Skip to main content

Can the Tories survive another decade?

The British Conservative Party is an extremely successful electoral machine. Over the nearly 170 years since it was founded in 1834, it has been in government more than half the time. It is currently the most powerful political party in the UK, holding the largest single bloc of seats in the House of Commons, the largest number of Peers as well as being the largest single British Party in the European Parliament (holding 25 of the 72 British seats) and being a dominant force in local government too, with over 9,000 councillors. In the face of such a record it may seem absurd to even question the future of such a political success story.

Yet the fact is that the Tories are facing a mounting series of challenges which could certainly lead to electoral defeat and potentially political irrelevance within a pretty short period. 

To me, the fundamental problem remains the unresolved merger of economically liberal ideas, which in the Conservative Party, are usually deemed "right-wing" with socially liberal ideas, which are usually deemed "left wing". David Cameron as leader has followed a largely left-wing social agenda, even as he has tried- with only partial success- to get the country through the economic crisis by following a right-wing economic agenda. However his socially liberal views have allowed his political enemies within the Conservative party to paint him as left wing across the board, which is emphatically not the case. More to the point the social conservatives are both increasingly vocal and increasingly unlikely to give way, even when the majority of their party do not support them. Overlaying this economic and social cleft there remains the poisonous issue of Europe, where an ever more intractable group of Europhobes are refusing to accept any compromise - insisting ever more vocally that the only way is out.

It is not just that the Conservative Party is divided- all political parties comprise differing points of view- it is the bitterness of the divisions and the rancor with which they are held that is making the Conservatives ever less attractive electorally and ever more difficult for a leader- any leader- to chart a safe course. Take Europe, David Cameron is the most Euro-sceptic Prime Minister in British history, he has- very wrongly, in my view- been prepared to veto major EU agreements and has been highly critical of the policies of other EU governments. You might think that the Tory Europhobes would regard him with some approval, but in fact far from it. The social conservatives and the anti-Europeans are fanatics in the classical definition, they won't change their minds and they won't change the subject, yet they have to function in a political world. Cameron has to function within the EU under a series of functional compromises, yet his own side regard such compromises not as an essential political tool, but as a betrayal,

When every decision is viewed through such a distorted prism, it becomes ever more difficult to make a decisions at all. In the circumstances it was only a matter of time before such dinosaurs as Peter Hitchens or Janet Daley would start to speculate over David Cameron's job security- but the issue they have made a litmus test, gay marriage, is a battle the social conservatives have long ago lost. Even the deeply social conservative "Cornerstone Group" (aka "Tombstone") has not been able to muster too much resistance, yet the noise that they have made simply reminds the voters how far behind the times so many Tories still are. Indeed, with an average age well into middle age, the Conservative membership is ageing pretty rapidly out of existence. In fact these Tory activists have been defecting to UKIP in some numbers, but it is a measure of how powerless party members are that the Conservative Party itself remains largely unaffected- it has become a virtual campaigning organisation, using paid deliverers and highly targeted voter ID software.

So with membership falling, and the growing perception that the party, even when on the popular side of the argument, can not effectively formulate or follow through its ideas, the Conservatives are on a slippery slope. Of course many would say that the coalition was to blame, and that the Tories will merely follow the depths that the Lib Dems have already plumbed. Yet there are signs that the Lib Dems could be poised for a modest, but significant recovery. As UKIP nibbles away at the right of the Conservatives, the Lib Dems have been winning significant numbers of council by-elections too. Given the bizarre maths of the British electoral system, it does not take that many votes to fall away before major damage can be inflicted on a political party.

A UKIP/Lib Dem squeeze on the Tories- sounds like wishful thinking, yet in some contests it has already been happening.      

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Concert and Blues

Tallinn is full tonight... Big concerts on at the Song field The Weeknd and Bonnie Tyler (!). The place is buzzing and some sixty thousand concert goers have booked every bed for thirty miles around Tallinn. It should be a busy high summer, but it isn´t. Tourism is down sharply overall. Only 70 cruise ships calling this season, versus over 300 before Ukraine. Since no one goes to St Pete, demand has fallen, and of course people think that Estonia is not safe. We are tired. The economy is still under big pressure, and the fall of tourism is a significant part of that. The credit rating for Estonia has been downgraded as the government struggles with spending. The summer has been a little gloomy, and soon the long and slow autumn will drift into the dark of the year. Yesterday I met with more refugees: the usual horrible stories, the usual tears. I try to make myself immune, but I can´t. These people are wounded in spirit, carrying their grief in a terrible cradling. I try to project hop

Media misdirection

In the small print of the UK budget we find that the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the British Finance Minister) has allocated a further 15 billion Pounds to the funding for the UK track and trace system. This means that the cost of the UK´s track and trace system is now 37 billion Pounds.  That is approximately €43 billion or US$51 billion, which is to say that it is amount of money greater than the national GDP of over 110 countries, or if you prefer, it is roughly the same number as the combined GDP of the 34 smallest economies of the planet.  As at December 2020, 70% of the contracts for the track and trace system were awarded by the Conservative government without a competitive tender being made . The program is overseen by Dido Harding , who is not only a Conservative Life Peer, but the wife of a Conservative MP, John Penrose, and a contemporary of David Cameron and Boris Johnson at Oxford. Many of these untendered contracts have been given to companies that seem to have no notewo

Bournemouth absence

Although I had hoped to get down to the Liberal Democrat conference in Bournemouth this year, simple pressure of work has now made that impossible. I must admit to great disappointment. The last conference before the General Election was always likely to show a few fireworks, and indeed the conference has attracted more headlines than any other over the past three years. Some of these headlines show a significant change of course in terms of economic policy. Scepticism about the size of government expenditure has given way to concern and now it is clear that reducing government expenditure will need to be the most urgent priority of the next government. So far it has been the Liberal Democrats that have made the running, and although the Conservatives are now belatedly recognising that cuts will be required they continue to fail to provide even the slightest detail as to what they think should guide their decisions in this area. This political cowardice means that we are expected to ch