Conservative party conference - the full review
I don’t believe I’m going out on too much of a limb here to say that the majority of people currently reading this do not like the Tories very much - and I’m certain that is a massive understatement. Fair enough. I happened to attend Tory conference earlier this week and I could talk all day about the negatives I witnessed. However, before I get into all that - relax, I’ll get there - I would first like to discuss the positives.
Some of you will find this shocking or will even downright refute this entirely, but there are plenty of - steel yourself for this revelation - very nice and decent Tories. I count some of my best friends amongst them. They are liberals and the majority of them are even pro-European, at least in the sense that if you handed them a pain-free manner of being back in the EU (or at the very least, the Single Market), they would bite your hand off for it. You can ask on one hand how they could remain Tory members after Brexit, Priti Patel followed by Suella Braverman as Home Secretary, Boris Johnson followed by Liz Truss as leader, etc, etc, we could be here all day with this list. On the other, given we only have two major parties in this country, with all attempts to disrupt this coming to nothing, perhaps it’s a very good thing that the sane Tories haven’t abandoned it to the lunatics and may in fact take the whole thing over some day relatively soon. A comparison here is the moderates who stayed in Labour during the Corbyn years - while it was happening, you were well within your rights to ask how they could stick around and at least tacitly support the whole horror show. Yet looking at it from a 2022 perspective and Starmer now looking like the next prime minister, it all looks totally logical, like it was part of a big plan. Anyhow, I wish the liberal Tories luck and hope they win their battle for control of the Conservative party some day. I know a lot of you would rather lie in a bucket of sulphuric acid than ever vote Tory but think about this in a serious fashion: would you rather have a Conservative party that was run by people who actually cared about the country more than some empty ideology, or the shower we current have running the show?
There was a European Movement event at the conference that’s worth commenting upon in light of the future of Brexit. It featured Michael Heseltine and David Gauke talking about Brexit from a pro-European, centre-right perspective and was enlightening as a result, with so many of the arguments for why Brexit has been a disaster usually coming from the centre-left. The room was packed and there was a lot of energy floating around - which was in sharp contrast to the events that were pro-Brexit in nature, oddly enough. One that stands out on that front being a Bruges Group event featuring Bill Cash, John Redwood and Andrea Jenkyns. It was like a “best of Brexit nutters” line up and it did not fail to deliver in the insanity stakes. Lots of people have quoted Jenkyns already from this panel - who please bear in mind is the current Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Skills, Further and Higher Education - when she said that people should stop getting degrees in “Harry Potter”. However, few have noted the part where she talked about the need to think about free speech for the under-5s ("Freedom of speech starts at a young infant age”). Or any of the crazy stuff that Cash and Redwood said (which I won’t bother repeating since it was the usual boilerplate Brexit stuff, only a shade crazier than usual). Yet there was no energy, no buzz there. The enthusiasm for Brexit is actually thin on the ground within all parts of the Conservative party these days. The have to come up with some “yay Brexit” stuff every once in a while because the party is chained to that particular corpse, but the old fervour is dying fast. It’s becoming increasingly obvious to everyone that leaving the EU was a terrible mistake, one that is not yielding even the most basic of benefits promised.
All right, let’s get to the good stuff - in other words, the bad from this year’s Conservative party conference. First of all, we need to talk about Michael Gove. He was everywhere, always offering his “full support” to the prime minister, while undercutting her and her agenda at every available turn. He scored a huge victory at the start of the conference, appearing on the Kuenssberg show saying the 45% rate cut had to be reversed, only for that very thing to happen a few hours later. That’s a lot of power for a backbench MP to wield. The fact is, whatever you think of Gove’s worldview, he is much, much better at politics than Truss and her band of amateurs. He can - and indeed, did - run rings around them all. Watching what he does throughout the Liz Truss premiership will be interesting. He could have sat the whole thing out quietly but has decided to go on the offensive instead - and good on him for that, someone has to. Thinking about it, this isn’t actually a “bad” of Conservative conference, although it is very bad for the prime minister.
The amount of members of the actual cabinet briefing over one another throughout the conference was astonishing. It’s one thing for Michael Gove to be clever with this stuff, quite another for a serving member of the government to say things that they must know to be harmful to Truss and her agenda. I thought about detailing at least some of the briefings and cross-briefings here, but there are just so many and they are all so complex, it would be difficult to know where to begin and where to end. Needless to say, someone should write them all up in a separate, long article.
Finally, I’ll end with this: there was a startling lack of ideas at the conference. It felt dead, like everything has been used up over the last dozen years. They have been left with the theory that shrinking taxes will on its own magically grow the economy. They talk of “supply side” levers as well, to be fair, but there are never any specifics here - everything they could do is either off the agenda completely (rejoining the single market), extremely tricky to get past a divided party (increased immigration) or chimerical (the age-old stripping back of “EU red tape”). Most people within the party know Trussonomics won’t work but it’s the last roll of the dice so they just have to pray for a miracle here. Getting rid of Truss would be admitting the game is up and all they are going for is damage control at the next election (which might not even work anyhow). Sticking with her, for now, is all they can do. It’s a bad place to be in.
Thanks for reading, as ever. If you haven’t subscribed, please do and I’ll be back next week with the worst of Brexit.
True, the UK electoral system is designed in a way that there tend to be two major parties in each electorate. But there is really no reason why a major party could not be replaced by a different one; that certainly has happened in many democracies, and it has happened historically in the UK.
So, instead of hoping that the Conservatives become more moderate again, a Briton could also hope for and work towards the UK's two-party system becoming Libdems versus Labour, for example. They might then be fine with the Conservatives being run forever by "the shower we currently have running the show" if that means the party will become marginalised and be replaced by a more moderate one.
One reason to prefer that instead of hoping for re-moderation of the Conservatives would be that they have not been moderate for several decades, so hope may be thin on the ground that there is enough liberal wing left for them to ever become sensible again. You may not like that view, and you write that "everything has been used up over the last dozen years" as if there ever were any good ideas in that party twelve years ago, but were there?
I am writing this as somebody outside of the UK and am therefore implicitly writing about the entire conservative political movement over the last forty years across all the 'Western' world, but basically the only idea it has had in all that time is: make the rich richer, make the poor poorer, and distract voters by stoking fear and hatred of immigrants and minorities. That's it.
There isn't, and never was, a good idea. There was only a thin veneer of ideology in the shape of trickle-down economics, which falls apart after one second of thinking it through. Because it is immediately clear that a billionaire given another hundred million currency will just stack it on top of their other billions, especially if the poors don't have the disposable income anyway to buy anything the billionaire would try to sell after investing that hundred million; and conversely, somebody living paycheck-to-paycheck given anther one thousand currency would immediately spend it to fulfill their urgent needs, meaning that trickle-up would obviously work to stimulate the economy where trickle-down never will.
In other words, if this kind of conservatism disappeared from the mainstream political spectrum of a nation, to be replaced with something like the UK's Libdems, nothing of value would be lost.