Is it really the end for the Tories?
The Tory crisis has intensified, under the pressure of an 800,000 strong march for Palestine they tried to get banned. Suella Braverman has at last been sacked and Dave Cameron has returned to sit in the Lords and be Foreign Secretary
The Tories remain around 20% behind Labour in the polls and are badly split. Nadine Dorries resignation letter to Sunak was partly farcical but partly sharp in pointing to numerous Tory policy failures.
Braverman on the hard right of the Tories has called for Britain to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights. If the High Court blocks the Tories plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda this week, Braverman and Co. will be pushing Sunak on this issue from the right.
In short the Tories are both split and in chaos
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 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Likewise they were the party of the landed aristocracy but in 1846/7 repealed the Corn Laws because this was in the interest of the rising industrial manufacturing class.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 probably only briefly. In the short term some at least would welcome a Government that was not the Tories even if policy differed only slightly.
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.
If the left don’t take advantage of the Tory chaos the hard and far right certainly will do
An earlier version of this post originally appeared in the Morning Star
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