Another false dawn: The Conservative party is finished

It’s that time of the month again, when an incoming Tory government attempts to foster a climate of calm after the storm and reassure the public that all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well. We are familiar with the ritual string of lies, especially the side-splitting whopper about taking back control of our borders and dramatically reducing immigration. It is beginning to have less and less impact on an audience that increasingly has Albanian as its first language.

Pro-government commentators are, as usual, cherry-picking every crumb of reassurance from Rishi Sunak’s cabinet selection. Suella Braverman back as Home Secretary: surely that suggests a will to tackle immigration? Ben Wallace remains as a safe pair of hands at defence – surely that is reassuring? Er – up to a point, Lord Copper. Has Mrs Braverman secured a guarantee that Britain will exit the ECHR? If not, there is no prospect whatsoever of controlling immigration. Has Sunak guaranteed the increase in defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP and, if so, within what timeframe?

A government in which Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt occupy numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street respectively is, to the point of caricature, a globalist, cosmopolitan regime, the personification of Davos Man. It has no empathy with the British public. Hunt is already uttering warnings about “tough” times ahead – more unproductive drudge austerity – and the message could not be clearer: forget dreams of a low-tax, enterprise-driven, high-growth economy under Brexit deregulation and reconcile yourselves to high-tax, low-growth, big-state inertia, in a country that knows its place.

Britain has to purge its contempt of court – the court of globalist consensus opinion – when it voted for Brexit; the globalist powers-that-be will ensure it pays a heavy penalty on the long march back to the Single Market, initially under the tutelage of Rishi Greencard and Jeremy Draghi. It is instructive to take a look at the internal workings of the Conservative Party, to understand how it has come to its present position.

For decades now, the parliamentary party has been recruited from ideological dyslexics with no knowledge or understanding of Tory history, thought or philosophy. As a hangover from the Thatcher years, if challenged on political philosophy, Conservative MPs would grunt something about “markets”. In reality, a majority of Tory MPs are Blairites: the Cameron/Osborne axis openly acknowledged its debt by referring to Tony Blair as “the Master”. In 12 years of government, has the Tory Party done one thing (apart from Brexit, which the leadership opposed) of which Blair would have disapproved?

Increasingly centralised control by CCHQ of candidate selection has weeded out true Tories such as were formerly chosen by constituencies. It was David Cameron’s undemocratic ‘A’-List that brought Liz Truss into Parliament, against the opposition of the “Turnip Taliban”. Remember? In this way, Blairite centralism has become the prevailing element within the parliamentary party. That includes a cowardly, unprincipled embrace of “woke” orthodoxy.

People have lost their jobs, or been arrested and prosecuted for offences such as expressing the scientific truism that human beings cannot change sex, under a Conservative government, while laws are crafted by Stonewall, which also “trains” police, teachers and civil servants – on the Tories’ watch. Our universities have been allowed to fall into the hands of ignorant, intolerant ideologues, closing the minds of the next generation of leaders in society – under a Conservative government.

If rank-and-file Tories object, they are ignored. Every natural Tory instinct relating to patriotism and free speech that was formerly at the core of Conservative assumptions is now ghettoised as “right-wing” by a parliamentary majority of Blairite globalists. The oldest political party in the world does not even have a coherent process for electing its leader. Such is the parliamentary party’s distrust and contempt for the membership that it is only permitted to arbitrate between the last two candidates.

On this occasion, with the 1922 Committee making it up – and gerrymandering it – as it went along, the membership had no say. It could only watch impotently while the prime minister it had chosen was defenestrated by MPs and replaced by the candidate it had rejected. Surely, many might say, there was an urgent need to get rid of the Truss/Kwarteng axis before the economy tanked? Yes, indeed, but the situation would benefit from some transparency.

Truss and Kwarteng grossly mismanaged the situation: choosing the worst economic circumstances to revert to market principles, cutting out the OBR, failing to prepare opinion and to explain their plans was all a recipe for disaster. But already some of the ameliorating conditions their plans expected, notably the fall in gas prices, have materialised. Gas is such a volatile commodity that, with a European war raging, we should not be surprised to see a price rise before long. But does anyone still cling to the £160bn costing of the energy package that supposedly panicked the markets over a “black hole” in UK finances?

Add in to the mix collusion between bond vigilantes and the IMF, a strongly political institution based in Washington and tied to the leftist Democratic Party, run by a former EU apparatchik and fiercely anti-Brexit, and the question arises just how free are markets? Future historians may conclude that serious mistakes made by the Truss administration were compounded by politically motivated manipulation of market sentiment.

Not that it matters, except as an alert to outside influences constraining UK government policy. There are no grounds for mourning the loss of Liz Truss, who was about to hike up immigration even further – perhaps the real reason for Suella Braverman’s resignation. Net migration is set to hit 300,000 this year and illegal Channel crossings so far amount to 40,000. Nothing serious is being done about this disaster, nor can it be until we withdraw from the ECHR.

The Tory government has presided over an additional 2 million in net immigration. The pretext for increasing immigration – in the teeth of now ferocious public opposition – is that immigration supposedly increases growth. It does so, on paper, if measured by the misleading criterion of GDP. Because more people enter a country, its economy becomes larger and with it GDP. But that is no guarantee that living standards are increasing: the reverse is more likely.

As long ago as 2008, the House of Lords advised the Treasury to assess growth not by GDP, but by the much more accurate measure of GDP per capita. If an immigrant earns more than the UK average per capita GDP, he contributes to growth; if he earns less, he reduces growth. UK per capita GDP is forecast to stand at £36,500 by the end of this year. Any immigrant earning more than that is increasing growth; otherwise, he is impeding growth, besides the further burden of non-working dependents, such as children. How many of the migrants the Tories are admitting in vast numbers earn more than £36,500?

Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, with their academic fixation on growth, must have known that. So, it seems that, knowing the markets would glance only at the rising GDP figure, rather than per capita GDP, it looks as if they were willing to defy the public and aggravate the immigration crisis, just to throw a favourable-looking statistic to the markets. Such a government is no loss.

Anyone with Conservative beliefs has to grasp the nettle of reality and face some harsh facts. The Conservative Party in 2019, under Boris Johnson, seemed, against all expectation, to have recovered its soul, to the extent that it even won over voters in the Red Wall north. It was a golden moment and Boris’s buccaneering personality seemed ideal to lead Britain in realising the opportunities of Brexit. Instead he lapsed into big-state squandermania.

There is now no prospect of reforming the Conservative Party. It has been colonised by Blairite globalists and there is no possibility of recovering its original identity. Conservatives with any self-respect should not hang around any longer to be lied to, patronised and marginalised while this country declines into impotence. It is time to find another vehicle, whether it be the Reform Party, or some similar organisation.

Nigel Farage, the natural leader of an insurgency, insists he will only make the attempt if several significant Tory figures join him. Six months from now, as the sack of fighting stoats nominally led by Rishi Sunak resumes hostilities, that may become a realistic prospect.

Meanwhile, the cracked gramophone record of insincere Tory rhetoric crackles on, with Rishi Sunak promising “a stronger NHS, better schools, safer streets, control of our borders [good sense of humour there], protecting our environment, supporting our armed forces”. Blah, blah, blah, as Greta Thunberg would say. We have heard it all innumerable times before. We know they do not mean a word of it. Millions will never vote for them again.

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