survived.
They might well have been small minded, and in fact I think they probably have been.
They might well have been decidedly parochial, and that has been unattractive.
In the past they were decidedly imperialist, and most definitely fanatical supporters of the monarchy and the class structure.
But hate? No, that wasn't it. They could somehow reconcile their positions without hating. But, this Tory party that Badenoch is creating is absolutely full of hate. That is the narrative that she's always seeking to present.
And this is why I think the Tories are lost in space. Because most people in the UK don't live on the basis of hate. Oh, come on, I'm real. They've got their petty prejudices. They've got their dislikes. And I don't always agree with a lot of what they will be representing through those prejudices and dislikes, some of which will be a bit antisocial to say the least. But they aren't hateful in the way that Kemi Badenoch is and in the way in which the likes of Chris Philps and Robert Jenrick and other Tory leaders are. No, they're not like that. They don't want to be like that. They want people who appear to be, in their terminology, decent in charge. And Kemi Badenoch doesn't meet that criterion for love nor money.
She can't be, then, a Tory leader in the sense that any previous Tory leader, apart from Liz Truss, has ever been, and be the supporter of Trump, and the far right, and all the narratives that go with it. This is a space where there isn't common ground. She's trying to force two parts of the Venn diagram to overlap when frankly they don't.
The Conservative Party and these views which she's promoting are in different places.
So where do the Tories go now? I don't know.
I don't know whether they can survive the onslaught from Nigel Farage as a result.
But what I do know is that, again, and this is a recurring theme of this channel at present, this leaves a void inside British politics. If Badenoch is moving further to the right, and frankly leaving the centre ground single transferable party coalition to be occupied by Labour, the Liberal Democrats and SNP, then she's actually simply removing another choice. Because there is no reason to vote for her and the Tories when Farage is doing the job better than she is on the far right.
So where is this place where the Tories are? What is the space they're trying to occupy? I don't know. But what I do know is that Badenoch, if she carries on as Tory party leader, which has to be open to doubt, will be leading that party into oblivion. And that is another deeply unsettling fact within the UK political economy at present.
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The Conservative Party is in La La land.
That’s why the electorate threw them out.
There is little point in trying to analyse them rationally.
But the Labour party is not far off.
They, together, are the Uniparty.
Sadly, as discussed, there is no viable left wing, rational, alternative.
That’s why people vote Reform (out of desperation). 🙁
Richard,
Me-thinks you are being unduly generous to the Tory party. I agree that most tories would like to appear to be kind – that doesn’t mean they are or have been… Their self-interest always takes precedence.
Interestingly, I think the tories were more popular in Scotland post-war/pre-thatcher. Then Thatcher blew it (about the time she patronised/irritated the governing body of the Church of Scotland). So there is a model for tory decline in middle England.
Maybe I am…
Just re Scotland – that was the Unionist Party, not the English Tories – they merged in the very late 60’s I think. This Unionist Party favoured some sort of limited home rule for Scotland at the time when Labour was strictly for a very centralised Britain. Labour’s turn to devolution only happened when they were in the opposition in the 80’s. Present Scottish Tories have very little to do with that old Unionist Party though.
Thanks for that!
You’ve reminded me that they are still officially the Conservative and Unionist party, right? I’d always assumed the unionist bit was picking up orange coloured votes………
I sometimes joke that the stereotypical Trots ended up joining The Conservative Party in order to cause a revolution.
Given how the party is treating people I can see it happening if they ever end up in power again.
There is absolutely no humanity in them
Badenoch, Trump, etc, are appalling – but we have to face the fact that electorally they are probably right. The neoliberal consensus that cohered the right and centre for 40 years has collapsed, for the simple reason that it failed, and everybody knows it. That status-quo offers stagnant or falling living standards plus climate-ecological breakdown. It’s not surprising that more and more voters are becoming radicalised – both to the left and to the right. Did the German election just belie this? – no, it didn’t, because the Conservatives won with their second lowest vote in their entire history (much like Labour in the UK) – the big swings were on the far right and far left, just as they have been across ‘western democracy’.
The centre-ground is not going to stop disappearing, because there are no non-radical solutions. Badenoch’s choice is between ineffectual centrism hanging on to the status-quo for just a bit longer before the dead-end (the space already occupied by Labour), or flight into right-wing fantasy conspiracism and scapegoating. Only the left/green actually have real solutions – but they mean upsetting the status-quo, existing wealth and privilege, so are even less attractive to traditional conservatives than the far right madness.
Great post – and you have been very kind to the Tory party.
I think the things is, Thatcher spent so much time destroying the institutions of state in this country that basically, the -social glue’ that held British society together became unstuck. That glue was also undermined by the gloves off more rampant ‘go-getting’ make ‘loadsa-money’ ethos as well, where even the most benign efforts to exert moral control of the ‘animal spirits’ in markets or society were simply swept aside.
Add in a bit of Liberal unreality about human nature (rational self interest – poppycock!) and what the Tories have done is unleash something that their old values could never hope to control – they have as many have said over the years ‘released the genie’ and it will not be put back in its bottle. These older ideals you discuss above are as I see it to do with feudalism really and that too gets mentioned quite a lot as though we are going backwards. The things is, we may not be going backwards at all. The modern Tory future is much less benign.
However therefore, please accept this excerpt from John Gray’s ‘The New Leviathans’: Thoughts After Liberalism’ (2023) pp.131-132 that debunks most comprehensively the idea that we are going backwards:
‘Feudal societies conferred benefits on their subordinate populations that contemporary societies cannot provide. In return for labour, serfs were promised protection by lords. 21st century serfs are abandoned to anarchy and despair (e.g fentanyl, queues at the NHS). Feudalism was supported by myths of a divine order in which the poorest had a place. The 21st century underclass are offered no place. Like the former persons’ of 20th century communist regimes, they are retrograde specimens of humanity on the wrong side of history’.
The only way that you can be politician now is arguably to join in, in the abuse of what ideological Thatcherism that shrugged off its ties to society created, a society where there is increasingly no social contract. All you have to do is manage the discontent and use it as a political tool to sustain your political career.
This is why we seem to go around in never ending circles.
The Conservatives were a pragmatic party in my youth – the 1950s and 1960s.. The switch from empire to Common Market and the accommodation with unions were all part of that.
Heath started the move with Competition and Credit Control act 1971. It gave more power to the banks. It lead to an increase in inflation and the Act was repealed in 1973. But the economy was also hit by the end of Bretton Woods and the quadrupling of the oil price. This brought about conflict with the unions and a Tory mission to break their power. Keynes was declared no longer suitable for the times.
Thatcher and Reagan pushed the western world into neo-liberalism. The era of ideology over pragmatism. Thatcher’s housing and privatisation policies have benefited the few and not the many.
America has become the model , not any of the Conservative parties of Europe. Now it is trying to suck up to the Republican party which has gone on a similar journey to the Far Right.
To oppose effectively the rest of us need an alternative model for our society. A workable model is not an ideology. There are differences. An ideology tries to fit the world to its teaching. We see a pragmatic approach here most days. I just hope more people do in the near future.