Kmflett's Blog

After the By-Elections is it really the end for the Tories?

The Tories lost two By-Elections on Thursday with swings to Labour similar to the period before 1997 when Labour won a landslide General Election victory.

The Tories remain around 20% behind Labour in the polls and are badly split.

Suella Braverman on the hard right of the Tories has renewed calls for Britain to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights. There is an issue with this however. She is the Home Secretary in a Government that does not at the moment support that.

Sunak has been Prime Minister for almost a year (Truss resigned on 20^th October 2022) and can be challenged as leader of the Tory Party. Given how other worldly many Tories are a return of Truss or Johnson might not be entirely off the cards.

In 2005 Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote a book arguing that the Tory Party had reached the end of its historic existence. As the years since 2010 have unfortunately demonstrated he was wrong. However in a recent Guardian article he has returned to the point, arguably more persuasively.

The Tories as a party representing ruling class interests have been ‘shapeshifters’ pragmatically shifting positions and policies to fit the demands of the moment. So the Tories resisted demands for an extension to the vote with force at Peterloo in 1819 and in Parliament with the 1832 Reform Act. However in 1867 they passed a further Act extending the suffrage.

Likewise they were the party of the landed aristocracy but in 1846/7 repealed the Corn Laws because this was in the interest of the rising industrial manufacturing class. In much more recent times Tory leader Edward Heath took Britain into was is now the EU in the early 1970s. 50 years on the Tories are focused on Brexit and staying out of the EU.

The problem they have is that beyond making money for their mates and sometimes themselves they no longer have a coherent view of what ruling class politics which can also win elections is. There have been five Tory leaders since 2015 each seemingly more incompetent than the last.

Boris Johnson personifies the crisis. He was not a supporter of Brexit and notoriously only became so not out of some great principle or understanding of ruling class interests but because it served his personal ambition to be Prime Minister.

However I don’t agree with Wheatcroft that it is certain that the Tory Party is finished as an absolute certainty.

There are several factors which might see it survive in some form.

The first is Labour. Despite huge majorities in 1997 and 2001 Blair while tinkering with reforms determined that his real focus was illegal wars. Then in the financial crash of 2008 Gordon Brown decided that the key thing was to save the market economy and in doing so ushered in an era of austerity. Unsurprisingly Labour votes declined significantly and the Tories who had looked finished made a return

Starmer of course has his own variant on this. If the Tories are busy making themselves redundant then perhaps the way forward is to move Labour into that space. His own version of the Great Moving Right Show. So hapless are the Tories at the moment that this strategy might work, if only briefly. As with Macron in France Labour might be voted in because few want the alternative but also not that many are enthused by Starmer and whatever policies he currently has.

The Tories however might shapeshift again and move themselves further to the right still, around the racist politics of Suella Braverman, Lee Anderson and others. Nigel Farage and the Reform Party while a minority have the capacity perhaps to mobilise votes around such a grouping. When one looks at Governments across Europe and beyond there is clearly a trend here too.

In Tamworth parties of the far to fascist right- Reform  UK, Britain First and UKIP got 9% of the vote

While the Tories political direction is not yet fully clear the Manchester conference suggested some pointers. Sunak stood alone fighting a self-declared war in defence of motorists and opening a pot holes hotline. The right is split between the New Conservatives Culture War promoters and Trussites. It’s a reflection of the state of the Tory Party that Truss’s fringe speech at the Conference  was packed out. It contained the usual range of ideas not actually rooted in reality but significantly in the front row was to be found perpetual political grifter Nigel Farage. Truss was introduced by an operative from GBNews.

Somewhere in there is scope for a political reconfiguration on the hard right mirroring developments across the rest of Europe. Opposing it rather than joining in the Great Moving Right Show is essential.

There is speculation that after an election defeat Farage could emerge as the leader of a reconstituted hard to far right Tory Party. Perhaps but that would also mean the end of the existing Tory Party with various strands of ruling class strategies within it. Tamworth is an historic victory of Labour but also a warning about where Tories in defeat might go if not stopped.