Posts: 130235
posted on 23/2/2023 08:26Nobody wants what the Tories are selling Bereft of ideas and tied in knots by Brexit, the Conservatives have had their time — and are wasting ours - Gav
David Aaranovitch in the Times today:
It was with a feeling of exasperation that I read our headline about how Boris Johnson was criticising Rishi Sunak over the Northern Ireland protocol and telling “friends” that “this is either a government of Brexit or it is nothing”. And I thought: “It’s been nearly seven years of this. Why don’t you — all of you — just go away?”
A week earlier, we had the news of the Ditchley Park “secret summit” in which an assorted bunch of Brexiteers and Remainers of all parties had come together to discuss how to make Brexit work better. Now, in a rational polity you might have expected it would be diehard Remainers, dreaming of one day rejoining the EU, who should have kicked up the biggest fuss about such a conference. But no. It was the commentators and politicians of the Tory right who went ape. Chief primate was Lord Frost, who accused participants of wanting to “unravel the deals we did to exit the EU”. Brexit, said Frost, did “not need fixing”. It needed instead for the government to “fully and enthusiastically embrace its advantages instead”.
As of now those advantages are lost on the British people. Never mind what Frost or I think — a substantial majority in the polls now regrets Brexit, and the evidence suggests that while some Brexit voters have changed their minds, demography is a big factor. Younger voters (and by this I mean those under 60) are anti-Brexit. The mortal reality is that the most pro-Brexit cohort from 2016 probably consists of those who have since died.
The return of Truss of the Forty-Four Days earlier in the month was the cherry on this unpleasant pie. Ah, but wasn’t her autumn dégringolade really the fault of the Office for Budgetary Responsibility (dice Kit Malthouse) or the Bank of England (John Redwood)? No. It. Wasn’t. Now go away. Please.
Yet they don’t. That we are still here and as a nation subject to the factional squabbles within the governing party — a party currently commanding the support of around a quarter of the electorate — and unable to progress is almost intolerable. Except we have no choice but to tolerate it.
Recently I’ve taken to looking back over the past few years, and one of the questions I’ve asked myself is what Britain has gained from the 13 years the Conservatives have been in power. In what way are we economically, socially and internationally better off? I came up with a few things that they haven’t got wrong, such as support for Ukraine after the 2022 invasion, and although our pandemic death toll was higher than some of our neighbours’ (and lower than others’), the vaccine procurement and rollout was a success. Apart from that we got an austerity programme that, whatever its other virtues, took no account of how badly critical services would be affected in the long term. And a referendum the people were not crying out for and that its sponsor, David Cameron — frit by the Ukip threat — knew would be bad for Britain should it be lost. When it was lost, narrowly, the ruling party and its new PM decided to interpret the vote as being for Total Brexit and maximum divergence, without ever resolving the tensions between red wall protectionism and Singapore-on-Thames.
The result has been a slow disaster. The government wasted more than half a decade of political and business time and civil service attention that were badly needed elsewhere. The economy was weakened at a moment when outside events began to demand greater resilience. Politically, the battles in the Tory party opened the black door for a man who everyone but himself knew was temperamentally completely unsuited to the top job. It was the Conservative Party and no one else who, when he inevitably fell, replaced him with the catastrophic Liz Truss.
Nevertheless, ever since the beginning of the year one continuing discussion has centred on how the Conservatives might be able to edge the next election. They are said to be “laying the tramlines” along which their campaign narrative will travel: falling inflation, fewer strikes, lower energy prices, a pre-election tax cut. If only (it has been argued) they can regain internal discipline, they might just win again. After all, they have Rishi Sunak who is not as lazy as Johnson, not as crazy as Truss and not as nasty as Raab. What’s to hate?
Some of this thinking reminds me of when I was a young communist and the party leaders would urge us on to work harder and sell more copies of the Morning Star (I ended up flogging my quota to the Trotskyists trying to sell their own papers) and bring the day of social justice closer. The problem, of course, was that no matter how hard we worked, people didn’t want what we were selling. Even a cursory look at the polls and the demography of party support shows that Sunak in 2023 is not Major in 1991 and the next election isn’t going to be 1992. In a fairly typical YouGov poll from the turn of the year, 2 per cent of those aged 18 to 24 supported the Conservatives. That went up among 25 to 49-year-olds . . . to 15 per cent.
It’s no surprise. Why would you vote Conservative next time? The horror stories of young professionals forced into slumlike conditions in vastly overpriced rental accommodation, while contemplating a housing market that is beyond their reach, is the common experience of our children. And when the government looked like it might actually do something to help, its own nimbys scuppered the bill. Or how about the bright technological future envisaged this week by Tony Blair and William Hague? On the same day it became apparent the Treasury had withdrawn £1.6 billion allocated to science research funding.
This is no party for young men. Why spend time and effort developing a programme for change, including rebuilding our ties with Europe, when you can have your deputy chairman bang on about bringing back hanging, hint yet again at building more grammar schools, devise your 20th doomed and immoral scheme for stopping people arriving in boats, or introduce illiberal and unnecessary legislation to curb protests? After all, which stance will go down best with the faltering faithful when it is time again to choose a new leader?
The Conservative Party today — the party of Braverman, Frost and Rees-Mogg — is a balloon of mediocrity kept aloft by hedge fund billionaires, dependent for ideas on ideologically armoured and similarly funded “think tanks” and steered by personal ambition. It is running down the clock. It is running down all our clocks. Why can’t it just go away?
- “Sometimes the angels punish us, by answering our prayers” -
It was with a feeling of exasperation that I read our headline about how Boris Johnson was criticising Rishi Sunak over the Northern Ireland protocol and telling “friends” that “this is either a government of Brexit or it is nothing”. And I thought: “It’s been nearly seven years of this. Why don’t you — all of you — just go away?”
A week earlier, we had the news of the Ditchley Park “secret summit” in which an assorted bunch of Brexiteers and Remainers of all parties had come together to discuss how to make Brexit work better. Now, in a rational polity you might have expected it would be diehard Remainers, dreaming of one day rejoining the EU, who should have kicked up the biggest fuss about such a conference. But no. It was the commentators and politicians of the Tory right who went ape. Chief primate was Lord Frost, who accused participants of wanting to “unravel the deals we did to exit the EU”. Brexit, said Frost, did “not need fixing”. It needed instead for the government to “fully and enthusiastically embrace its advantages instead”.
As of now those advantages are lost on the British people. Never mind what Frost or I think — a substantial majority in the polls now regrets Brexit, and the evidence suggests that while some Brexit voters have changed their minds, demography is a big factor. Younger voters (and by this I mean those under 60) are anti-Brexit. The mortal reality is that the most pro-Brexit cohort from 2016 probably consists of those who have since died.
The return of Truss of the Forty-Four Days earlier in the month was the cherry on this unpleasant pie. Ah, but wasn’t her autumn dégringolade really the fault of the Office for Budgetary Responsibility (dice Kit Malthouse) or the Bank of England (John Redwood)? No. It. Wasn’t. Now go away. Please.
Yet they don’t. That we are still here and as a nation subject to the factional squabbles within the governing party — a party currently commanding the support of around a quarter of the electorate — and unable to progress is almost intolerable. Except we have no choice but to tolerate it.
Recently I’ve taken to looking back over the past few years, and one of the questions I’ve asked myself is what Britain has gained from the 13 years the Conservatives have been in power. In what way are we economically, socially and internationally better off? I came up with a few things that they haven’t got wrong, such as support for Ukraine after the 2022 invasion, and although our pandemic death toll was higher than some of our neighbours’ (and lower than others’), the vaccine procurement and rollout was a success. Apart from that we got an austerity programme that, whatever its other virtues, took no account of how badly critical services would be affected in the long term. And a referendum the people were not crying out for and that its sponsor, David Cameron — frit by the Ukip threat — knew would be bad for Britain should it be lost. When it was lost, narrowly, the ruling party and its new PM decided to interpret the vote as being for Total Brexit and maximum divergence, without ever resolving the tensions between red wall protectionism and Singapore-on-Thames.
The result has been a slow disaster. The government wasted more than half a decade of political and business time and civil service attention that were badly needed elsewhere. The economy was weakened at a moment when outside events began to demand greater resilience. Politically, the battles in the Tory party opened the black door for a man who everyone but himself knew was temperamentally completely unsuited to the top job. It was the Conservative Party and no one else who, when he inevitably fell, replaced him with the catastrophic Liz Truss.
Nevertheless, ever since the beginning of the year one continuing discussion has centred on how the Conservatives might be able to edge the next election. They are said to be “laying the tramlines” along which their campaign narrative will travel: falling inflation, fewer strikes, lower energy prices, a pre-election tax cut. If only (it has been argued) they can regain internal discipline, they might just win again. After all, they have Rishi Sunak who is not as lazy as Johnson, not as crazy as Truss and not as nasty as Raab. What’s to hate?
Some of this thinking reminds me of when I was a young communist and the party leaders would urge us on to work harder and sell more copies of the Morning Star (I ended up flogging my quota to the Trotskyists trying to sell their own papers) and bring the day of social justice closer. The problem, of course, was that no matter how hard we worked, people didn’t want what we were selling. Even a cursory look at the polls and the demography of party support shows that Sunak in 2023 is not Major in 1991 and the next election isn’t going to be 1992. In a fairly typical YouGov poll from the turn of the year, 2 per cent of those aged 18 to 24 supported the Conservatives. That went up among 25 to 49-year-olds . . . to 15 per cent.
It’s no surprise. Why would you vote Conservative next time? The horror stories of young professionals forced into slumlike conditions in vastly overpriced rental accommodation, while contemplating a housing market that is beyond their reach, is the common experience of our children. And when the government looked like it might actually do something to help, its own nimbys scuppered the bill. Or how about the bright technological future envisaged this week by Tony Blair and William Hague? On the same day it became apparent the Treasury had withdrawn £1.6 billion allocated to science research funding.
This is no party for young men. Why spend time and effort developing a programme for change, including rebuilding our ties with Europe, when you can have your deputy chairman bang on about bringing back hanging, hint yet again at building more grammar schools, devise your 20th doomed and immoral scheme for stopping people arriving in boats, or introduce illiberal and unnecessary legislation to curb protests? After all, which stance will go down best with the faltering faithful when it is time again to choose a new leader?
The Conservative Party today — the party of Braverman, Frost and Rees-Mogg — is a balloon of mediocrity kept aloft by hedge fund billionaires, dependent for ideas on ideologically armoured and similarly funded “think tanks” and steered by personal ambition. It is running down the clock. It is running down all our clocks. Why can’t it just go away?
- “Sometimes the angels punish us, by answering our prayers” -
- Nobody wants what the Tories are selling Bereft of ideas and tied in knots by Brexit, the Conservatives have had their time — and are wasting ours - Gav 23/2 08:26 (read 686 times, 1 post in thread)