In the 2024 American and British national elections, it was no mystery why the incumbents lost. Both the Democratic and Conservative parties had abandoned their core principles. Democrats veered so far left that they fell off the edge of the world. Tories squandered 14 years in power competing with the sopping opposition over who could be more wet, a strategy perfectly designed to alienate the entire electorate. Left-wing voters will not – surprise – vote ‘Conservative’. Conservative voters want – surprise – conservative representatives and instead got sheep in sheep’s clothing.
Although I’m seldom keen on purity tests, Kemi Badenoch now heads a party that resembles Britain’s sewage-mucked rivers, and it could use some purifying. So I welcome her announcement that she will weed out from the next list of Tory parliamentary candidates anyone who still backs net zero and who doesn’t support withdrawal from the ECHR. The Tories will field candidates all united firmly around the same pragmatic right-of-centre message.
Conservative softies in the pressure group Prosper UK object to such opinion vetting, claiming that the party must remain a ‘broad church’. Yet ‘broad’ positions that are all over the map fail to offer voters clear answers to their country’s difficulties. Further, a party is not a church. Governing as if running a Presbyterian charity bake sale was the Tories’ problem.
Conservatives might seem to have fallen prey to Gad Saad’s ‘suicidal empathy’, but their weakness has been more superficial than feeling too deeply for their fellow man. Tories have desperately wanted to seem nice. They’ve wanted to be liked. They’ve been suckers for any policy that casts them as caring – as concerned for the ‘vulnerable’ (never mind that governmental altruism requires a functional economy) and making the whole world (as opposed to Britain) a better place.
If Britain’s oldest political party is ever to restore its reputation for competence and fiscal responsibility, it must also restore its reputation as the nasty party. It must relinquish this forlorn hope of being loved, accepting the risk of dislike in trade for the citizenry’s begrudging trust. It must advocate for a platform that seems harsh. It must be willing to make some people unhappy for the sake of the country at large – thereby, in the fullness of time, making more people happy than not. The Tories must become hard-asses, or they’ll not return to government. Which could make them lucky. For if the UK isn’t soon wrested forcefully from its current pushover benevolence towards every interest group save ‘the rich’, a parliamentary majority will merely provide front-row seats for the sickening spectacle of national collapse.
So, yes, bin net zero. Curtail public subsidies for renewables that prop up the fiction that windmills save families money, halt the paving of productive farmland with solar panels manufactured with coal in China, and resume drilling in the North Sea – because the UK’s deindustrialisation and popular penury have no effect on the weather. And, yes, quit the ECHR, ditto the Refugee Convention and any other treaty or legislation that protects murderers, rapists, thieves and fraudsters from deportation. While you’re at it, Kemi, stop putting young men who break into your country in hotels or any other agreeable accommodation, stop giving them phones, stipends and free dental care and start stuffing them in detention facilities, which they can tell all their friends in Calais are unpleasant.
Better yet, prevent those boats from landing in Kent to begin with, and tow them somewhere other than the British mainland. Not necessarily Rwanda; how about retired cruise ships, so long as there’s no all-you-can-eat seafood buffet. Consider eliminating asylum altogether. Making foreign-born non-citizens ineligible for social housing would be a start. Be mean.
Chuck racial preferences, stop pandering to race and gender grifters and return to merit. Tell the police their job isn’t making people cordial and compassionate but keeping them from killing each other. Defend even nasty free speech.
The Tories have wanted to be liked. They’ve been suckers for any policy that casts them as caring
A nasty party could go at the welfare budget with the requisite callousness. It could announce that being worried or sad is part of normal life and does not oblige other people who get up early and work very hard to buy your lunch. It could either severely tighten or scrap whole disability categories of ‘mental health’ or at the minimum demand rigorous in-person diagnosis rather than a few minutes of TikTok-coached interviews on Zoom. It could decide that being overweight is not the same disability in scale or in kind as having multiple sclerosis, and those extra stone don’t earn you a free Volvo. Or it could junk Personal Independence Payments altogether and provide small accessible buses that transport a dozen disabled passengers at once, as New York has done for years – although a no-free-Volvo scheme might prove rather less popular. It could brutally trim the ranks of students claiming to have special needs, and for God’s sake stop driving them all to school in taxis.
A war on bureaucratic sentimentality would require a steely obliviousness to Channel 4 News packages about families from Afghanistan with adorable children who’ve been denied a council house (along with scads of British families with adorable children who’ve also been denied a council house) and Guardian-esque exposés about supposedly suicidal depressives who failed their interview for disability assistance. (Remember the hair-tear over the ‘bedroom tax’?) Only a certain hard-heartedness will rescue Britain’s public finances from a debt crisis that’s increasingly a matter of not whether but when. Only a certain hard-heartedness will prevent the UK’s once neighbourly and culturally coherent population from sliding into a crowd in an island-wide airport terminal with a Babel of languages where rootless passengers merely trip over one another’s luggage.
The Tories may still be unelectable. But Reform is fragile and too dependent on one slightly peculiar fellow. For now, small-c conservatives shouldn’t write off the Conservatives altogether, a party with a historically distinguished track record if we take the long view. Kemi is making the right noises. If she can clean the house of all those wet CINOs – a big if – she might make a formidable PM.
Comments