This week in Brexitland, November 16, 2023
What would a decent Conservative party in opposition look like? A thought experiment
This week brought with it big changes to the government. Braverman out, David Cameron in. Some on the right cried “Brexit betrayed!”, which is ridiculous given we left the European Union and don’t look set to rejoin it any time soon, but I think I get what they meant. Braverman going seems like the death of the National Conservatives rising to take over the government, at least for now.
The reshuffle caused me to ask myself this question: what would a decent, reformed Conservative party look like? And what could the Tories do to turn things around if/when they lose the next general election?
Here’s the prospectus of a Conservative party I would seriously consider voting for, particularly if Starmer’s Labour government turns out to be a disappointment (which is likely - almost all British governments are). I believe it comes down to five essential points:
Become pro-business again
This is far and away the biggest hurdle the Tories have to overcome. They have, mostly unconsciously, become bitter and resentful towards what is essentially their power base. Brexit is what started it and it has grown by leaps and bounds within Conservative circles ever since 2016.
As an example of this behaviour, I was at an event thrown by a centre-right think tank a few weeks ago. The main speaker gave an impassioned defence of business alongside a warning that Labour has already started to steal the Tories’ clothes in this regard. As it happens, I agreed with every word that he said.
The follow up Q&A was fascinating - all of the questions were from centre-right think tankers and politicians, and almost all of them had an anti-business undercurrent. “Hasn’t the business community been its own worst enemy over the last few years?” or “Should businesses be lecturing anyone right now?” or the classic, “Isn’t woke capitalism to blame?”
The Tories have to look at themselves and ask “Who are we?” - and if they don’t stand squarely with business, it is difficult to say who they stand with. Brexit caused them to drift away from business - if they don’t find a way to drift back, they are finished.
Connect with younger people
This is the second most important thing the Tories need to do. The median age of the Tory voter creeps higher every year and alongside this, the pandering to an older generation at the cost of alienating younger ones keeps growing. This is the road to the party’s ultimate demise, just by dint of demographic reality. At some point, they need to change tack. Right now is as good a time as any.
Become pro-housebuilding. Let the NIMBYs be damned. If they go off to the Lib Dems in protest, let them. The Tories need to stop being so defensive and go on the offence. They all worship Thatcher, but seem to avoid the biggest lesson of her success - have a vision for the country and follow it through. There will be lots of things that people don’t like about it, but if you stay the course, voters will see the big picture. Yes, this comes with risks, but so does doing the same things you know don’t work over and over again.
Think about the needs of younger voters. This will probably transform you into centre-right liberals, but that’s almost certainly where the future lies anyhow. It doesn’t actually mean moving to the left in any meaningful sense - it means reclaiming the centre ground you’ve ceded to Labour over the last few years.
Growth, growth, growth
Liz Truss used this as her mantra - it blew up in her face because she wasn’t prepared to confront the contradictions this entailed. But further to point 2 above, if the Conservative party don’t have some vision for how the country is going to economically grow, they will struggle to turn their electoral fortunes around.
Growing probably means immigration, at least for the time being. Embrace that and let the National Conservative types howl from the corner. We need new houses, new towns, maybe new cities. Nothing happened to the free ports idea because you weren’t ready to commit to what it would mean in practice. Stop being scared of growth and the bits of it the loons in your party don’t like.
Anti-woke, not anti-liberal
The word “woke” itself is extremely contentious now, with the right having spread its use to mean “anything vaguely left-wing”, but I’m going to pull the definition back about five years and use that as much as possible for this section. I would have defined woke in 2018 as a left-wing but passionately anti-liberal ideology that stems from various forms of “Theory” that swamed around academia for a while before being unleashed like a virus onto the left-wing world. Instead of the liberal, Enlightenment-derived idea of seeking a world in which we all find a way to live together and not discriminate against each other but rather, see everyone as individuals, not as the sum of their race, sex, birthplace, etc, classical wokeness (for lack of a better term) wants to only see people as the sum of their race, sex, birthplace, etc.
Liberal: wanting to eliminate racism, so that no one is judged by their ethnicity. The aim is to get to a point where race and racism is no longer an issue for 99.99999% of people.
Woke: saying that racism is just something intrinsic in human beings, particularly white ones, and so it can never be eliminated. We just have to talk about it all the time in order to try and minimise its effect on society and particularly people who are put into a pot marked “victims”, whether they like it or not.
Basically, liberals seek an equal society, where every individual is free to try and find the life they want to live for themselves, while the woke see the world as split sharply into “oppressor” and “oppressed”. Being an oppressor isn’t a big deal within this ideology, so long as you fess up to your privilege. Then you’re allowed to go on being as much of an oppressive prick as you like. It’s sort of like Catholicism - if you’re willing to confess your sins, you are given tacit approval to keep on sinning. It’s not about changing the world - the woke don’t think the world can really be changed.
The Tories should be classical liberals on this stuff - which to be clear, isn’t the same as being “anti-woke”, which has become a dogmatic religion all of its own. Stand up for women’s sex based rights. Stand up for the good parts of British history. But stop spreading a panic about wokeism as if its Covid-19 and you’re powerless to do anything about it.
Rejoining the European Single Market as a long term goal
Finally, the most difficult one on this list to achieve and for that reason, possibly the most important. The Tories have to aim to undo the worst elements of Brexit - particularly given they are the Tories’ fault in the first place - one of which was undoubtably leaving the single market. It was a mistake, one from which all of the errors I’ve already discussed in this article, most notably the anti-business turn, stem.
I, as long time readers of this Substack know, would love for us to rejoin the EU full stop. However, I can see what a stretch this might be for a lot of Conservatives, so I’m willing to meet you half way. Leaving the single market has not resulted in the glory promised by many Brexiters, to put it mildly. Also, rejoining the single market, while it would require re-instituting freedom of movement (although if we’re going for growth, growth, growth, as I’ve already pointed out, that shouldn’t be a negative), wouldn’t require rejoining common agricultural or fishing policies. Nor would it require Britain to stop doing its own trade deals, as this is not a requirement of single market membership.
Embracing this idea fully would be the final break from the Braverman/Truss/Boris Johnson past and help every other aim on this list be achievable. If the Tories want to turn away from a list such as this and wallow in the purity of opposition for a decade or more, that’s up to them. All I know is, if they were serious about wanting to achieve the things listed above, a lot of people who would currently crawl over broken glass to vote for Labour might stand with them instead.
Thanks for reading. If you haven’t subscribed already, please consider doing so. I’ll be back next week with the worst of Brexit.
Nick wants the Tories to return to being a relatively sensible centre right Liberal Tory Party. They've done that shift away and are not going back any time soon, if ever.
Their biggest seat haul for decades was for Bunter in 2019 after he had sacked 20 moderate MP's including major figures and imposed a fascist style loyalty agreement on the rest re. brexit and him. Constituent views or interests and personal conscience be damned.
The Tory membership has had entryism and the deaths or infirmity of many old traditional tory types, leaving them completely interchangeable with the deregulatory Brexits/Reform UK, who won the last EU election from Tory votes and were financed by old Tory money, previously supporting UKIP. It's a planned playbook to hammer the Tories to the right, copied from the Reform Party of Canada which eventually merged with their Progressive Conservatives ( remember they fell from government to 2 seats under FPTP) to form a very nasty Conservative Party, which back in power, suppressed hundreds of science papers it didn't like. So much for their supposed belief in free speech.
In these days of conspiracy theories, the return of nativism, extreme views being amplified by social media to grab clicks and the demise of jobs for life and traditional work places, replaced by contracts, home working and the gig economy, where is the old Toryism going to come from? Les Nobless Oblige and it's hangover from feudalism is a relic from the distant past. Moderate Toryism is not returning.
Socialism and it's moderate form Social Democracy are now dead according to Yanis Varofakis. I am not so sure. His hard leftism lasted 5 minutes in Greece before imploding. The Soviet form is thankfully dead and buried but the coming info revolution will replace professional work with AI and at the same time take manual work and deliveries via robots, which can already be cheaper than minimum wage, taking into account a general purpose programable robot via maintenance contract, with no need for social leave, meal breaks, sick pay and redundancy pay etc. People will demand money to live, from somewhere, rioting if need be and only a big nanny state will be able to provide it, by taxing the robots and AI and their owners.
As for the end of the EU and it's breakup predicted by Farage. Nothing could be further from the truth. Globalism is going rapidly into reverse since lock down and the world is turning into regional trade blocks of EU Europe, NAFTA North America, the CPTPT Pacific, African Union etc. Supply chains had become too long and flaky. China is too unstable, thieving, over centralised and authoritarian to deal with. It's fuel, food, fertiliser & labour are all over stretched. It's too reliant on overseas markets and foreign made semi-conductors, but no longer competitive in the region or even with high tech manufacturing in North America, now re-shoring fast. It's the most over borrowed entity in history and it's population is plummeting faster than any country in history. It's firms given free capital based on how many people it would employ regardless of viability and it's property market collapsing. In 40 years China went from agricultural & bicycles to massive industrial power and 1.3bn people, but heading down fast.
The UK will have to choose between NAFTA, if they will have us and the EU. It would not working being in both as the standards are too different. All logic and economics plus democratic inputs suggest going back into the EU. We would have no parliament or rolling presidency in NAFTA and the UK would struggle to compete with USA. Plus there's a bloody great ocean in between to add costs and green house gasses.
Joining with USA, Mexico and Canada, would be made to be humiliating, as the Lend Lease deal and Marshall Plan terms were after the war. This time they would want to take over most of the NHS, especially purchasing to push up the price paid for U.S drugs. The other big one would be farming and food supply, which would be trashed to give the politically important U.S farmers some growth to supply us. UK farmers could not compete outside of organic and niches. They would supply all the big stuff with hormone injections, blanket antibiotics, GM gene implanting, intensive rearing and big doses of pesticide and other chemicals on everything. Expect levels of health and life expectancy to fall.
The Tory story of buccaneering Brits sailing the world to do business is a fantasy. The idea was predicated by literally taking guns to a knife fight and extracting whatever was wanted by force with a few beads, rum and drugs thrown in to try to legitimise it, which is how the British Empire was born. Trade is not free anyway, but like the the rules of the road. The EU never prevented anyone from selling around the world.
Sorry Nick, Heseltine's and Major's Tories have no major figures left and are not being replaced by the like minded, as seats come up. There's none of the economic basis remaining that created them. They are yesterdays figures as much as Disraeli, Gladstone and Lord North.
Good points all; but from outside, and looking at the toxic way both the US Republicans, and US White Christianity/ Fundievangelicals have been going the past 5-10 years - and they do have a huge influence on English-speaking Brits, via the Bannon-pipeline for right-wing propaganda: I don't have much hope.
The snowflake feelings-brigade - the ones triggered by anything, which is then labelled woke or socialist or anti-Brexit recently - is also anti-facts, because "reality has a liberal bias", so facts must go.
And as scientific studies have shown, people do become addicted to the outrage mechanism; people who deliberatly deny contrary facts and surround themselves with echo-chambers and yes-men do become dumber and unable to think critically, and people do start believing their own lies.
That affects not only the voters, but also their leaders. Right now, anybody who wants to help business and grow needs to accept facts and be rational - he won't have a chance to get anywhere in a Tory party where loyalty to dogmas is required to get in.
And since it's not voters, but members who decide the direction, and the members are old rich men who believe their own ideology and who are terrified of loosing power by "giving in" - accepting other viewpoints - nobody will get far enough to change direction, I'm afraid.
Which is bad for the country, not because conservatives are a good thing in my opinion, but because a competent, factual, honest opposition party is necessary part of a working democracy (which GB doesn't have, anyway), or a well-run country.
Regardless of how much of a disappointment Labour under Starmer will be, a honest fact-based opposition can hold them to account and stop bad ideas.
But these Tories will just shout the same lies as now, because they don't care about facts.
Your take on wokeness is interesting; I don't agree with your definition (because I think that's the twisted version from the right) but with the conclusion and that what you call liberal is the right direction.
But people raised in authoritarian thinking can not understand win-win: either they have total power, or somebody else has power. So sharing rights with women, PoC, trans, gay etc., to them means loosing power, so they fight.
They will loose, of course, just for demography, as you say, same as in US, same as toxic Christianity; but it's a hard battle like every battle when one side is backed into a corner.