Peter Hitchens is someone I only intermittently agree with (and this time is no different, after all he writes for that bastion of the right-statism, The Mail on Sunday) but his lengthy article in The Spectator called Conservatives do not have a party had me nodding most of the time.
There is no point in pretending that the Tory party is going to recover. This pretence only delays the construction of a new movement, which cannot flourish until we have said goodbye to the old one. It also gives the Liberal Democrats the freedom to supplant the Tory party, unobstructed, in many of its former strongholds, a freedom they are enthusiastically using.
[…]
So David Davis, who is opposed to European integration if he means anything at all, is compelled to seek the support of federalists. This, the modified Molotov–Ribbentrop pact approach, has been tried before — but only by people who forget how that pact ended. Similarly, Kenneth Clarke is seriously put forward as the saviour of a party he plainly hates.
[…]
You cannot properly defend, say, constitutional monarchy if you have no idea why you believe in it and do not understand why your opponents hate it. You cannot effectively oppose the introduction of identity cards unless your every instinct revolts at the imposition of these oppressive breathing licences on a free people.
Hitchens and I disagree over foreign policy issues (amongst other things) but it is hard not to recognise that the Tories are finished for exactly the reasons Hitchens points out and that it is not in the interests of anyone who cares what happens in Britain to have the current power elite unopposed for any longer.
And before some of our commentariat start muttering that it is unrealistic for someone like me to expect the Tory party to transform itself into a model of libertarian small state rectitude; I am not suggesting that at all. I just think that as the Conservative party is not meaningfully conservative any more and that the party’s leadership clearly do not give a hoot about conserving civil society, it needs to be replaced with something that fills that rather large political niche if the current trend towards politically correct populist authoritarianism is to be effectively opposed.
I read the article in The Speccie, and I agree with you. It is pointless saying “The Tories have lost their way…”, as though they could misplace their entire philosophy and raison d’être. They haven’t even had the decency to offer an opposing philosophy. With a couple of exceptions, they haven’t even bothered to be a proper Opposition.
They are too busy scampering around trying to copy the socialists, who are so popular most of the population couldn’t be bothered to walk down to the polling station in the last election. They’re so stupid that they’re competing with Labour to see who can be the most loony. Kenneth Clarke! Give me a break! And Malcolm Rifkind stating that the Conservatives didn’t offer enough women candidates! Oh, gawd!
What is your solution? Could David Davies hive off his own party? More libertarian and more assured than the silly Tories?
As with the EU, I don’t think there is any cure for the Tories. Trying to fiddle around and massage this bunch of chumps into a party is a waste of time. They’re done.
Indeed! I shall continue to vote UKIP mostly just to help the process of killing off the Tories, at least until something better comes along.
It is sickening to watch them flounder around looking for approval from those already commited to Blair and his ilk whilst at the same time they don’t even have an awareness that they might have principles of their own.
With the wholesale destruction of civil liberties, the deliberate obstruction and shrinkage of civil institutions, incredible waste of public sector operations, endemic public sector expansion etc….
there is a huge group of productive people out there who despair ever finding a party that could make this country a place they could again believe in.
Bernie, what is so baffling is, the Tories seem to be unable to see the destruction of British civil liberties that take place before their eyes – in Parliament – and the destruction of British civil society that also takes place before their own eyes – on the streets, on the trains, on the tubes, in the school playground.
Blair said in a speech that he was going to “destroy the forces of conservatism” – meaning everything that binds society together and provides continuity of the generations – and the Tories are sitting around thinking, “I wonder how we can get in on that!” They beggar belief.
But as I asked above, who will provide a solution?
As someone who’s seen quite a bit of the inside of the Tory party recently, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the grasp there of the changing axes of politics. I’m fairly sure most of the plausible leadership candidates see there is space for a libertarian (in a non-doctrinaire sense) opposition. It is not one that would appeal to Peter Hitchens necessarily, because he is like many genuinely conservative types too exercised by threats to traditional ways of life, though in practice he should be happier with that than the War on Freedom.
The political problem they face is a difficult one, however. They need to convert some key segments of opinion leaders who, reason to the contrary, believe the Conservatives are the incarnation of evil, and Blair is bad because he’s like them. (Such as the original Charter 88-ers, but also some Old Labour peaceniks.) The naked authoritarianism of the last few years may help them do that. Davis I am sure has spotted that. His opposition to the police state is not just personal conviction (which in the pragamatism of politics is necessarily derrogated), but a profound strategy.
It is not just Tories who fail to see the destruction, it would seem that a majority of ‘ordinary folk’, are as purblind as their leaders.
The quote below was written threehundred years ago:
The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during election of members of parliament; as soom as the members are elected, the people are enslaved, they become nothing. In the brief moment of its freedom, the English people makes such use of that freedom, that it deserves to lose it. – Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
People get the government they deserve – no truer words were ever spoken.
Suppose I agree with you perry, what are we supposed to do about it ?, surely if the party collasped it would take a very long time for something new to form that even had a small chance of defeating Labour, meanwhile New Labour get an even freer hand to mess up the country.
But Dave, the Tories are probably not going to win the next election. Or the one after that in all likelyhood (assuming it even exists in a meaningful way by then). The sooner it dies, the sooner something else can come along (hell, it might even call itself some sort of capital C ‘Conservative’ party for all I care).
Rule one when you find yourself in a hole: stop digging. The Tories are history, we just need enough people to realise so that we can hurry up and do something about it.
Ernest Young: had you quoted Marx or Mao or Pol Pot or Himmler, you would have quoted someone more trustworthy and worthy of regard for to my mind Rousseau is the very fount of modern evil. I would go so far as to say if Rousseau wrote that, then clearly think were better than I thought in England at the time.
“we just need enough people to realise so that we can hurry up and do something about it.”
But what? what can be done that wont take 15+ years?
Are you starting a new Party? 🙂
Perry has reason on his side. Unless a miracle happens, and it won’t, the Tories won’t win the next election and Blair will have been free over the previous four years to finish removing all the rights the British people have inherited for generations, thereby enslaving them, and they’ll win again.
Better finish them off now, and give a new party a chance to form and gain credibility over the next four years. The Conservatives have been such spectacular, foolish failures that I cannot see anything about them that is worth preserving. The same old egotistical has-beens “throwing their hat in the ring” – the same has-beens whose bickering and failure to under Blair has been the cause of their collapse.
Up until around three months ago, I was arguing for giving the Tories a chance to find their way, but now I am convinced they will fail yet again.
The Rousseau quote is reassuring. If we had voter apathy and a similarly dictatorial ruling elite 300 years ago, maybe the doom and gloom we feel under Blair is not such an unusual thing. Perhaps we will be moaning just the same 300 years from now about the rule of King Tony the twelfth.
Perry I agree with you that the Tories are finished but for them realising it. The question is how to get them to realise it.
Conference time will be here soon….I wonder if some of us might get along and subvert it.
It is entirely possible that during the next few months there will be some real ideological divisions in the Tory Party leaving two or more factions who see no way to work together. That is the best outcome I can see of their current navel gazing. One of those may form the new party and will gain ground rapidly if it still has the machinery of the old party to hand. The others will fall by the wayside.
I’d be very worried if I started agreeing with Peter Hitchens too often. There’s something slightly deranged about the way he overstates his case.
Six months ago I was thinking the Tory Party would fall apart after the General Election. Now I am quite sure it won’t.
There is a serious discussion going on about what direction they should take – like the silly ideas about putting more candidates in dresses, or was it frilly Marks and Spencer knickers, from Teresa May and Alan Duncan – to the more substantial points about civil liberties and rebuilding civil society from David Davis and David Willetts. It is actually interesting for once and the last time there was such a ferment of ideas on the right was with Keith Joseph and co. in the 1970s.
It’s very easy for people with an intellectual approach to politics to become consumed by the obsession with consistency, and with internal contradictions that will destroy a movement. But in the real/electoral world, I really don’t think such things matter. It’s actually been a huge secret of the Tories’ success that while the Right across Europe has so often been split between nationalists and (more or less) social democrats, between urban liberals and rural traditionalists, and so on, the Tories have – not without incident – managed to combine them all in one party, and built governments on that basis that have been in power far more often than Labour.
Thanks for the history lesson Peter. Here is another: the Tories have made history by losing a third election. The time has come for farewells and moving on to something else that works. I do not care what it calls itself but it better not look like the Tory party does now.
In the 80’s it seemed inconcievable that a Labour party would ever be in power again. Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock were the sort of jokes that Haig, IDS and Howard have been.
Then along came Blair and Mandleson and their ilk and threw out the “loony left” and re-packaged the Labour party into New Labour. And most amazingly of all people voted for them. Ok the Tories helped by imploding at the time.
Perhaps there will be someone who will re-package the Tories. If the article cited in an earlier posting by Melanie Phillips is a representative sample of current conservative thought, there may be a renaissance in the Tory party.
I truly hope not though. Like many of the earlier commenters I would like to witness a general change of attitudes to minimal government and personal responsibility. I see little evidence of this, however, in the MSM.
But history is relevant if we want to understand how the Tories (okay, then … the right-of-centre party of your choice) can win in the future. It suggests that a broad coalition of sometimes conflicting interests works a lot better than some sort of ideologically A-OK model of consistency. At the last three elections, we evidently weren’t able to win broad enough support, so the lesson is how to win over a wider section of the electorate, not to look for reasons to jettison sections of society that now support us because there might be some internal contradictions. No progress will be made premissed on the idea that the Conservative Party and its message are not yet exclusive enough. If the ship is undermanned, you don’t start looking for people to throw overboard – you start looking for extra crew.
Peter – There are three things that I find disturbing about the Tories. One is, they have stupidly allowed themselves to be led onto the socialists’ territory to fight. For seven years, they have let Blair, a radical leftist, define the battle. You don’t win wars by being corralled onto your enemy’s turf, as we all know. That they have been that weak and stupid is not encouraging.
And I can pinpoint the exact minute they all began to race, lemming-like over the cliff. When the foolish William Hague appeared in a baseball cap at the Nottinghill Carnival. Right onto pullover-clad, coffee mug, “pretty straight kinduvaguy”, Espace-driving Thoroughly Modern Tony’s turf.
So that is one stupidity which is hard enough to credit.
Second is the total lack of discipline and the disloyalty. Do they have the faintest idea how comical ferretts in a sack are? Admittedly, Michael Howard had very little time to pull it all together and I think he did well. He used Howard Flight as shorthand for discipline because he didn’t have time to do more.
Michael Heseltine and Kenneth Clarke and the other toothless, flea-ridden “big beasts” need to be disposed of. They are a constant distraction.
People like Sir Malcolm Rifkin need to have tape put over their mouths. The idea that the Tories lost the election because they didn’t run more women is so staggering the Conservative establishment ought to take fright.
Third, and most important: they seem to no longer understand what Conservatism is all about. They seem to have no understanding of what has been done to Britain by Za-NuLab.
As long as they are mesmerised by a cheap con trick like Tony Blair, who on earth would trust them to run the country? People don’t even like the real Tony Blair.
What do you say?
I’d agree with most of that, though not the bits about disposing of people and taping their mouths. I don’t think Blair is unbeatable, or a political master. I do think he’s been particularly lucky in circumstance.
I believe the Conservatives need to set out ways in which Tory solutions to the problems that motivated people to vote for Blair in the first place are best, and unfailingly keep on hammering the message home. It’s a long-term project that may not necessarily be completed in one parliament, but it is the route back to power.
There’s a limit to how much the Conservative Party can do on its own, however. If people are still as often inclined to vote for the tax and spend solution to the problems with our public sector as for the choice and change solution, it may be that in some ways the party is going to have to let that idea run its course, and wait for people to ‘catch up’ and see with their own eyes that the problem with schools, hospitals and our legal system is in the mechanisms, not the inputs.
But I really do scoff at arguments like the one quoted in this post, premised on a death of the Conservatives that plainly isn’t happening. The Tories won in England and came 2.9% behind Labour in Britain overall. The party is setting the agenda in policy area after policy area, because Labour is rightly too scared of failure if it takes an alternative turning.
Peter the problem isn’t that they didn’t win the last election, thankfully. If they had won we would all have lost. The problem is NOT how are they to get themselves elected. The problem is that they are not a conservative party and are not spouting conservative policies but merely peddling the same kind of crap as Blair is. I think the electorate demonstrated they are fed up with Blair but there wasn’t a viable alternative to vote for.
A real conservative party could have walked the last election and they could walk the next one without any kind of cosmetic makeover and pretty much regardless of what faces they present, as long as those faces sincerely present real conservative policies.
Peter, I must confess I agree with Bernie rather than you.
Undoubtedly, Blair has been lucky. But he is also a bully. He has been vicious in the way he has treated the Opposition, and the way he has treated the citizens of Britain. And the way he has treated the Queen. People tend to cower before a powerful, vicious person, and the Tories, I believe, have been cowed by the sheer brutality.
Had the Conservatives had the bottle to stick to their beliefs they could, as Bernie says, have walked the last election. But they didn’t. Why should we bet that they will improve later? Become more astute later? Cleave closer to their conservative heritage later? There is no evidence that they will.
I singled out Malcom Rifkind, who I have always rather liked, actually, because he has absolutely no idea why the Conservatives lost an election they could have won. He thinks it was because they weren’t Za-NuLab enough. If he’d read some studies, he’d be surprised to learn that voters are often put off by women candidates, who tend to be bossy and mumsy. But he latched on to this piece of post-election “wisdom”. Because it’s Za-NuLab and Za-NuLab wins elections.
One more thing: I do understand the Tory reluctance to set out strategies because Blair, having no honest moral compass, steals anything bright and glittery. So in that sense, he has gagged them.
Cuthbertson is a prime example of why the Tories are finished. They lose a 3rd time and all he can do is sound like some tedious party flack spouting the party line.
Mind numbing stuff. They are nothing but warmed over NuLab, but with less charm and less brains. The Tories problem is not that they have become to ideologically pure, it is that they do not actually stand for bloody anything any more. If you cannot see that you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.
Like Bernie said, people did not vote Tory because they are not an alternative. And like Hitchens says, they are NOT A CONSERVATIVE PARTY. I will never vote for them again because, unlike quixotic Peter, my capacity for wishful thinking only goes so far. I have been lied to quite enough, thanks. It is not time to shuffle the deck yet again, it is time to stop playing the game and start a completely new one. Time to make some new history. I just hope the process happens in time to prevent irreparable damage to what actually makes this country special.
Can David Davies actually bring it back to life (cos undead is what it is)? I doubt it unless he is willing to take a large axe to the membership and just heave maybe 30% of the parliamentary party out on their arses without any apologies. We will see.
Iceni – Would they even be calm enough to vote for Davies? I’m not sure. They’re are perfectly capable of irrationally giving it to the immensely unattractive (to the voters; I know he’s popular in the Westminster boys’ club) Ken Clarke. Or Malcolm Rifkind, who’s a nice man but appears not to understand the issues. And he’s another Scot; I don’t think the English will want another Scot in charge of them. Some of them will even be chasing after William Hague, purely on the grounds that “he’s seven years older now”.
Desperate. Who can have any confidence in a party like this? If they manage, in error, to choose the right leader, that man will have to be merciless and very, very intent on winning.
Blair shamelessly steals any ideas that might emerge from the Tory party,that is how he got elected in the first place,a wolf in sheeps clothing,sadly the Tories are now sheep in sheeps clothing.
I would agree that pretending to be touchy feely NuLab lite will put the electorate off,though I personally would vote for anyone whose upper lip didn’t quiver.
The Tories are not going to die that quickly and even if Kenneth Clarke as leader hastened its demise,we are still going to be stuck with NuLab.I would say that getting rid of NuLab is more important to the country,scuttle them anyway possible before the damage is to great to rectify.
Send Tony grinning into history,fading away like the Cheshire cat.
There isn’t the time to build new parties.
Not the previous Peter
Verity:
Or Malcolm Rifkind, who’s a nice man but appears not to understand the issues.
He is a nice man. He’s also very sharp indeed, and does understand the issues.
And he’s another Scot; I don’t think the English will want another Scot in charge of them.
I’m sure it is a disadvantage that he sounds Scots, and probably ought exclude him from the leadership in the brutal reality of politics. You should note, however, that most of the English haven’t noticed Blair is a Scot. (That’s one important reason TB got the leadership of the Labour Party.)
I think you all give the electorate too much credit. Sadly, the awareness amongst even educated voters of these key issues is so poor, particularly in those aged under 40.
The Conservatives are finished because they command almost no support in the 20-40 yr old crowd. It is an image problem beyond repair.
I work in the most capitalistic, Darwinian environment you could imagine, yet almost nobody will admit to voting Tory. Those who do manage to see beyond Tony’s (admittedly brilliant) PR voted Liberal without realising (and this is the key point) that the latter are often further to the Left than Labour.
However, i do detect growing disenchantment with Labour and believe that now represents a wonderful opportunity for the formation of a new party.
Lets call it the Enterprise Party. It should be the natural home of the working working and middle classes and the retired.
It should look to hire as many non-politicians as possible.
How about Chris Gent to run it?
Reconstructing Conservatism (with a small or capital C) would be a long term project, I think. However, the primary objective is to remove this unconscionable bunch of lying, hypocritical, anti-democratic, nomenklatura-fixated scum out of power. This is unlikely to be achieved (in the short term) by a from-the-ground-up reconstruction of the Tory party.
The electoral successes of ’97 and 2001 particularly were based on getting large numbers of the electorate, despite disparate political philosophies, to combine and vote *against* the tories. And it wasn’t the contents of the NuLab manifesto that did it, it was an epidemic of distaste.
Now the tories in the mid ’90s were tired, mostly useless, stumbling from one embarassment to another and contributed enormously to their own downfall. It was the perception of ‘sleaze’ that caused most non-natural lefties to look elsewhere. The rallying cry was “Tories out!” What’s sauce for the goose ….
Questions have been asked – “What can we do?”
The first and possibly most effective grass-roots tactic is to raise the profile of the excesses and arrogance of this present lot. There’s fertile ground out there, most of those I talk to are not happy. So encourage the ground-swell of discontent and anger *locally* on the effects of the knee-jerk “let’s pass another law” on *local* businesses and people, even though the paticular policies are national.
It’s difficult to get the majority of voters angry over high-flown principle, but they will and do get pissed-off at the street-level effects of patronising incompetence. Encourage it. Nuture it – without looking like ‘Disgusted from Tunbridge Wells’. Better thoughtful concern than rant. Mention of “it didn’t used to be like this, we could think for ourselves once” won’t go amiss. Provides opportunities for constructive disparagement and character assassination, too.
The pub, work, letters to local newspapers should be the battleground of choice. It’s in those areas that a centralised national machine is most at a disadvantage. The national media will follow if and when the background noise starts to become too loud to be ignored. And once that happens, watch NuLab and fellow travellers like the LabDems implode.
Blogs like this are fun, but for the most part it’s preaching to the converted. Get out more, create an atmosphere. One that chokes the bastards.
What is needed is not the actual demise of the Conservative party but the splitting up of the party. It needs to divide roughly along the federalist statist and eurosceptic line (this is possibly just my bias speaking)
Even a rump small goverment party will provide a starting point. The secret will be to let the wets have the name Conservative, and for the new party to use something better (what??)
Could alos rant on about poilicies but thats for another day.
As a guide we should use the guardianista guide to indicate where the split will occur, the more hated and despised by our self claimed cultural elites the better
I dunno what planet you live on, Pommygranate, but its clearly one a long way from the average British university.
No Tory support from young people?
I think not.
The thing that strikes me is that I only knew true red in mind socialists when I worked for the public sector. Ever since then everybody I’ve ever met has instinctively held small ‘c’ conservative or even libertarian leaning views. They all vote Labour though, even when they disagree with almost all Labours policies.
The Tories have a major PR problem, people just can’t bring themselves to vote for them. I think a lot of this is the media, I flicked the BBC on last night for the first time in many moons to see the usual constant excoriation of anything even remotely right wing. (They were moaning about how removing the CAP would impoverish the Third World last night. Baby Jesus was crying).
They need a solid moral core which people can warm to, which is strong enough and strident enough to shine through the murk at Broadcasting House. I think a libertarian leaning core is one that would really shine and chime with the electorate – not some stale 1970s One Nation toryism as expounded by Ken Clarke.
In short, I think David Davis is the man. 😉 If he gets in, I have hope. He’s got the right platform and he’s not a toff.
Totally irrelevant but I thought y’all might enjoy this…
Star Spangled Icecream
ToryBoy
You’re restating the points i made, which is that the Conservatives’ problem is not one of policy but image.
It is a while since i was at University but i stand by what i said about the Conservatives having no support amongst the young. Only a blind man would diasagree. In contrast, conservative views are widely held.
Like it or not, we live in a TV age and young people just do not connect with people like Rifkind, Howard, Hague, Willetts etc. I agree with you that Davis is the best of a bad bunch but he is not the Tories’ answer to Blair. And as for the so-called “Notting Hill” Tories, one can only despair.
Toryboy, the game is over. Move on. Why not be a part of a fascinating period in liberal politics – the formation of a new party.
OK, the miserable refutation first…
Like it or lump it, first past the post means any new party is likely going to be consigned to being shoulder to shoulder with the SWP, the BNP and UKIP, ie at the fringe. UKIP has done as well as a fringe party is ever likely to do, and its not going to get an MP at Westminster any time soon.
Even if I wanted it to, the Tories arent simply going to disappear overnight, and thats what would be needed for a new party to have a chance. The Tory brand has an apparent core vote of about 30% of the turnout who would never vote for another party, who have stuck with the party no matter what, even in 1997.
And now a more practical refutation…
Your theoretical new party would still get excoriated by the BBC, assuming it wasn’t simply ignored like UKIP generally is. It’s not going to be any more immune to this than the olde Tories are/were. If we agree that the main problem facing the right wing opposition is presentational – how is a new party going to change that? Even assuming you managed to convert that 30% of the population en masse, and raise a whole new parliamentary party, chances are more than a few of them would be ex Tories. I can see Paxo licking his lips already on what he’s going to do then. “Your nothing but an old Tory with a new shiny badge, aren’t you!”.
The more I see of the Beeb the more despicable I think the institution is, if you want to focus your guns on something in an attempt to improve the chance of a rightish government being formed in the future – not the Conservative Party.
As for young people… I still think most young people are actually more conservative in their views now than their elders than ever before, and its not exactly a traditional right wing demographic.
I agree with you in part here though re. the leaders, I honestly think Davis is the only one who even has a remote chance, the others are going to go the way of Hague IMO.
ToryBoy
i) UKIP has done as well as a fringe party is ever likely to do
What was the share taken by the SDP in the mid 80s? I dont remember the exact number but i think it was pretty high.
ii) Tories arent simply going to disappear overnight
This is the problem. If the Tories soldier on to the death, then a new liberal, pro-individual, anti-state party has no chance. The new Enterprise party has to capture the old Tory vote to survive.
iii) young people are actually more conservative in their views now than their elders
Couldn’t agree more.
All the 20-40yr olds i work with have conservative, libertarian views but vote Labour. This is why i am optimistic.
iv) The more I see of the Beeb the more despicable I think the institution is
Srangely enough, i seem to have picked up over the years a number of friends who work for the Beeb in news programs. I asked one of them at a recent gathering what % are Labour voters. He guessed 90%. He also rather unnervingly added that those who hold “right wing” views are ignored.
Fortunately, the BBC is becoming less and less relevant in an age of cable, digital and satellite TV.
I think we pretty much agree, Pommy, on the situation, if not the solution.
The SDP did do well, but not well enough to put Labour in third place – though they were scared – and this was during Maggies tenure, when Trots were infiltrating Labour and Kinnockio was running the show. Possibly at a lower point for the opposition than the Tories were in 1998. The fact a third party couldnt even get in with more than 50 seats at this absolute nadir says something.
I’m actually not averse to voting for a minor party myself if I think it’ll do any good – I will always vote UKIP in the European parliamentary elections for example. I just don’t think a new party will do any good, it will merely split the right wing vote.
The problem is presentational, your anecdote doesn’t surprise me at all, and that is the problem.
I will admit the Tories have had a distinct lack of vision of late, but that isn’t really the root of the problem. In fact its more like a symptom than a cause – its hardly surprising strident visionaries are thin on the ground when they dare not lift their head above the parapet for fear of having it shot off by Paxo and chums. It’s not Blair doing the bullying here.
I agree with you that the BBCs influence will wane, and thank god, it couldn’t come soon enough. Thats why I still have hope. Though I think the Tory party is picking up on this new fangled internet thing far too slowly.
Pommygranate writes: I agree with you that Davis is the best of a bad bunch but he is not the Tories’ answer to Blair
To my mind, this is falling straight into the Za-NuLab trap. We do not have to define the entire political world in Britain by Za-NuLab and its sleazy leader. We don’t need “an answer” to Tony Blair. We need someone with a whole new vision for Britain, a strong personality and a unique way of communicating with the voter. If it is the right man, Blair will look like yesterday’s man and we won’t need “an answer” to him. He’ll look faded and dated. The Tories must stop measuring themselves against these vicious people and their wicked policies.
Guy Herbert, as I said above, I’ved always liked Malcolm Rifkind – perhaps partly because his cousin, a linguist, and I became friends when we were taking a class in Mandarin and I liked her, too. Obviously, he is fiercely intelligent – but I don’t know how perceptive he is if he makes one’s heart sink by saying the problem was, the Tories didn’t run enough women. Dear god! Again, he is making the mistake of defining the Tories by the disreputable yardstick of the socialists.
Finally, Blair doesn’t have a Scots accent. Sir Malcolm does, thus pushing his Scottishness into the hearer’s consciousness. Personally, I like an Edinburgh accent, but will voters who are ready to reject the foul Gordon Brown want to listen to another Scots accent, no matter that it’s an Edinburgh accent?
There appears to be a virus throughout this entire blog called Verity. Symptoms include disrupting interesting, intelligent debates with hysterical wailing.
Can someone fix the bug?
I just think Rifkind is too old when what is wanted is something new, and he looks like a psychotic headmaster with that intense gaze of his. Front bench for sure, but not in command.
Incidentally I heard Polly Toynbee rooting for Ken Clarke the other day, which speaks volumes of what a disaster the affable but arrogant toff would be.
TLT writes:
“I just think Rifkind is too old when what is wanted is something new,….”
I’m still chuckling over the description I heard of Rifkind: a Michael Howard tribute band.
Verity misses my point on Tony Blair.
He is the most successful Labour politician of all time (success in politics being defined as the ability to get and then keep your party in power). When he took over the leadership, the Labour party was a joke, arguably an even bigger joke than the Tories are today. Now Labour look unbeatable. Not bad after eight years in power.
The Conservatives need their own “Tony Blair”. That is patently not Malcolm Rifkind. As myself and ToryBoy have been trying to explain, the Conservatives’ problem is one of image. Rifkind is dull, dull, dull.
Pommygranate writes:
“There appears to be a virus throughout this entire blog called Verity. Symptoms include disrupting interesting, intelligent debates with hysterical wailing.”
Was that really necessary?
The number of ad hominem attacks in recent weeks (particularly those coming from some apparent newcomers) is starting to water down the usually high level of Samizdata discussion.
Pommygranate – I have been posting here for two years and one of the things I like is the civilised level of discourse. Ad hominen attacks are discouraged by the owners of the blog.
I don’t know why, but I have a sneaky feeling you are something to do – yet one more alter ego, for example -with HJHJ – the Basil Fawlty of the Waitrose Customer Service desk – who is absolutely unable to tolerate a dissenting voice from a woman. You were equally inexplicably hostile to me on Stephen Pollard’s blog before disabled his comments section.
I take exception to your attacks on me personally, rather than my arguments.
After reading quite a few favourable remarks made about David Davis I thought I’d check him out a bit. So I did a search to see if he has a website and was pleasantly surprised to find this http://www.david-davis.co.uk/
Then I found this(Link). He says some good stuff. I wonder how far he would actually go.
Yes, kindly stop with the personal insults or I will start deleting comments and kicking people out.
The occasional tetchy and intermittent down right irritable is acceptable but tolerance for gratuitous insults is growing very thin indeed.
Regarding David Davis… well I am so distrustful of the Tories now that I am not holding my breath, but I have been surprised before. That said, unless things change rather dramatically I still think the Tories are finished.
Poor Malcolm Rifkind. Not only making a bid for the Conservative Party leadership within 12 hours of securing Kensington & Chelsea (just as a ‘hey I’m back’ move) but now he’s been placed in opposition to none other than David Blunkett. I’ve always seen Rifkind as someone who behaves like a startled gerbil (no Richard Gere jokes please!) caught in the headlights of an oncoming SUV – I feel his pre-election address on ITV should be held for posterity as a model of how to be shot down in flames on live television.
Any way if the Conservative Party is to have a chance I still maintain, like a worn needle stuck in the groove, that it must move on from the John Major legacy and rid itself of the ‘old guard’. Implore or bribe Blair to grant peerages to Rifkind, Howard, Clarke and the remaining yesterday’s men and move on to pastures new, and let’s see a Conservative Party that can actually do something apart from bicker with Labour as to who is the most authoritarian in the Commons.
I’m with Perry de Havilland about David Davis and the Conservatives.
To me, he seems the best thing to have happened to the Tories for some years.
But how many more times is one willing to trust them?
G Cooper – That’s the nub of it.
And how long before the wannabees will be stabbing the new leader in the back and saying he’s not up to the job? Is too right wing? Is too exclusionary? Hasn’t made overtures to “our partners” in Europe? Doesn’t have a multi-faith, multi-ethnic shadow cabinet? Isn’t “reaching out” to those excluded by society? Blah blah blah blah blah.
I think Mr Howard is a sincere Conservative and wants the best for the party. I think Sir Malcom Rifkind is a gentleman, not a wrecker. But Kenneth Clarke has a way of gathering a festering little crowd around him, and this will have been his very, very last chance.
It’s not David Davies about whom I hae ma doots. It’s the rest of them.
Verity writes:
“And how long before the wannabees will be stabbing the new leader in the back and saying he’s not up to the job?”
About three tenths of a second would be my guess.
Just to strike a slightly optimistic note, it’s worth remembering that Za-NuLabour is barely able to keep its own geological fault line held together with vinegar and brown paper and that the moment Glum Gordie takes the reigns there are going to be a lot of Blairites being burned at the stake. This could well re-ignite the political feuding at the heart of Labour, which Bliar has held at bay simply through his ability to silence dissent by winning elections.
However I look at this issue, I keep returning to a single fundamental question. Do we need political parties at all? Are they not, by their very nature, unholy compromises and inevitably suppressive of creative thought?
Surely, a movement that can only succeed through consensus must stamp down on dissent to do its work, and it is usually through dissent that the best ideas emerge.
Well, I’m with Verity here. Howhard seems to be wanting to change the rules solely to keep David Davis out – and to the benefit of some godawful Notting Hill toff as well.
Not exactly encouraging stuff.
Yes, but G Cooper, one needs to form a “legitimate” – i.e., endorsed by a the few voters who actually stagger to the polls, or whose postal ballots for 78 people living in one terrace house in Wigan haven’t been invalidated – government in order to deal with other governments. And to collect taxes for the protection of our borders, which I know you would regard as a legitimate role for government and the enforcement of civil contracts.
Otherwise, the New Hampshire project looks good.
The Last Tory Boy – which godawful Notting Hill toff?
Verity writes-
“The Tories must stop measuring themselves against these vicious people and their wicked policies.”
Absolutely! That’s exactly what their problem is.
“…but I don’t know how perceptive he is if he makes one’s heart sink by saying the problem was, the Tories didn’t run enough women. Dear god!”
Verity, I couldn’t agree more. Why do polititians think they have to have a woman’s face on their party just to get women’s votes? Hillary Clinton is a woman but good Lord! That sure doesn’t mean she’ll get my vote in 2008! So she’s a woman. So what. Whoopty doo. She’s also a Democrat and I don’t want her in office.
Thank you, Denise W, because this fractionalisation presented as universality is what we face. Let’s have women! The world’s full of them! They must want to vote for their own! No, actually. I want a calm, competent, very astute person in charge … and I’m sure you do, too.
Blair and his fellow travellers in the US pretend – and who will have the nerve to challenge them? – that they are catering to segments of “the community”, but they’re actually intent on destroying “the community”.
They’re trying to destroy – and have largely succeeded – the sense of community the British have felt among themselves for centuries. This sense of confidence is what allowed them to welcome strangers, as in the Displaced Persons after WWII, into their midst and shelter them. And (I believe) 47,000 Indian Ugandan refugees.
Now these formerly kindly and willing community actions are dictated by supranational bodies to whom our own government has ceded sovereignty. Some “High Commissioner for Refugees” is making decisions about who the British/Americans/Aussies will accept into their countries. And international accords on “asylum seekers”.
The destruction has been deliberate and in the furtherance of an agenda.
No matter his Pose of The Day, Blair, in Britain, is at its dark heart.
May I add that this sense of community would have given a universal endorsement of a man seeing off a drunk who was following a woman down the street, for example. Or an adult who would have reprimanded an out-of-line teenager, absolutely confident of the support of other adults.
No more.
Verity you just mentioned assylum seekers and I had a realisation. I are one 🙂 You also mentioned the NH Free State Project. I signed up to that about 6 months ago and it looks better every day.
Good for you, Bernie!
I was using the construct “asylum seekers” in the Za-NuLab sense of arrogant, queue-jumping parasites.
Good luck to you! Just think, you’ll be a neighbour of St Mark of Steyn!
I think it’s very premature to be sounding the death knell for the Conservatives. Most people on this blog expect the British economy to fall off a cliff some time in the nearish future due to all the red-tape-big-government machinations of Blair and co. Ideally, the Conservatives should be expeditiously distancing themselves from the Labour party – becoming the party of small governance is a good start – so that they can deafeningly shriek “I told you so!” when the wheels fall off the economy.
It most probably won’t happen. However, when NuLab’s model fails, don’t you think that will give the Conservatives the courage to move in the sort of Thatcherite direction that Labour never would or could? Better late than never. If the economic decline took hold, and the Conservatives continued to fiddle whilst the proverbial burns, then we could well and truly say they’re finished.
ISFMA writes:
“I think it’s very premature to be sounding the death knell for the Conservatives.”
People have short memories and one of the plagues of the Internet is that its population is disproportionately skewed towards people who haven’t lived long enough to have memories at all. Or at least, not many.
In other words, yes, I agree, it’s unwise to make too many assumptions about the death of the Tory party. Not so long ago, Labour looked absolutely unelectable – even more finished than does today’s Conservative party.
I also agree that the craziest thing the Tories could do is emulate ZA-NuLabour, as I read that twerp, Andrew Lansley, is advocating, today. When the economic crunch comes (and for many in the retail trade, by all accounts, it has already begun) what the Tories need to be is as distinctly different from Labour as they can be.
To that end, I suspect David Davis may prove to be the right mixture. He’s on the economic Right of the party, yet comes from such an atypically Tory background that he inevitably wrong-foots the Leftist intelligentsia – particularly those with a Hampstead elite background.
They simply don’t know what to do when confronted with a working class Tory.
G Gooper says: “They simply don’t know what do wo when confronted with a working class Tory.” Which illuminates the cloud cuckoo land where their little truisms take root. The Conservative Party has always appealed to the working class and been supported by working class votes.
Verity writes: “The Conservative Party has always appealed to the working class and been supported by working class votes.”
It certainly has – though to what extent today, I’m not so sure. But nothing upsets a “Hampstead thinker” more than a working class Tory. Well, perhaps a black Tory – that hurts them, too.
Verity
I apologise for my earlier outburst.
The hapless state of the Conservative party often brings out the red mist.