After twelve years of the Conservatives in power, does the country feel more conservative now than it did in 2010?
David Cameron and George Osborne infamously referred to Tony Blair as “the Master”. Far from turning back any of the changes wrought by Blair and New Labour, twelve years of Tory government has only further entrenched that political project.
Boris, Brexit, betrayal
Opposition to immigration was a key driver in the vote to leave the EU. Boris Johnson rode the Brexit wave straight to Downing Street only to open Britain’s borders — and yet few of his voters seem to have noticed. Matt Goodwin, a politics professor at the University of Kent, spoke of this predicament on the Triggernometry podcast. It’s worth quoting at length:
“So the big promise was take back control — regain control over the immigration system… We can now set our own immigration policy and its independent of the European Union. But the specific immigration policy that we now have… has made it a lot easier for people from outside of Europe to migrate into the UK… The end result that were now seeing in the data is a watershed moment in Britain’s immigration story. The numbers of migrants coming over from India, the Philippines, Nigeria, Zimbabwe is now increasing dramatically. The source of migration into the UK is changing. It’s not European. It is now predominantly coming from countries such as Pakistan and Nigeria… In the next few years this will become visible very quickly to lots of people who perhaps are currently thinking we’ve got this new immigration policy thats much more restrictive… I just don’t think people have tuned into the reality of just how quickly the country is going to be transformed by this new migration policy.”
To anybody familiar with the history of the Conservative Party this Bait-and-switch wasn’t particularly surprising.
Diversity: whatever it takes
It’s a testament to the state of the party that the contender for the party leadership (and therefor Prime Minister) deemed the least woke has been Kemi Badenoch, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants who spent much of her childhood in Lagos and described herself as “to all intents and purposes a first-generation immigrant.” That a newcomer to the country can have such an easy rise to power isn’t random. In July of this year David Cameron tweeted “The current Conservatives leadership contest to be our next PM is the most diverse ever. But this didn't happen by accident; it's been years in the making.” In an article in The Times the former Prime Minister writes:
“During my first week in the job, I made a speech explaining that it wasn’t enough to open the door... We needed to get out there and bring people in. So I immediately froze the selection of Conservative candidates. I said that from our broader candidates’ list we would draw up a priority list, of which half would be female and a large proportion would be from black and minority ethnic backgrounds. Associations in winnable seats would have to choose from this “A-list”, and they would be encouraged to select candidates through “open primaries” that were open to non-party members… We headhunted great candidates from ethnic minorities and pushed them forwards. Our approach was “whatever it takes”.”
In the end it was Rishi Sunak who was handed power — a man so disconnected from the country that his wife doesn’t even pay tax here.
What of the ostensible right of the Party? There’s Steve Baker, the MP who rose to prominence as a full-throated Brexiteer. He has since urged support for footballers taking a knee in solidarity with BLM and adopted the rhetoric of white privilege. In a statement titled Black Lives Matter Baker wrote:
“It is clear the Conservative Party needs to move beyond our proud record of establishing the most ethnically diverse government ever, to becoming more proactively anti-racist in what we say.”
The Stonewall takeover
It’s difficult to find any cultural issue where the Tories hold a conservative position. In his autobiography Cameron writes that gay marriage “is one of the things of which I’m proudest.” (Did anything he achieve beat gay marriage? His “proudest achievement” was increasing foreign aid.)
During her tenure as Prime Minister, Theresa May told the Pink News awards: “We have laid out plans to reform the gender recognition act, streamlining and demedicalising the process for changing gender.” May wanted to introduce “self identification” so that legally changing gender would be as simple as filling out a form — without the need for any medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria. The process is already startlingly easy.
An article in the New Statesman describes a scene at the Tory Party conference last year:
"The room was packed, the mood exuberant. On 5 October this year, young Tories queued for an LGBT+ Conservatives Pride reception at the party’s annual conference in Manchester, thanks to its promised star guest. “Trans is brave,” their 23-year-old host, Elena Bunbury, who chairs the group, told the crowd. “Trans is beautiful!” And then she handed over, with a hug, to the Prime Minister’s wife. Boris Johnson watched from the back of the room as Carrie Johnson, a long-standing ally of the group, declared her husband “completely committed” to extending LGBT rights.“
According to the Guardian, “Introducing Johnson to the stage, Bunbury said: “Trans people’s rights that exist is not a topic up for discussion.” At a time when the rhetoric around gender has become completely unhinged, the Conservative Party has planted itself on the side of the radical transgender ideologues at Stonewall. According to Boris Johnson’s own former director of legislative affairs, senior advisers to the then Prime Minister were ‘letting Stonewall dictate trans policies’. During his leadership the government promised to ban “conversion therapy” for trans people. In this context the term conversion doesn’t mean taking a child and converting them into a sad simulacrum of the opposite sex but rather the opposite — counseling anybody slightly confused about their gender that they might not be “stuck in the wrong body”. It is a ban that would criminalise all treatment for gender dysphoria other than life-altering surgery.
Do you have a license for that tweet?
After the Hunter Biden laptop debacle the insidious nature of big tech censorship is obvious yet the Tory party think there is too much free speech online. Here’s an excerpt from an official synopsis of the Tory party’s Online Safety Bill:
“Platforms will need to have appropriate systems and processes in place to stop criminals using their services to spread hate, and will need to respond quickly if someone posts racist content, whether words, images, emojis or videos. Companies which fail in this duty of care could face huge fines - up to 10% global turnover, which for the major social media platforms will be billions of pounds.”
Faced with such onerous fines, The Spectator predicts: “Inevitably, these companies will err on the side of censorship, for fear of being punished for not censoring enough.”
The thought police
Boris Johnson rejected claims that the police force had become “too woke”. Here’s a more accurate assessment from former officer Harry Miller: “We don’t have a police force, we have a paramilitary wing of Stonewall”. What has twelve years of Conservative government wrought? An officer telling a thought criminal “Someone has been caused anxiety based on your social media post. And that is why you’re being arrested.”
If there was ever a case to vote for the Tory Party it rested on the claim that they might at least govern with some financial acumen. Given Britain’s current economic maelstrom, that claim has proven entirely illusory.
This is not a party that is salvageable. It must be totally destroyed.