The Tories will spend a long time in the wilderness if an article in The Telegraph about Suella Braverman reflects her genuinely held views. She believes they must attract or recover Tory voters lost to Reform UK. Braverman said: “If we keep disagreeing with Reform on many and fundamental things, we won’t get those votes back.” This is how societies end up like the Republicans in the USA, pandering to ever more insane populist opinions instead of trying to educate voters on what is reasonable, possible, practical, and achievable in a democracy.
When one section of a community can't convince a significant majority of the others to adopt policies that they (and only they) think are right for everybody, you either have to try harder, accept a compromise, or overturn democracy. In the US at the moment they are well on the way to that last option. Republicans are being backed by umpteen billionaires who only want to get richer still and care nothing for the planet, ordinary folks in the USA or anywhere else or democracy itself.
Braverman says the Tory party, “can do better than being a collection of fanatical, irrelevant, centrist cranks” which she likens the Liberals to.
The article is really about the coming leadership election with Braverman having to deny reports she is on the verge of defecting to Reform UK Ltd, but I think it's only a matter of time. A senior unnamed Tory says she “would be a disaster as she is the most Right-wing candidate possible” and urges her to “stand aside and fall in behind Robert [Jenrick]”. He of course is not very far behind her on the right.
Miriam Cates, the Tory MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge in Sheffield from 2019 to 2024, tweeted this quite amazing claim, quoting her own words from a GB News interview:
On paper, the Conservative Government had a majority of 80. But in reality, there was no conservative majority, because too many Conservative MPs were liberals, not conservatives. This is why, for example, there wasn’t a majority in Parliament for leaving ECHR or repealing GRA. pic.twitter.com/52YBt5cTwJ
— Miriam Cates (@miriam_cates) July 20, 2024
Cates admits the Conservative party is split and says she doesn't want to "paper over those cracks" any longer. I agree. The party must and will divide itself into two, with one side effectively joining Farage and Tice as Reform UK Ltd, including Braverman and Cates probably.
That would be the best outcome for the left, the voters, and the country because it would leave the right politically divided and out of power for a couple of decades at least.
This mad belief in ever more extreme policies is not rational. Braverman, Cates, and the rest are never going to convince a majority that shipping a few hundred poor unfortunates to Rwanda at huge cost, is worth the UK quitting the European Convention on Human Rights. That and other proposals to slash spending and emaciate public services that will only damage the poorest in society and is never going to find favour with 35-40% of the electorate.
Elections are won and lost on the centre ground - by centrist cranks.
University College London has done some research into the election result and this bit should be required reading for the Tory right - but won't be:
"The Conservatives should resist the temptation to simply try to outflank Reform UK on the right, as the number of Reform voters willing to return to the Conservatives will not be enough to form a majority, while aping the politics of Nigel Farage is likely to cost the Party further votes in the centre.
"Less than a third (31 per cent) of those who voted for Reform UK say they might otherwise have voted Conservative. The remaining two-thirds say they would have backed other parties - including almost as many who say they would have backed some combination of Labour, the Liberal Democrats or Greens. Others would not have voted at all.
"Taken together this implies that in the absence of Reform standing the Conservative’s would still have ended up with well under 200 seats in this election. What’s more, those who abandoned the Conservative Party for Reform UK are the most likely to say that they would never vote Conservative again of all those who voted switched from the Conservative party at this election."
Braverman wants to ape Reform because they advocate the sort of cruel, performative but ultimately self-defeating policies she likes.
At least she is being open about it and this is to be applauded. We'll know what to expect if Reform UK Ltd ever gets into power. This is preferable to what's happening in America where Republican candidates have to espouse all kinds of crazy MAGA conspiracy theories to win over voters on the right. Once in power, so the theory goes, they will moderate their opinions and govern sensibly.
This only leads to more disappointment, accusations of a sell-out and the election of even crazier people.
David Cameron did the opposite in 2010 and 2015, He stood as a moderate, centrist candidate but having won power eventually in 2015, he ushered in what has been the most right-wing Tory government in my lifetime if not ever.
So, I welcome a split in the Conservatives. At the very least it gives both sides a proper platform to campaign openly for what they believe, instead of appealing fraudulently to one side of the electorate while planning to implement policies which the other side demands.
