Monday 2 October 2023

Tory wars

Over the last thirty years or so we have seen a splitting of the right in this country. It has been like watching a slowly developing disaster, like a man with one foot on an unmoored boat and the other on the jetty. You just knew a fall was coming. The party wasn’t able to bridge the widening gap between the far right and the One Nation Tories of old. And so UKIP was born, carrying Nigel Farage to national prominence and providing him with huge influence over party policy, Conservative Party policy that is. UKIP came and went, only to be replaced by The Brexit Party and now The Reform Party under the multi-millionaire Richard Tice.

The lesson the far right has learned is that not only didn’t you need to have a majority inside the Conservative parliamentary party, but you didn’t even need to have any MPs in the party at all! You could be just as effective by pulling from the outside, provided there was a faction inside sympathetic to your views.

Leaders would always need to have a watchful eye and tack in the required direction to head off rebellions. Loyalty to the party, and tribalism, would always prevent any Tory prime minister from working with the opposition to bring the ship back onto a more central course. Cameron, as we all know, tried to counter the growing threat by appealing to the nation in a referendum - and failed. 

And so we come to the annual Tory conference, underway this week in Manchester in a converted railway station, ironically given the imminent announcement that HS2's connection to the city is about to be cut.  The front page of the Manchester Evening News was not something delegates would want to read:



The conference is, we are told, like a ghost town, and the party is in despair:

None of this is surprising. Sunak has not only lost control of the economy, he's lost control of his own party. 

For several years, wrestling with the aftermath of Brexit, the Conservative Party has attacked every group that they identify as being responsible for the myriad problems that have resulted from our leaving the EU.  The problems aren't all directly down to Brexit although many are, but it has sucked resources and focus from everything else and we have seen infrastructure crumbling and living standards fall at a record rate. 

Judges (AKA enemies of the people), the BBC, lefty lawyers, the Blob, civil servants, remainers, and so on have at one time or another had a sustained broadside from the Tories. The party is now preparing to turn their fire on each other.

There are now has so many factions it’s hard to keep track of them all. The European Research Group (ERG) has been joined by the Northern Research Group (NRG), the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO) and now the New Conservatives (NC):

The ERG are essentially Truss supporters, while the CDO would like to see Johnson back in No 10. New Conservatives are MPs elected after 2019. 

And yesterday I noticed yet another, the Conservative Growth Group (CGG):

I am sure there are others too. The problem is that Sunak doesn’t seem to have the support of any faction and neither does he have a faction of his own. There are people in the party who don't think that he is even a Conservative at all!

The former Tory Home Secretary Priti Patel has flatly contradicted the current Tory Home Secretary on multiculturalism. Braverman told an audience in the US last week that multiculturalism has failed. Patel says she’s wrong and we should be proud of it. 

The party is split every which way on every topic, there’s no coherent policy platform, no rational reasoning, nothing beyond survival, and yet if only they actually addressed some of the pressing issues, they might achieve a bit of a turnaround in the polls.

There have been a lot of protesters in Manchester including loyalists from Northern Ireland unhappy with the Windsor Framework which came fully into operation yesterday. They claim it has ‘killed’ the GFA.  This should also be a concern to Sunak since the fragile political balance in the province is in real danger at the moment, with the DUP still refusing to join the power-sharing executive.

As if things weren't bad enough have a look at this:

Even the donors are deserting them. The problem is that they can’t agree on what to do. This is what happens when you have no logic underpinning your policies. At the heart of it all is Brexit. It always was and always will be a wholly irrational thing and it forms the shaky foundation of everything that has gone afterwards.

But fortunately, the Tory's period in office is coming to an end. It's time to demolish Brexit and start again. Can Starmer do it? I really don't know.

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