Kmflett's Blog

Do the Tories face electoral oblivion or will they morph into a hard right
Faragist Party

The Tories lost two By-Elections on 15^th February one at Wellingborough by the second largest swing since 1945

The crisis for Sunak is just getting worse. He may be preoccupied with bomb
out to help out Netanyahu but a YouGov poll showed the Tories would be reduced
to a rump at the forthcoming Election. Sunak is the second unelected PM the
Tories have had since 2019 and now some want a third.

The Tories remain around 20% behind Labour in the polls and are badly
split. Nadine Dorries resignation letter to Sunak last Autumn was partly farcical but
partly sharp in pointing to numerous Tory policy failures.

Meanwhile former Home Secretary Suella Braverman on the hard right of the
Tories has renewed calls for Britain to withdraw from the European Convention
on Human Rights and ban demonstrations against genocide in Gaza

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repealed the Corn Laws because this was in the interest of the rising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 what 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 a 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.

I don’t agree with Wheatcroft that the Tory Party is
finished is 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 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.

The Tories however might shapeshift again and move themselves further to the
right still, around the racist politics of Suella Braverman and
others. Nigel Farage and the Reform Party while a minority have the capacity
perhaps to mobilise votes around such a grouping. Their vote at Kingswood and
Wellingborough was not as high as the predecessor UKIP got in 2015 but the
electoral context is different with Labour 20 points ahead.

There is scope for such a political reconfiguration on the hard right mirroring
developments across the rest of Europe and in the US. With Truss sharing a platform with fascist Steve Bannon and Lee Anderson outside the Tory Party and in ReformUK after a racist rant too many, the possibility is growing

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.

For the left while ousting the Tories electorally is essential the real
response to this is in workplaces and on the streets. Strikes and protests
won’t win Starmer’s support but they can exert real political pressure from the
bottom up. That is essential as a counter to top down Parliamentary politics