Friday, 12 July 2024

The right must unite

 

There is no use complaining about the British electoral system. We had a referendum on abolishing First Past the Post in 2011 and it won. You cannot reasonably argue for a second referendum if you argued against having a second referendum on Brexit or Scottish independence. Anyway, Labour is in charge now and it is unlikely to change a voting system that just gave it a landslide.

The purpose of democracy is to give voters a real choice and the opportunity to decisively get rid of a government it dislikes. We have just done so. There is no question that voters have given their verdict on the Conservative government of the past 14 years. The only question remaining is whether the Conservative Party will learn its lesson.



The failure of the Conservative government is that it gave rise to Reform. Voters on the right were so disappointed with Sunak that they were willing in their millions to vote for Reform knowing that it was unlikely to win many seats and knowing that the likely result was a Labour government. The right is split and won’t win another election until it finds a way to cease to be split.

I fear that the defeat of the Conservative Party was not bad enough. If it had won only fifty something seats or had come third to the Lib Dems, then the argument for change would have been unanswerable. But the same voices that were responsible for the defeat will now argue that the result was not that bad and more of the same is therefore required.

If that argument succeeds Reform will get stronger, the Conservatives will get weaker, and we will still have a Labour government after the next election.

The failure of the Conservative government was not that it was too right wing. If only we had been a little more like Labour or the Lib Dems, we would still be in power. But apart from a brief Liz Truss episode the Conservative government was so centrist it could easily be described as social democrat.

It was under a Conservative government that the size of the state increased, public spending increased, debt increased, taxes increased, woke ideology increased and mass migration increased. Remaining in the centre means that all these things continue to increase, moving towards the right means some of them may decrease.

There are three alternatives. Reform and the Conservatives could merge to form one new party. They could have an electoral pact with only one standing in the seat where it has the best chance of winning. Finally, the Conservative Party could change to the extent that Reform was no longer necessary. This would involve the Conservatives becoming a proper right-wing party, Thatcherite in its ideology and minus the Tory Wets who did their best to prevent Thatcher doing anything and finally got rid of her.

It is vital that the right in Britain stays mainstream. It must neither follow the Trump route nor the Le Pen route, not least because these involve protectionism and tend towards socialism as they move further to the right.

Human nature involves seeking the best for myself and my family, but it also involves wishing to live in a community where my neighbours and fellow countrymen are overwhelmingly like me. If that were not the case, we would never in history have formed countries at all.

If it is racist to wish to maintain the demographic makeup of a country and to oppose it changing radically, then this racism is shared by every country in the world at every period in history.

Socialism is contrary to human nature because it wants us to share our wages with strangers, but it makes still less sense to ask us to share our wages with strangers with whom we have nothing in common and who have no historical connection with this country. If I must do this then we may as well abolish countries, remove all borders and allow anyone from anywhere to move where they will. This is what the left wants.

The folly of the Conservative government was that it moved us further in this direction. It moved us leftwards.

But while we may reasonably seek to limit mass migration, we must not demonise those who seek to migrate. Trying to live somewhere with a better standard of living has been going on since time began, otherwise Angles and Saxons would not have migrated to Britain. But you cannot expect the Ancient Britons to welcome the invasion and to cooperate with it.

We must treat every British citizen the same, but we do have the right to control and limit who becomes a British citizen.

The difference between the right and the left is that the left wishes to change human nature to make us more willing to share with strangers and thus ready for socialism. This is the point of all the woke stuff. The right accepts human nature for what it is, which means that it is grounded in the profit motif and the fact that human beings first love their family and then a community of fellow countrymen who are similar to them and who share their values. This is why people are willing to fight for a country. It is because of a shared identity that has developed through history to form people who we care about more than those from other countries.

I may be willing for my taxes to pay for the health care of someone I have never met in Cornwall, but I am not willing for my taxes to pay for someone in New Zealand. Again, if I were we would cease to have countries.

The right needs to move towards protecting both the nation state and to allow its citizens to use these protections to earn wages for themselves and their families. There ought to be a limited welfare state and the guarantee that healthcare will be available to every citizen, because this is as much a part of creating the environment for prosperity as the rule of law and democracy.

Social stability is necessary for me to be able to conduct business, so it is reasonable that I pay something towards it. Try making a profit during a revolution.

But it is not the job of the state to solve all your problems, nor to provide you with a pleasant enough lifestyle where you don’t have to work, nor to share our nations wealth with people from other countries, nor to fight the battles of the whole world.

A party that is in favour of free market, small state economics and is willing to do what is necessary to limit mass migration will have sufficient support to defeat Labour at the next election, but both the Conservative Party and Reform have brand problems.

The Conservative party has failed to conserve and anyway to conserve is to look backwards while the job of politics is to make the future better.

Historically the Conservative Party and its predecessor the Tory Party has wished to conserve the divine right of kings, rotten boroughs and the right of only nobles and landowners to vote. It tried to first prevent poor men from voting and then all women from voting. It tried to conserve the British Empire and fought a losing battle to keep it, when it would have been better if we had stayed on our island and left the places we colonised alone so long as they did likewise.

The historical record of the Conservative Party is mixed and its allowing itself to be called “Tory” is toxic especially in Scotland. No one calls the Lib Dems “Whigs”.

The Tory brand means that the right is associated with conserving the wealth of rich people, when in fact the virtue of capitalism is that it enables the poor to join them, while the vice of socialism is that it brings everyone down to the same poor level.

The Conservative Party needs to finally ditch the Etonians and the posh in favour of ordinary people who have become successful not because of the school they went to but because of their own talents and effort.

The Reform brand’s main deficiency is that it keeps changing. First it was UKIP then the Brexit Party, then it was Reform. What all of these had in common was Farage and a right-wing populism that sometimes went too far.

There are people who are both put off by the Conservative brand and the Reform brand. The task for Reform is to ditch anyone who flirts with the far right. The task of the Conservative Party is to ditch the Remainers and the wets. You cannot appeal to everyone.

It would be especially beneficial in Scotland if there was a right-wing party with a new brand that can be disassociated with the Tories. Such a party should forbid the use of the word “Tory” on grounds of broadcast impartiality. But you cannot argue against separatism while wishing to create a separate Scottish party. That is merely the soft nationalism that blames the English for all our problems.

This soft nationalism extends to the Scottish Conservatives ascribing to the modern Scottish values of social democracy, collectivism and higher public spending, while the key to its revival is rediscovering the older Scottish values of thrift, working hard and Adam Smith.

The Scottish Conservatives have benefitted from the anti-SNP vote, but they are likely to benefit less from this in the future. It won’t be enough to be the anti-independence party if that issue is down to 9 MPs.

Instead, the right in Scotland must come up with a distinctive vision that seeks to shrink the state, lower taxes and make the UK more united by treating every UK citizen as primarily British and only secondarily from each of the UK’s regions.

The right must unite, and it will not do so by means of separating. This is the danger of Reform. The lesson of the Reformation is this. Once you go down the route of schism you first get the Protestant Church, but eventually the Church of Scotland splits into the Free Church and eventually the Free Church splits too. Finally, you are arguing amongst yourself about infant baptism and bishops and you split on the most trivial of issues. After that no one believes in Christianity and no one goes to church.

The group of voters attracted to Reform are not going away. They have been here since the Conservative Party ditched Thatcher. The merger can happen in any number of ways, but it must involve real change on the part of the Conservative Party.

The threat of a Labour government did not work this time and it is doubtful it will work next time so long as the Conservative Party does not offer a genuine alternative to social democracy. Offer that and either a new united party of the right may emerge, or Reform may decide that it no longer needs to be separate.

But above all the right must cease to be Tory. We are not toffs, landowners or Jacobites. We are ordinary people who recognise that the way to prosperity for every British person is through free market economics and the only way to maintain and defend the character of our nation state is to defend its borders and limit migration.  


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