A shambolic election exposes a moribund political system

If this general election is self-evidently a shambles, it is only fair to concede that it accurately represents the state of the country. Britain has been one of the great countries of the world: not the greatest, even its empire was surpassed by other, more enduring power blocs, but incontrovertibly one of the leading influences in modern human history. To look at it today is to contemplate the squalor of decline: moral, cultural, social and geopolitical.

A general election affords the best opportunity to observe that decline when its perpetrators have emerged from under their stones to scuttle around in full view: the termites, the destroyers – in a word, the politicians. The political class has destroyed Britain and Europe while proclaiming the grandeur of “our values”.

In this ancient nation one of the two main parties of state, near the end of the second decade of the 21st century, has no better prescription for human betterment than to dredge up the universally discredited precepts of socialism, drawn from a manifesto published in 1848 and responsible in the intervening years for the brutal murders of more than 100 million souls.

Socialism in all its incarnations – Soviet communism, Maoism, Scandinavian welfare socialism, autogestionary Titoist Marxism, social democracy, Chinese state capitalism, North Korean totalitarian lunacy – is a mechanism for poverty creation. It does not work. Every conceivable permutation on the delusionary fantasies of Marx, Engels, Lenin or Beatrice and Sidney Webb has been tried and has failed. Yet today, in Britain, in a political version of the Dead Parrot sketch, the Labour Party is trying to resuscitate the cold corpse of socialism in the era of the algorithm.

Labour has become a Michael Foot re-enactment society. Its manifesto reads like an appendix in a political history book. Tax rises, in an already extravagantly overtaxed society, with £80,000 and £123,000 regarded as the frontiers of obscene plutocracy; unlimited immigration, when that grievance was the secondary motive for 17.4 million voters detaching Britain from the European Union; nationalisation of railways and energy; lowering the voting age to 16 to court the immature vote; and abolition of welfare reforms to create a benefits free-for-all, etc, etc. Citizen Wolfie Smith of the Tooting Liberation Front would have thought it a bit over the top.

So much for the pathetic offering from The Party We Love. How, in contrast, is it with This Great Party of Ours? Strong and stable? Er – up to a point, Lord Copper. The Conservative Party, in effect, no longer exists. True, there is a fairly monolithic machine funded by very rich donors that exists to capture as many seats as possible at parliamentary elections and which calls itself the Conservative Party, though it is no such thing.

No self-styled Conservative parliamentarian today, from a backbencher sitting on a three-figure majority to a cabinet minister, has the slightest idea what Conservatism – let alone Toryism – is about. If invited to articulate a philosophy they will mutter something about “markets”. Insofar as they claim any political pedigree it is an illegitimate descent from 19th-century Manchester Liberals, with a dash of Peelite anti-protectionism. They are as likely to have read Bolingbroke, Burke or Disraeli as are the louts in the Occupy movement.

In their worldview globalization is good, until recently so was the EU and they will fatuously describe themselves as “socially liberal”, in the style of airhead pop singers saying “I’m not religious but I’m very spiritual.” Nothing could better illustrate the loss of any vestigial Tory philosophy. To be socially liberal is to be liberal, tout court. Politics is about society. Economic policy is only about mechanisms for the creation of wealth to sustain society at a certain level of prosperity. It does not define the character of society. It is the culture wars that matter most.

Defending the culture was formerly the primary preoccupation of Toryism. Today, not only has that responsibility been abdicated by the Conservative Party but it no longer recognizes the culture and traditions of the nation it aspires to govern. Under a so-called Conservative government and without recourse to any manifesto commitment, marriage was arbitrarily redefined and the succession to the throne altered on the back of an envelope. What, exactly, are these “Conservatives” interested in conserving?

It is a scandal that a Conservative election manifesto should omit a commitment to abolish “aggravated” offences under criminal law and repeal all legislation suppressing freedom of speech. But Theresa May’s manifesto reads: “We will consider what new criminal offences might need to be created, and what new aggravated offences might need to be established, to defeat the extremists.”

That sounds firm and purposeful (strong and stable?), except that the dogs in the street know the “extremists” against whom such laws will be invoked will not be jihadists but Christian preachers, bakers and B&B owners. There are plenty of laws already on the statute book that decree blowing people up is wrong and prescribe severe penalties.

The notion of “aggravated” offences awarding privileged status to people with “protected characteristics” is the most un-Tory concept imaginable. It has ended equality under the law, which it took almost a millennium to achieve, and returns us to the non-level playing field where killing a Norman baron incurred execution, but killing Higg, son of Snell, a churl, could be redeemed by payment of a groat to his grieving but mercenary kinsmen.

There has been much rending of garments among the capitalist commentariat over the left-wing provisions of the Conservative manifesto. In cultural terms the Conservative Party has been sub-Marxist for a decade; only now, when that aberration has spilled over into fiscal policy, have free-market commentators taken notice.

The Conservative Party under Theresa May is as much a principles-free zone as was Labour under Tony Blair. The woman who abused her captive audience in conference speeches, most notably in 2002 and 2005 (“There is no place for you in our (sic) Conservative Party”), demonstrating her dictatorial instincts, is now Prime Minister. As a declared Remainer, she spent the EU referendum hiding in the stationery cupboard before emerging to conduct the Brexit settlement. She was imposed on a pro-Brexit nation by her arrogant party establishment.

Politicians should make the best of this election: the next hustings, around 2022, may take a very different shape. Political parties – Britain’s toxic legacy to much of the rest of the world – have exhausted the mandate of heaven. New movements and new systems of government will evolve before long. They can only be an improvement on the current shambles.