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.
If you liked this article, then cross my PayPal with silver and soon there will be a new one. See below.