THE STRANGE DEATH OF THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY
The Cancer At The Heart Of The Conservativism
Ed
Miliband’s decision early in March to effectively rule out a referendum on EU
membership it is said put a smile on David Cameron’s face, albeit temporarily.
The move, he believed, placed clear blue water between the parties.
If it did
put a smile on his face it tells you a great deal about how diminished a figure
he now is and how circumscribed his political horizons have become. Go back in
time a few years and you would find a Cameron horrified at being held hostage
by the euro- sceptic right and forced to commit to an in-out EU referendum. Now
he is grateful for whatever daylight he can find in his cramped prison cell.
His
predicament is the symptom of a disease that has been slowly killing the Tory
party since the political assassination of Mrs Thatcher in 1989.
Thatcher
was never a political Conservative, she was a free Market liberal. Capturing
the Conservative Party for her brand of Milton Friedman style capitalist fundamentalism,
and the voodoo economics of monetarism required purging the party of its old
style aristocratic paternalism, party members initially characterised as ‘the
Wets.’ True to this label those on the old style ‘moderate’ wing of the party
didn’t put up much of a fight and after Thatcher’s election victory in 1983
threw in the towel completely. What followed was the transformation of the
Conservative Party into a hard right free market political organisation serving
the interests of the multi-national corporations and media oligarchs like
Murdoch. Osborne and Cameron are both children of this revolution. The few remaining
Conservatives in the party, such as Edward Heath, looked on in horror.
However
whilst the Tory party might have been captured by Thatcherite zealotory, the
public remained less enamoured of the dogma. Thatcher’s success was always the
product of a divided left, she never enjoyed the support of the majority. As
the 80’s drew to an end and the party faced almost certain electoral defeat the
party, in a demonstration of its historically renowned ruthlessness, dumped
her.
In her
place it placed the Brixton boy, John Major. Major, whilst still wedded to key
elements of Thatcherism, sought to present the party much more as occupying the
so called ‘middle ground’ and jettisoned the more extreme Thatcherite rhetoric.
In the short term he was successful, famously
winning the 1992 election against the odds. This victory was however
misleading, it hid a cancer that soon began to openly consume the Conservative
party. For whilst it was relatively easy to replace Thatcher with Major the
ideology she had introduced had now taken root, there would be no going back to
the one nation Conservatism of the MacMillan years; more importantly the
zealots within the party were not a forgiving bunch and they were out for
revenge on those who had deposed their great leader. The story of the Major
government, 1992 – 97, is the story of that revenge and of the havoc that it
wreaked in the Conservative party.
One might
have thought that over a decade in opposition might have chastened the hard-core
ideologues, but not a bit of it; it is a peculiar feature of Thatcherite
zealotry that it is not amenable to normal political logic and is also unappeasable.
If elections are lost it is either because the platform was not sufficiently
Thatcherite or that the public had been bamboozled by left liberal propaganda
pumped out by the BBC and the London based liberal elite.
Moreover for the hard
core Thatcherite one can never be Thatcherite enough, one wonders indeed whether
Thatcher herself might now not be considered too ‘wet’ by some. The issue that
most ignites the zeal of the passionate Thatcherite backbencher is hostility to
the European Union. The wider Thatcherite core of the party, indistinguishable in this matter from UKIP, will no
longer be satisfied by promises of referenda; growing in
strength, confidence and virulence, they now want out.
This
obviously presents real problems for Cameron, who in the privacy of his own
home understands the importance of EU membership. This however has now become
the belief ‘that dare not speak its name.’ Where once the Tory party was replete
with closet gays, publicly decrying homosexuality, now we have the phenomenon
of the closet European.
Madness In Their Method
 |
| Backbench Thatcherite Zealots Peter Bone, Chris Chope and Philip Hollobone |
Consequently
we now have the spectacle of Thatcher’s children, who have continued to push
her agenda, privatising the NHS by stealth and the Post Office incompetently,
(with more than a tinge of the corruption about both), under pressure for not
being sufficiently Thatcherite. Cameron in particular is reviled by significant
numbers of Europhobe backbenchers, some who would rather see the party loose
the next election than Cameron triumph. It was this group that engineered the
humiliation of the Lib Dems over House of Lords reform, thus sabotaging the possibility
of an agreement on boundary changes that would have favoured the Tories to the
tune of as many as 20 seats. [1]There
is indeed madness in their method.
The full
implications of all of this for the future of electoral politics in the UK is
unclear, with Scotland now edging toward independence nobody can now
confidently predict the future of UK governance. However if the Conservative’s
win by a narrow majority they are unlikely to be able to provide stable government. The most likely scenario being a government obsessed with Europe and
Thatcherite orthodoxy; they are likely to tear themselves apart.
[1] In a
Parliament short on laughs the rage of Tory backbenchers, who had mocked and
jeered Nick Clegg throughout the attempt at Lords reform, when Clegg tore up the
agreement to support boundary changes that would have greatly benefitted the
Tories was wondrous to behold. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/aug/06/nick-clegg-blocks-boundary-changes.
I mean really what did they expect? It was a moment when the depth of stupidity
of the Thatcherite backbench Tory was made manifest for all to see.
