This week in Brexitland, April 6, 2023

The idea that there is a left-wing conspiracy - a “New Elite” - that secretly runs Britain is an idiotic one. Here’s the real story

I have been to Toryland on extended holidays. I have worked for conservative (really “Conservative”) think tanks in London. I have written for centre-right publications, at times for extended periods of time on a regular basis. I think I have an idea of how it works - at least, as much as any outsider could. And I’m here to tell you that the idea that there is a left-wing cabal that secretly runs Britain has no basis in fact. Generally speaking, the opposite is much closer to being the truth. And not just because the Tories have been in power for 13 years. Even when they are out of government, the massive cultural powers in Britain mostly lean to the right.

There is a group of very wealthy individuals who want the Conservative party to be in power, no matter what. Even if they don’t like what the Tories are doing at any given time, or aren’t much for the leader, they always strongly prefer a Conservative prime minister over a Labour one. The New Labour years, followed by a coalition government where the Tories had to share some power out, scared the crap out of this contingent. They thought in Boris Johnson they were making a long-term investment. He would keep the Tories in power for another decade at least. That turned out to be a false dawn. Now, they’re scared again.

The reason the dial has been turned up on the culture wars by so many right-wing pundits lately is by co-ordinated design. It is a final, desperate punt to stave off crushing defeat. And it’s a look under the hood, as it were. The right have spent years saying that what animates the left is ideological purity; that their political foes aren’t interested in any middle ground. Everyone either agrees with the left on every political position, now hardened into dogma, or else they are the enemy.

I don’t disagree with the idea that the above description has characterised a large portion of the left over the last decade. However, the right haven’t seem to notice that they’ve sunk into the same trap themselves. The British right’s shibboleths - Brexit was great and necessary; “wokeness”, which is increasingly undefinable, is the number one scourge of our times; lockdowns were a bad idea and the whole Covid thing may have been a big con; people who live in cities are actively evil, unless they are members of the Conservative party - are just as stiff and unbending as the left’s. And if you disagree with any of them or even question the programme a little, you are going to be cancelled by the right.

Is there a right-wing conspiracy afoot? Calling it a conspiracy isn’t correct. It’s more like a country club. There is a Tory ecosystem that is well-funded, well-organised and most parts of it understand what the whole thing is trying to achieve (which is permanent Tory government). It isn’t political in the starkest terms. Someone can be centre-right or even hard right without being anywhere close to the Tory ecosphere. I’ve met plenty of people who fit into this category (and many who were outside the ecosphere who were then admitted into it and inevitably, that changed them greatly). It’s a sort of a gang.

For a while there, between say, 2015 and 2019, you could be in the gang or at least hang out with the gang once in a while, so long as you weren’t explicitly against the idea of a Tory government. Over the last three years in particular, this attitude has greatly hardened. Outsiders and traitors are actively searched out now by the right. If you don’t like Brexit, you’re out. If you ask whether anti-wokeness has become as bad if not worse than the excesses of wokeness, you’re definitely out. The “marketplace of ideas” appears to have collapsed on the right, almost completely.

This is a big part of why they are losing. The strengths of the Conservative party over the last century, one they have thoroughly dominated, have been twofold. One is that they defined themselves throughout this period as being non-ideological. The Conservative party as the place to come if you don’t like big ideas or big change. This started to shift with Thatcher, who was unquestionably ideologically animated, but even then, they tried to cling to this idea that they were the ones who avoided real politics. Thatcher only had to do all the big stuff because Labour had made such a mess of things, they would say. The same sort of idea was trotted out, to decent political effect, during the coalition years, when the idea was that while cuts to services were bad, they were necessary because of Labour’s excess.

This is no longer the case. Brexit changed all that because Brexit was unavoidably a huge idea built around change. You can’t do Brexit and be the “no change, please” bunch at the same time. And sure enough, Brexit opened the floodgates to a host of other ideological tenets, many of them fairly extreme. It is, ironically enough, exactly what happened to the left a decade before - bereft of new ideas and wondering where to go, the left embraced the idea of huge change, letting in the extremists and their extreme ideas they had been trying to keep at bay since the Berlin Wall fell.

The second strength of the Conservative party pre-2016 was that they defined themselves in the widest terms possible. Everyone is a Tory, really, they would say. It might be that you just don’t know it yet. Wait until you have bills to pay, or you have children, or you own something of value. Then you’ll grasp your inner Tory. Eventually, you’ll see that we’re right.

That’s all gone now. If you don’t think Brexit was a great idea, you can’t be a Tory anymore. That’s more than half the country gone right there. If you don’t think wokeness is the single most worrying thing we have to think about right now, then look elsewhere, the Conservative party isn’t interested in you. Do you think maybe we shouldn’t ship refugees off to Rwanda where they will stay forever? If you are even having second thoughts about whether this is a good idea or not, get lost, the Tories are not the place for you either.

No wonder they are hovering between 20 and 25% in the polls. Hell, that’s fairly decent considering how actively they are trying to shed voters at present. They’ve essentially destroyed themselves. And all over Brexit, which was a transparently bad idea, particularly from a Tory perspective. Not just because there are endless centre-right arguments one can make against Brexit, but because it was obvious that it always had the potential to destroy the Conservative party from within. And so it has.

The only reason they have any chance at the next general election at all is because, ironically enough given the dialogue around a left-wing “New Elite” that runs the show, there is a right-wing elite that is willing to throw a lot of money at trying to save them. Most newspapers lean obviously and unashamedly Tory. Hell, a few years ago I would have blanched at the idea that the BBC leans Tory, but after the Richard Sharp ordeal, that’s an increasingly impossible position to defend. Most cultural institutions in Britain still lean Tory, and that’s after years and years of the Conservative party going way out of its way to completely piss them off.

If a “New Elite” of left-leaning individuals really did run Britain, Labour would be looking at a 500-seat majority at the next election without question. After all, this is the Tory record in stark terms: they have hoisted several of the worst people in Britain upon us as prime ministers, crashed the economy, made the NHS unusable and pulled us out of the largest single market in the world. It’s only the actual elite who run things in this country who are giving them a fighting chance of existentially surviving the next election.

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Thanks everyone and I’ll see you all again next week for the worst of Brexit.