Tory radicalism is a great tradition, not mere opportunism
The principal current topic among political commentators, whether in broadsheets or in the bar of the Dog and Duck, is whether there really has been a political revolution in Britain or just a fluke election result unlikely to be repeated. In more specific terms, are the Conservatives just the chance beneficiaries of the perfect storm (Corbyn/Brexit) that engulfed Labour at the election and will northern voters return to The Party We Used to Love at the next contest, or does Boris Johnson have a realistic prospect of retaining their support?
This is the most fascinating political conundrum of the post-War era. It opens up vistas of possibility – though by no means certainty – that suggest the potential for transforming British society dramatically and irreversibly. Already, though, the first misunderstanding of the situation has gained currency: the notion that the Conservatives need to “reinvent” themselves, to assume a character that is not truly theirs in order to court the “blue-collar” vote.
In last Monday’s Guardian, John Harris wrote a pretty accurate, round-the-houses column on the challenge facing Johnson to retain the support of first-time Conservative voters. However, the false premise on which it was based was revealed in his claim that such a conversion will require “further changes in thinking that will jar against some of the party’s deepest beliefs”. Not so: on the contrary, they will jar against some of the party’s most superficial and recently acquired beliefs.
Toryism has long nurtured a radical tradition. As early as the 1820s, before the Tory Party was repackaged as the Conservative Party, Richard Oastler, the Yorkshire-based champion of the Ten Hour Bill to regulate labour in factories, was an eminent Tory radical. Radicalism, allied with traditionalism and social conservatism, was a strong strain within the Young England movement which peaked around 1844. It is no coincidence that Disraeli, a leading light in Young England, first stood for parliament as a Radical.
He retained some of that inspiration when he became prime minister. Lord Randolph (“Trust the people”) Churchill inherited much of that tradition and so did many Tories throughout the more modern history of the party. Contemporary Conservatives have become so philosophically illiterate that they imagine their exclusive purpose is to champion free markets – a laudable objective, but too often confused by them with endorsement of crony capitalism – in tandem with the countervailing woolly concept of being “socially liberal”.
If the Conservatives cling to those delusions, or any part of them, over the next five years they can wave goodbye to Bassetlaw, Bolsover, Wrexham and just about every parliamentary seat north of Watford. That mentality was the toxic legacy of David Cameron and the one political posture that is more dead than Corbynism is Cameronism. But the worst misapprehension of all is that what went wrong with the Conservative Party was Thatcherism and that it is her legacy that must now be trashed.
Margaret Thatcher was a great prime minister who pulled Britain back from the abyss of global irrelevance. But it is debatable that there ever was such a creed as “Thatcherism”. Her policies were, in the best Tory tradition, a pragmatic response to an inherited crisis. Following the Winter of Discontent, control of trades unions had to be returned, by law, to rank-and-file members. The dead hand of the state had paralysed enterprise, so utilities had to be denationalised (the first mistake in that process was using the selfish-sounding term “privatisation”, the second was denationalising the railways horizontally rather than vertically, creating the monster Railtrack).
This programme freed up business, particularly the SMEs that are the lifeblood of the British economy. Small operators benefited. It was a traditionally radical measure to give council tenants the right to buy their homes. Remember, too, how “white van man” was attracted to the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher, seeing her party as an enabler, instead of a hobbler, of enterprise. The Thatcher legacy should not be clouded by the era of incoherence and incompetence that followed: “modernisation”, “austerity”, “the Big Society” (inspired by Saul Alinsky, demented Trot).
If Boris wants a template for courting and retaining his new working-class voters he could not do better than invoke Cameron’s Law: work out what the egregious Dave would have done and do the opposite. Cameron’s Law demonstrates that the horny-handed sons of toil in the North East do not flock to your cause because you proletarianize yourself by peeling off your Lewin & Sons tie and exposing your open-necked Harvie & Hudson shirt to better advantage. In those days of derangement the Tories actually held a fund-raising event for rich donors where the dress code was dinner jacket and open-necked shirt.
If Boris wants a second term he has no need to renounce one jot or tittle of Tory heritage. All he has to do is re-embrace Tory radicalism. That means being truly Tory again, rather than Conservative. But he must do so whole-heartedly, with no holding back. Every nettle must be grasped, every promised policy delivered. Any areas of fudge will be fatal. The Prime Minister knows he must invest money in the North and the Midlands; but he must do so strategically, bearing in mind that simply throwing money at a problem never solves it.
HS2 must go: it is the totemic white elephant that symbolizes the delusions of the past. Delivering businessmen to Birmingham twenty minutes earlier at a cost in excess of £100bn is not the kind of regeneration ex-Labour voters had in mind. Here, too, Cameron’s Law settles the issue, with George Osborne, a sub-section of that law, screaming “Save the life of my child” in defence of the HS2 squanderfest. HS2 was nothing more than a virility symbol for ministers, planners and the whole echelon of the Entitled who regarded it as their right to dispose of industrial amounts of taxpayers’ money on pet projects.
Above all, the Conservatives must control immigration and begin to do so this year. On this issue the Tories are drinking in the last chance saloon, having broken their pledges to control immigration three times in a row. The canard attempting to spread complacency in the Westminster bubble pre-election was that immigration had faded as a public issue. In fact the latest polling shows 65 per cent of the public highly concerned. In the year to June 2019 net migration amounted to 212,000. The woes of the NHS are directly linked to population increase.
Johnson’s proposal for an Australian-style points-based system is fair enough, but only if complemented by an Australian-style immigration cap. Proposals to loosen visa requirements for non-EU workers and lower the Tier 2 salary threshold below the current £30,000 would be fatal. So would an amnesty for illegal migrants, of whom Britain has the largest number in Europe. Any backsliding on this key issue will lose the Tories their new adherents. They must turn a deaf ear to the BBC and the rest of the lemming lobby urging open-door policies that are unsustainable.
The real war now is cultural. Boris must ditch all the PC nonsense, notably the “transgender” absurdities, and restore sanity to public life. The canary in the coalmine is a law scheduled to come into force in September denying parents the right to withdraw their primary schoolchildren from age-inappropriate “relationship” classes influenced by the “LGBT” lobby. That will play well in Sunderland. How Tory is it for the state to supplant parents’ rights? If Boris means business he will quash that anti-family, totalitarian, vote-killing piece of legislation.
The police must be de-politicized and made to do their job. There are 900 Met officers parked in front of computers, trawling the internet for “offensive” material, while knife mayhem runs rampant in the streets of London. There will be no point in recruiting 20,000 more police if they continue to target politically incorrect citizens while legalizing burglary by refusing to investigate such crimes.
Boris Johnson has inherited a Britain that, under the oppressive grip of cultural Marxism, has been turned into a La-La Land of demented liberalism. If he can make Brexit the occasion of replacing that Hieronymus Bosch landscape with a vision of a restored and revitalized Britain, he will be rewarded by the continuing support of those who have turned to the Conservatives as a forlorn hope.