Tory policies may look like red meat – but there’s no substance

Why does a prime minister have to be on the danger list and his party confronting electoral extinction before they begin, even cosmetically, to implement the policies they promised the electorate they would carry out? And why, when they desperately seek a stay of execution by throwing “red meat” to their supporters, do they remain unwilling to execute that programme properly, resorting instead to token gestures, designed to placate the public?

We are told that, under Operation Save Big Dog – a codename that conjures images of a tousled Boris Johnson with a small barrel of brandy slung under his chin – the government has been galvanised into implementing all the “populist” measures it was elected to deliver. Whether this is the same exercise as Operation Red Meat, or the two rescue attempts are operating in tandem, is unclear. What is evident, however, is that the Conservative government realises at last that it must do something that is Conservative – or, at least, try by smoke and mirrors to convey the illusion that it is doing so – in order to survive.

Cue culture secretary Nadine Dorries uttering blood-curdling threats against the BBC, proclaiming the imminent demise of the license fee, eliciting from the corporation protests and lamentations that play to her scenario. All of it entertaining theatre – but nothing more. What do the Dorries reforms amount to in reality? The freezing of the license fee at its current outrageous £3.2bn a year until 2024, followed by feather-bedding it against inflation until 2027, followed by – er – some kind of new funding model.

Since it will be a miracle on a par with the parting of the Red Sea if the Conservatives are still in power by 2027/28, it could be argued that Dorries’ remit is adequately fulfilled by charting a course up to the point where Labour will return to take responsibility for its favourite woke institution, restore and amplify its taxpayer-funded privileges and point it in an even more leftward direction. The Conservatives should long since have come to conclusions with the Remain propaganda platform that is the BBC.

A free society does not need, indeed it positively ought not to host, a “public service broadcaster”. The state broadcaster is an iconic attribute of every totalitarian society. Political bias has been endemic in the BBC for so long that it has almost acquired respectability. When the corporation, back in the Blair/Brown era, held a seminar on bias, it came to the complacent conclusion that it was biased, but in a nice way. On that occasion, Andrew Marr memorably observed that the corporation “is not impartial or neutral… It has a liberal bias, not so much a party political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.”

So, that is all right, then. In fact, a cultural bias is far more corrosive of society and its values than a mere party preference. Brexit exposed the BBC’s extravagant bias in favour of the elites and against mainstream Britain. In the six months following the EU referendum, when the elites were organising to prevent the verdict of a plebiscite from being implemented – an anti-democratic phenomenon that should have been of serious concern to any genuinely neutral public broadcaster – the organisation News-watch carried out statistical logging of the BBC Radio 4 Today programme’s business news segment from 24 June to 22 December 2016.

This record showed that, of 366 guest speakers on the programme, 192 (52.5 per cent) were anti-Brexit, 114 (31 per cent) were neutral and just 60 (16.3 per cent) were pro-Brexit. So, more than three times as many Remainers were invited onto the programme by the BBC as Leavers. Even more extravagantly, only 10 (less than 3 per cent) of business news interviews were conducted with Leavers.

When 70 MPs wrote to the then BBC director general Lord Hall to complain about the corporation’s extreme bias in Brexit coverage, he replied, with apparently no sense of irony: “Impartiality has always been the cornerstone of BBC News. It remains so today.” He added: “We go to great lengths to ensure that we balance our coverage and address all issues from a wide range of different perspectives. It is one of the reasons why the public trusts the BBC more than any other source of news.”

Er – up to a point, Lord Copper. It is testimony to the Conservative Party’s loss of any sense of self-preservation that it has not driven a stake through the heart of this undead corporation that constantly seeks to discredit it with voters. Years ago, the BBC should have been privatised, broken up and sold off. Politics aside, it is long past its sell-by date. It incompetently squandered more than £100m on its failed Digital Media Initiative (DMI) and its Project Smart software development programme swallowed up £55.7m – £6m more than its projected benefits. Not to worry, it was only the money of the mug punters who pay the license fee.

The corporation that is trying to remove Boris Johnson from office with much moralising cant harboured Jimmy Savile for years. “Public service broadcasting” turns out to be a euphemism for EastEnders. Yet after so many years and so much provocation, Nadine Dorries expects plaudits for a bogus crackdown that amounts to keeping the license fee in existence until 2027. A supportive Tory MP told the House that license-payers would be grateful for the temporary freezing of the fee.

Does he seriously imagine Red Wall households will feel grateful to the Tories for saving them a few quid in annual increase, while leaving people who are already paying subscriptions to channels they want to watch stuck with a bill of £159 for a channel they never watch? Is this the Conservative Party’s new, insightful rapport with Red Wall voters?

But the BBC is just one of a whole bunch of issues the Tories can only bring themselves to tackle cosmetically. Take this week’s cry from the Commons’ crow’s nest of “Send in the Navy!” Instead of deterring Russian submarines, the Royal Navy is being called upon to solve the crisis of illegal migrants crossing the Channel. And how is it supposed to do that? Of course, it could help to mitigate, in the very short term, one or two logistical problems; but it cannot possibly resolve the crisis.

The truth is that no one, from any quarter, under any circumstances, will ever be able to end the Channel crisis until the United Kingdom withdraws from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). From time to time, government sources hint at such an intention; but everyone, friend or foe of Britain, knows that it will never happen, so long as Britain is governed by either of the legacy parties. Their mindset is ineradicably aligned with the elite consensus.

Similarly, Brexit will never actually be “done” until the Northern Ireland Protocol is scrapped. Yet the government appears to have blinked first and conceded continuing jurisdiction over part of the United Kingdom to the European Court of Justice (ECJ). Nations that have not even left the EU, such as Poland, Germany and most recently Romania, are challenging the ECJ’s jurisdiction more vigorously than supposedly sovereign Britain. Meanwhile, the corrosive effect of the Protocol on Northern Ireland’s membership of the UK is progressing at a concerning rate. But will the government trigger Article 16? Most unlikely.

Are ministers even in control of their departments? If so, how can Liz Truss’s urging of government departments to leave the training programmes run by the lobby group Stonewall be squared with the Foreign Office’s increased donation of £750,000 to that organisation in the past year? Who is making real policy? HM Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, or civil servants in consultation with Stonewall? Even the BBC has abandoned Stonewall, which has made more enemies than friends by aggressively promoting “transgender” policies, notably in schools.

This is the phenomenon known as the “deep state”, which only a few years ago was dismissed by the elites as a conspiracy theory. Its reality is only too self-evident. If Owen Paterson constituted a scandal, how much more of an abuse is it to pay Stonewall to lobby the government and put in place the policies it supports, regardless of how alien they are to the Conservative tradition or voters’ wishes?

It is time to expel from the body politic all lobby groups, NGOs and other busybodies who presume to mediate away the electorate’s wishes by imposing upon a weak government. They should be outlawed from Westminster and it should be a criminal offence for ministers or officials to act on their behalf. Voters naively wonder why, even if they break a century of family tradition by voting for the Conservative party, they still do not get the no-nonsense, red-blooded policies they want. The answer is that the Conservative Party is no longer conservative; it is marinated in the prejudices of the elite consensus.

That is why, even when the Conservative government’s continued existence is gravely threatened, it can only bring itself to throw out chaff, instead of withdrawing from the ECHR to mend the immigration system, triggering Article 16 to get Brexit genuinely done, scrapping the BBC license fee and beginning to cut the corporation down to size, and taking back control from unelected civil servants and restoring it to the electorate’s chosen representatives. In a word, the Conservative Party is effete. It has lost the instinct for survival and its predators are closing in. This looks more like Operation Dead Meat.