WHAT is the point of the Conservative Party? This question that TCW has long since asked (and answered) was put to me by a friend while discussing my previous article on Sunak’s latest broken promise on EU legislation. He was genuinely curious about how Tory MPs always appear to be completely different people before and after an election campaign.
I told him I suspect there is no transformation – they just play at conservatism when their seats are on the line, but as soon as the sheep have been safely herded into their pens, they relax back into the hand-wringing, politically-correct ‘progressive’ default setting of ‘polite’ society, earnestly reflecting the concerns of the BBC interviewer rather than the people they supposedly represent.
In all fairness, I’ve been on a journey myself . . . in the opposite direction. As a naïve 18-year-old, I put a cross on the ballot paper next to Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats. I was deeply in love with the ‘European Project’ and suckered in by the promise of free university tuition. Five years of brain maturation later, in the next election I voted for UKIP, and have been voting for them or the Brexit Party ever since.
Many told me such votes were pointless, or even made a Labour victory more likely. I didn’t care, reasoning that it is better to support the party which most aligns with one’s own worldview than any tactical shenanigans. Indeed, far from ineffectual, the surging tide of UKIP votes of which I was a part led directly to David Cameron calling the EU referendum in the first place. Had they kept faith with the Tories, doubtless we would be thoroughly enmeshed in the EU to this day.
As Mark Steyn says, ‘when the right is elected they’re in office, when left is elected they’re in power.’
The sheer scale of both legal and illegal immigration has consistently been the No 1 issue concerning voters for decades, especially Conservative ones, and yet the numbers have never been higher. On one level the Channel crisis is just an irrelevant diversion in the grand scheme of things, though the pro-active ferrying of so many illegals is unprecedented.
Over a million people immigrated into Britain last year, a million people . . . just let that sink in. That’s not a figure you will ever hear on the BBC. Mainstream media and Tory politicians prefer to talk about ‘net migration’ as it looks less appalling, though still quite horrifying. If there are treaties or organisations preventing us from reducing immigration, ditch them: it’s really as simple as that. This country already has pretty robust laws for dealing with the issue, that’s not the problem; the problem is the political will to enforce them, and that is pathetically lacking in the Tory party.
For a long time I held a deep contempt for social conservatives who consistently voted for the Tory party, likening them to women who repeatedly return to an abusive partner, reasoning ‘I just need a bit more time and I can change him.’ I saw them as pathetic cowards being taken for fools time and time again. As the years have gone by my disdain has tempered, but only slightly.
Many voted for Tories because the alternatives are so much worse, and maybe they were right to do so. I have no doubt that Labour would have accelerated the terminal decline even more, but it’s rather disheartening that all the so-called ‘Conservatives’ have managed to do in the past is slow down the process ever so slightly. If that. The last 13 years of Conservative government has seen immigration speeding up, Islamification deferred to and a massive escalation of government debt.
Despite the gestures and the promises, nothing is ever tuned back, nothing is ever reversed, nothing is ever conserved. They have surrendered all the most important ground without a fight, claiming the hill to die on was always around the corner, and now they are surprised when they see there are no hills left. Boris Johnson turned out to be just as filled with hot air as we all feared he would be, Braverman talked a good game but when it really comes down to it is as useless and ineffectual as all the rest who came before.
Even as an atheist I can recognise the fact that the war being waged is a spiritual as much as a cultural one: at stake is the very soul of Western civilisation. The accusation of racism has been the left’s primary weapon because they don’t care if everything is destroyed at the end of this war; in fact that’s the whole point, for then it will be all the more easy to rebuild as a socialist utopia. It is no longer the old left pushing for this but, much more worryingly, politicians of all hues are clambering aboard the Great Reset Revolution.
Too much has been apologised for, too much has been conceded and ultimately, too much has been lost. Perhaps it is already too late, but I for one will continue to fight for the preservation of my civilisation so long as I have air in my lungs.
The question is where do we go from here? If you’d asked me a few months ago I’d have told you it would be better to let the party die and rebuild with something new than prop up such a decayed pack of treasonous cowards. Even if it means five years of Labour and all their unimaginable evils.
The trouble is that the first-past-the-post system makes it extremely difficult for new parties to break through, unless they enjoy concentrated regional support. For example, in the 2015 General Election the SNP got 1.5million votes and gained 56 Commons seats while UKIP got just shy of 4million votes and one seat.
Now I think it would be better, and faster, to gain control of the Conservative party, with all its infrastructure and support, rather than start from scratch. Much as Trump took control of the GOP. Naturally this would require the trouncing of the party at the next General Election. We need to clear out all the useless, pathetic squishes who comprise the vast majority of the PCP. So far there is no sign of the will to do this.
We need the party to be grievously wounded, but not mortally so, and for a hero to emerge from the ashes. A genuine social conservative elected to Parliament under a Labour government with a rump PCP. He or she could then could build back the support of the grassroots by actually standing up for conservative values.
The risk, as ever with the Tories, is that they learn all the wrong lessons, as when they interpreted their repeated defeats to New Labour as an imperative to become an even Newer Labour with a different coloured rosette. Not least perhaps because it is in the interests of both to extend a fake debate.
Which is exactly how we found ourselves in this mess to begin with.
