Doomed Tories celebrate keeping the Rwanda albatross around their necks

No victory was ever more Pyrrhic than the Prime Minister’s 44-vote majority securing a third reading for the Rwanda Safety Bill – more accurately the Rishi Sunak Safety Bill. Instead of ridding itself of the whole Rwanda incubus and addressing the important issue of immigration seriously, within the Tories’ last twelve months in office, this decaying political entity sentenced itself to spend its remaining lifespan stretched on the rack of the Rwanda fantasy, assailed by endless amendments and rejection by the House of Lords.

We are watching the death agonies of an ancient political party for which self-harm has become an instinct, an addiction and its default position. Future historians will spill oceans of ink in their struggle to comprehend, to analyse and to explain the extraordinary demise of the Conservative party, especially in light of the fact that the Opposition, consistently and for 13 years, failed to lay a glove on it. This is indisputably not a case of murder, but of suicide. 

The root cause of the Tory party’s collapse is its loss of identity. As early as the 1940s the party was being accused of never having conserved anything, confirmed when its return to power in 1951 saw it embrace the Attlee settlement. As successive Labour/Tory governments alternated in office, a system became embedded whereby Labour governments engaged in bouts of nationalisation and similar statist projects, but when the Conservatives returned to power they failed to reverse the relentless leftwards ratchet, until Margaret Thatcher.

Margaret Thatcher was not regarded philosophically as a Tory, more as a Manchester liberal, with certain similarities to Sir Robert Peel; but when she was exposed to trials such as the Falklands War, her intrinsic Tory instincts of patriotism, assertion of British rights under arms and reflecting the views of the nation, rather than of the craven surrender monkeys who surrounded her, came to the fore. Her rejection of managed decline, in every area of society, was the first bold reassertion of Tory principles since 1945.

Those whose sense of entitlement gave them a divine right to rule as managers of Britain’s decline, at least in their own estimation, responded petulantly by creating a faux philosophy, or rather façade, designed to misrepresent them as the true guardians of the Tory flame. By invoking the unconvincing claim that Mrs Thatcher was a “Peelite”, they purloined Disraeli’s “One Nation” ideal and arrogated it to themselves. They even, at times, presumed to pose as the “conscience” of the Conservative Party. 

To anyone taking the trouble to interrogate their claims and examine the policies they espoused, it was evident that this bastardisation of Disraeli’s great aspiration was no more than a smokescreen for accommodation of all the modish nostrums of the Left. Indeed, from the 1980s onwards, a new oxymoron intruded itself upon British politics: “The Tory Left”. Anyone who expressed doubts about this phenomenon was invariably reminded that the Conservative Party was “a broad church”.

And so it was: from its inception in 1681 it was necessarily a coalition of interest groups. But the character of that church’s breadth should be clearly understood. Of the fundamental Tory tenets of Monarchy, constitutional stability, equality under the law, support and respect for Christianity and family life as the basic building block of society, maintenance of the King’s peace at home and our national interests abroad, free, but regulated, markets and a concern that no British subject should fall below a certain material subsistence level, the degree to which each of these principles was prioritised varied greatly from one individual to another.

Some Tories might place the constitution above markets in their personal pecking order of preoccupations, others might have more interest in defence than religion. Yet all Conservatives acknowledged the paramountcy of these fundamental ideals, which might be summarised as prescribing an evolutionary as distinct from a revolutionary social order. The Tory party was a broad church in the sense that all its members adhered to the articles of its creed, though each member brought his own priorities to his observance of it.

That is what the currently opportunistically misrepresented term “broad church” was about: it was not about bringing the unconverted adherents of other churches into the Tory fold. The weasel term “One Nation” has routinely been used as a Trojan horse for entryism into the Conservative party by people who are ideologically light years removed from conservatism in any realistic sense. Under David Cameron the flood gates were opened, as he took control of candidate selection, with his “A-List” ploys, ensuring the adoption of metropolitan liberals in the same mould as himself.

During the current Rwanda pantomime, with the self-styled Tories of the “Five Families” going through their customary routine of “rebellion” followed by submission – marching up to the top of the hill and marching down again, in Nigel Farage’s contemptuous jibe – it was noticeable that the One Nation group, the Liberal Democrat presence within the Conservative Party, outnumbered all five dissident caucuses. That is why the next general election will be an extinction event for the Tories.

There is no longer anything remotely Tory about the Tory party. When David Cameron bulldozed through same-sex marriage, not even in response to any vociferous demand other than from his wife, what became of Falkland’s essential maxim of Toryism: “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change”? From that removal of a social lintel came the current situation where defenders of traditional marriage are demonised and intimidated, while children are a prey to transgender fanatics in British schools – at the end of 13 years of Conservative government.

“Socially liberal”, a term incompatible with Conservatism, is the routine self-description of Tory MPs. But the leftist inclinations of the Conservative government embrace every area of activity. Public spending, using the pandemic as a pretext, became addictive. Taxation is at its highest since the Second World War. The Tories do not appear to be quite socially liberal enough to defend the Jewish population from rampant anti-Semitism on a scale never before experienced in Britain.

Our woke police forces are both disinclined and afraid to contain the mobs spreading hate through our cities. As with so many other problems – housing shortages, a collapsing NHS, pressure on public services of all kinds – mass immigration is the cause. The reality is that, even if a moratorium were imposed tomorrow, as should be the case, it would take this country decades to absorb those immigrants already here.

The most basic responsibility of any government is to control the borders of the nation it rules. How have the Tories addressed that responsibility? In 2010, the last year of Labour government, net immigration amounted to 252,000. Cameron promised to get that down to the “tens of thousands”. In 2016, 17.4 million Britons voted for Brexit for two main reasons: to restore British sovereignty and regain control of our borders. The Tories regained that control and what did they do with it? Last year, net immigration totalled 745,000.

Sunak is using his pathetic “Stop the boats” mantra as a distraction: the greater problem is legal immigration, over which he has total control. The Conservatives are taking the public for fools, trying to focus attention on illegal immigration, while opening the back door to all and sundry: in some occupations, immigrants with incomes of £16,000 are being admitted. Why? Because the Tories’ crony capitalists in large corporations – all dripping with DEI and ESG compassion, of course – want cheap labour.

By citing misleading GDP figures instead of GDP per capita statistics, the pretence is maintained that this influx, choking all public services, is “helping the economy”. The public is not impressed. The Government has lost all contact with reality. The absurd Rwanda scheme is the plot for a farce, not for serious politics. The clowns in Downing Street have become fixated on one fantasy: that the sight (“the optics”, in their corny Spinspeak) of one airliner – even just one – taking off for Rwanda will miraculously turn around their fortunes and win the next election, even if there are just half a dozen bogus asylum seekers on board.

These people are not wholly sane. Because the Lib Dems of the One Nation group will not tolerate withdrawal from the ECHR, this grotesque pantomime is being performed, when what is required is for the Royal Navy to intercept the people traffickers’ boats and tow them back to France. Meanwhile, the real threat, the unlimited flow of legal migrants, should be cancelled by a moratorium or, at least, stemmed via the Reform UK policy of net zero immigration (“One in, one out”).

Nigel Farage is out of the jungle and heading back to mainstream politics. The derangement among This Great Party of Ours has reached the stage where some honourable members who clearly need therapy are canvassing him as a Tory minister or even leader. While Farage is toying with them, to extract the maximum exposure of their disarray, why would he want to step aboard the Titanic? To do what? Join Boris Johnson in the litany of betrayers? 

A joint Farage/Johnson ticket has even been mooted. Why, again, would Farage team up with an open-borders fanatic despised by Red Wall voters for his betrayal and by the rest of the country for his incompetence? Boris is a toxic brand. Farage has just calculatedly extended his outreach to a younger cohort of voters who would otherwise have overlooked him. As it is, at election time, the party promoted by “that guy from I’m a Celebrity” could well benefit from elements of a youth vote with no affinity with the legacy parties.

But the main interest, at the moment, lies in the question: how much more damage can the Tories do to themselves? Tuesday night’s “victory” ensured that the remainder of the time between now and the general election will be consumed by bickering over the absurd Rwanda plan, so that the party will haemorrhage further support. One does not normally look to William Hague for political wisdom, but this week he said something significant.

Addressing the possibility of a Tory rout at the next election, he warned: “There is no guarantee of coming back… I am not predicting that will happen, I am just saying it can happen. The Liberal Party used to be a regular governing party but when it went out after the First World War it actually never came back in again as a majority government.”

So, realisation has dawned on the first Tory. The others are too busy celebrating the fact that they have succeeded in retaining the Rwanda albatross around their necks, to torment them between now and when the polls open, to recognise the terminal nature of their situation. Farage is right in claiming that the Conservatives are nowhere near their nadir yet and that things will deteriorate much further. Psephologists have pointed out that, if the swing in the Mid Bedfordshire by-election were replicated nationwide the Tories would emerge with 20 seats.

Anything is possible, with Reform UK now routinely polling in double figures and hatred and contempt for a Conservative party that has betrayed everyone who ever trusted it growing ever faster, fuelled in the months to come, no doubt, by more infighting over the Rwanda farce. Just as Labour displaced the Liberals, the time has come for an authentically conservative force to replace the effete Tories. It is all over for the Conservative party.

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