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.
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.
I don't: it's a bad concept. It starts with some people being nobler by birth, which is false (non-factual), and therefore requires them to be obliged to be good patriarchal caretakers of the lower classes, but lacks any mechanism to actually enforce that, or stop those not-noble nobles who abuse their privileges - as we see playing out with the current crop of Eton and Bullingdon yobs.
A better system is a modern democracy, where there's no born elite, just people who work to a position by showing they are competent at it, and who, if they misuse their power, can and are held accountable. Actually accountable, that is, in court of law, with paying fines or going to prison, not some Parliamentary committee staffed with their cronies/ friends, who gives a slap on the wrist, and one month later they are back in another position of power again.
Du hast mich missverstanden - das war ein Witz. Parcel of Rogue hat den Ausdruck "Noblesse oblige" , falsch als "Nobless oblige" geschrieben, was andere Bedeutungen hat...
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.
I don't recognise your definition of woke at all. I have no knowledge of what it was in academia, but when it emerged in public discourse, woke was simply being aware of discrimination and being against racism. It certainly didn't mean talking about racism all the time to the exclusion of everything else. You make it sound like being anti-woke is a good thing. Being woke is a subset of being liberal in my view, not the opposite of it.
I agree it quickly became used in response to any left wing comment. All kinds of new pejorative terms sprung up such as wokeness, wokery, wokist to add to the lexicon of bigotry. Just as PC became twisted into an abusive term.
This would require that the Conservatives let go of their fixation on austerity and openly accept that significant levels of investment in all parts of the country are needed. For this, government investment must have a leading role. Leaving the necessary investment to the private sector is libertarian fantasy.
It also means the party needs to become much more spread geographically across the country and away from its heartland in the shires, which would necessarily reduce the influence of the current membership. Good luck with that...
Some great suggestions, but the main problem is that you are not describing the Conservatives. You want a liberal party that connects with younger people, is ok with immigration, wants to build more houses and is happy to cut through against NIMBYS to do so and wants to rejoin the Single Market. The party you've described already exists in the UK but you're currently dismissive of it.
Thanks Nick for your thoughtful and constructive piece. As a former Tory voter from Thatcher’s time on, I agree with most of your points, though you completely lost me on the woke question. I propose adding a 6th point: Conservatives need to regain their credibility in economic and financial management with a vision that isn’t bound up in austerity. This will be prerequisite to the growth and industrial redevelopment agenda.
In the meantime, I’m looking forward to getting my expat vote back next year so I can vote the bu…rs out.
Nick, I previously quizzed you on the subject of " Re-joining the European Single Market" and you side-stepped the question. Now you are making it major objective in your list of hypothetical things to do (although last on your list). LOL.
Is this some magic solution, a fourth way, the other ways being ...
what we are now,
joining a customs union,
or re-joining the EU?
Please enlighten us.
And when you describe this unknown 'solution' maybe also explain why the EU would want us to be half-way inside the tent? Thanks.
(re-)joining the Single Market usually refers to becoming part of an arrangement that is similar to what non-EU members of the EEA have.
It was specifically designed to provide EFTA members with the option of being part of the Single Market without being part of the EU as a political union.
If Cameron had been clever enough, he would have negotiated such an option before running the referendum, which in turn could have between remaining in the EU and leaving for that new association status.
The early May government had still an opportunity to achieve that, although from an already weakened position. Such an outcome would have solved many of the issues that made the withdrawal agreement so difficult. Especially the hard ones like the border in Ireland and the status of each other's citizens.
The best hope right now for any similar achievement is the increasing chance that the EU will create such an arrangement for the new set of membership candidate nations.
If the UK government of the day has managed to restore some semblance of trustworthiness they could be invited to join as well.
Since this will get some new name it would allow both main parties to side-step earlier commitments not to join the Single Market.
In politics everything is possible, but in this case not only has there got to be something in it for the member states, but the existing members of EFTA have a say as well. If, on a variation on this theme, there would be a shiny-newly named vehicle for new membership candidate nations that will be difficult to sell inside the UK. Otherwise, and this is a point made by Nick now and then, the 'simplest' and 'easiest' way for the UK to get back into Europe in a meaningful way is for the Tories to change their mind. The electorate can help that 'conversion' by keeping them out of power as long as they don't change their mind.
I genuinely do not know what 'woke' or 'wokeness' means, since the words are used indiscriminately, as you note, to mean anything the right-wing don't happen to like at the time. I therefore was glad to have your definition, although harking back to some time before 'woke' became so ubiquitous. Then I read the comment from münchner kindl and rather agree with it re 'woke'. It's become just a word that's chucked around on social media and has been picked up by more 'serious' media, still without meaning. It would be interesting to have a glimpse into its future definition in the OED, if such a publication survives.
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.
I like the concept of "Nobless Oblige"
I don't: it's a bad concept. It starts with some people being nobler by birth, which is false (non-factual), and therefore requires them to be obliged to be good patriarchal caretakers of the lower classes, but lacks any mechanism to actually enforce that, or stop those not-noble nobles who abuse their privileges - as we see playing out with the current crop of Eton and Bullingdon yobs.
A better system is a modern democracy, where there's no born elite, just people who work to a position by showing they are competent at it, and who, if they misuse their power, can and are held accountable. Actually accountable, that is, in court of law, with paying fines or going to prison, not some Parliamentary committee staffed with their cronies/ friends, who gives a slap on the wrist, and one month later they are back in another position of power again.
Du hast mich missverstanden - das war ein Witz. Parcel of Rogue hat den Ausdruck "Noblesse oblige" , falsch als "Nobless oblige" geschrieben, was andere Bedeutungen hat...
Ah, sorry, that went over my head.
Was ist die andere Bedeutung von Nobless oblige? Ich kenne nur die normale Form, geläufig in der Übersetzung "Adel verpflichtet".
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.
I don't recognise your definition of woke at all. I have no knowledge of what it was in academia, but when it emerged in public discourse, woke was simply being aware of discrimination and being against racism. It certainly didn't mean talking about racism all the time to the exclusion of everything else. You make it sound like being anti-woke is a good thing. Being woke is a subset of being liberal in my view, not the opposite of it.
I agree it quickly became used in response to any left wing comment. All kinds of new pejorative terms sprung up such as wokeness, wokery, wokist to add to the lexicon of bigotry. Just as PC became twisted into an abusive term.
RE: #3 Growth.
This would require that the Conservatives let go of their fixation on austerity and openly accept that significant levels of investment in all parts of the country are needed. For this, government investment must have a leading role. Leaving the necessary investment to the private sector is libertarian fantasy.
It also means the party needs to become much more spread geographically across the country and away from its heartland in the shires, which would necessarily reduce the influence of the current membership. Good luck with that...
Some great suggestions, but the main problem is that you are not describing the Conservatives. You want a liberal party that connects with younger people, is ok with immigration, wants to build more houses and is happy to cut through against NIMBYS to do so and wants to rejoin the Single Market. The party you've described already exists in the UK but you're currently dismissive of it.
The earliest reference to “woke” I have found is the musician Lead Belly.
In 1938 he urged people to be “woke” in respect of the dangers of being black.
From awareness of racism in society and inequality the right have sought to own the term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_Belly?wprov=sfti1
Thanks Nick for your thoughtful and constructive piece. As a former Tory voter from Thatcher’s time on, I agree with most of your points, though you completely lost me on the woke question. I propose adding a 6th point: Conservatives need to regain their credibility in economic and financial management with a vision that isn’t bound up in austerity. This will be prerequisite to the growth and industrial redevelopment agenda.
In the meantime, I’m looking forward to getting my expat vote back next year so I can vote the bu…rs out.
Nick, I previously quizzed you on the subject of " Re-joining the European Single Market" and you side-stepped the question. Now you are making it major objective in your list of hypothetical things to do (although last on your list). LOL.
Is this some magic solution, a fourth way, the other ways being ...
what we are now,
joining a customs union,
or re-joining the EU?
Please enlighten us.
And when you describe this unknown 'solution' maybe also explain why the EU would want us to be half-way inside the tent? Thanks.
(re-)joining the Single Market usually refers to becoming part of an arrangement that is similar to what non-EU members of the EEA have.
It was specifically designed to provide EFTA members with the option of being part of the Single Market without being part of the EU as a political union.
If Cameron had been clever enough, he would have negotiated such an option before running the referendum, which in turn could have between remaining in the EU and leaving for that new association status.
The early May government had still an opportunity to achieve that, although from an already weakened position. Such an outcome would have solved many of the issues that made the withdrawal agreement so difficult. Especially the hard ones like the border in Ireland and the status of each other's citizens.
The best hope right now for any similar achievement is the increasing chance that the EU will create such an arrangement for the new set of membership candidate nations.
If the UK government of the day has managed to restore some semblance of trustworthiness they could be invited to join as well.
Since this will get some new name it would allow both main parties to side-step earlier commitments not to join the Single Market.
Anda, mmmmmh, however a fair point.
In politics everything is possible, but in this case not only has there got to be something in it for the member states, but the existing members of EFTA have a say as well. If, on a variation on this theme, there would be a shiny-newly named vehicle for new membership candidate nations that will be difficult to sell inside the UK. Otherwise, and this is a point made by Nick now and then, the 'simplest' and 'easiest' way for the UK to get back into Europe in a meaningful way is for the Tories to change their mind. The electorate can help that 'conversion' by keeping them out of power as long as they don't change their mind.
Hmm, interesting that you would consider a new EEA-type arrangement more difficult to sell.
It could even come with different rules than the agreement between EFTA and the EU.
But yes, it would likely still need a shift within the Tory party for this to be offered
I genuinely do not know what 'woke' or 'wokeness' means, since the words are used indiscriminately, as you note, to mean anything the right-wing don't happen to like at the time. I therefore was glad to have your definition, although harking back to some time before 'woke' became so ubiquitous. Then I read the comment from münchner kindl and rather agree with it re 'woke'. It's become just a word that's chucked around on social media and has been picked up by more 'serious' media, still without meaning. It would be interesting to have a glimpse into its future definition in the OED, if such a publication survives.