(The
following article has been written by a member of COPOV and is a personal
reflection on the current political situation and does not necessarily reflect
the view of other COPOV members)
The
party conference season is over and it is back to business as usual. In the
last eighteen or so months everything has changed and nothing, it seems, is
better. I am profoundly depressed and
frightened by what the future holds. A
referendum campaign which has split the country in two setting family members
against other family members, a USA
President totally out of his depth and who seems to think that shouting slogans
such as ‘Rocket Man’ is going to solve anything, a tin pot dictator in a far
away country threatening the world with nuclear weapons, the major opposition
party in the U K now led by a group of M P s who worship the doctrines of Karl
Marx and a government in office but not power led by people who voted ‘Remain’
in the referendum and who have no idea as to how to implement ‘Brexit’
effectively. The ‘botched’ general
election campaign has given the Labour leadership a spring in its step and
credence to an ideology that has enslaved and murdered millions over the last
hundred years. That is unforgivable and
we must take full share of the blame.
Yet our party has been dying for the last forty or so years. I would
contend that the last real general election win was in 1979 when Margaret
Thatcher formed her first administration. Each win since -four outright (1983,
1987, 1992, 2015) and two biggest party (2010, 2017) – is the result of special
circumstances surrounding that particular general election. The 1982 Falklands War rescued Margaret
Thatcher whose economic policies the previous year had been castigated by 364
leading economists. The rise of the SDP / Liberal Alliance in both 1983 and
1987 split the parties of the left leading to easy victories for our
party. The result in 1992 after a
recession was probably ‘touch and go’ with Neil Kinnock’s disastrous Sheffield
Rally speech in which he looked more like a circus ringmaster than a Prime
Minister in waiting tipping the balance in John Major’s favour.
The
vagaries of the first past the post system however meant that John Major’s
overall majority was only 21 even though the party polled 14 million votes, its
highest ever. Since then it has been downhill all the way. After thirteen years
in opposition so called modernisation and a financial crisis in 2008 we still
could not win outright in 2010; in 2015 only the complete annihilation of our
former Liberal Democrat coalition partners gave us an overall majority (we actually
lost two seats overall to Labour). But nothing was more disastrous than 2017
when an unnecessary general election was called by the Prime Minister and an
opinion poll lead of 15 to 20 points was needlessly thrown away.
That
Jeremy Corbyn, rejected by three quarters of his parliamentary party, should
increase the Labour vote by 10% is no mean achievement. But how and why did
this happen? He offered hope – an end to
austerity, the writing off of student debt, more resources for the
NHS.etc. We shot our own supporters in
the foot with the ‘dementia’ tax, offered nothing new and completely failed to
expose Labour’s irresponsible spending commitments which would ruin the country
and would make a mockery of all the difficult financial decisions taken in the
last seven years. As a country we are still spending 50 billion a year more
than we raise in taxes and the debt interest is enormous.
That
the general election would be fought simply on which party would be the better
at delivering Brexit was a non starter; other issues were bound to crop up but
the complete lack of any kind of strategy was fully exposed and was fully
exploited by the other political parties.
Probably
our biggest failure over the last twenty years has been trying to outsmart
Labour on its own natural territory. Because we were reduced to 166 seats in
the House of Commons in 1997 and Tony Blair was at the time the master of all
he surveyed we assumed that the only way back was to court progressiveness.
Hence we readily accepted at one of our party conferences our Chairman telling
us we were a ‘nasty’ party (this comment alone giving ammunition to our
political opponents should have disqualified her from the highest office) and
we had to do something about it. I have voted Conservative all my life and I
certainly don’t regard myself as nasty; quite the opposite in fact.
Nastiness
is not confined to any one particular party as the recent Labour Party
conference in Brighton showed. But we took it as gospel and alienated a lot of
voters who would you believe are conservatives with a small ‘c’. Brexit happened partly because millions of
Labour voters in the north of England and the Midlands were unwilling to be
part of a European super state whose leaders appear to be accountable to no one
but themselves, wanted control over who comes into this country and the
problems excess immigration can cause in the fields of housing, education and
health, and laws made in the United Kingdom Parliament and interpreted by U. K.
Judges. And instead of being called
patriots they are labelled racists, out of touch etc. Yet we were warned fifty
years ago as to what might happen by a politician now long dead; a politician
who changed parties and whose name is, simply due to political correctness,
unmentionable and erased from history .Yet he was one of the most brilliant
scholars of his time, was a Cambridge don, rose to the rank of Brigadier in the
Second World War, and was for one year a Member of the Cabinet. We have allowed
what is known as ‘cultural Marxism’ - the idea that the white population- in
particular white males- are oppressors of other races, that heterosexual
marriage and the procreation of children is not to be encouraged, and that
religion and in particular the Christian religion is as Karl Marx said the
opiate of the people – to manifest itself in various ways and have done little
or nothing to combat it. The left has
had a field day but like everything else the left is never satisfied. You could
spend 200 billion on the NHS and the left would still want more. In 1987 Neil Kinnock thought he had seen off
the Militant Tendency in the Labour Party yet it was only sleeping and in 2017
has reared its ugly head in the form of Momentum. It says something about the
current state of the party that Tony Blair the most successful Labour leader at
winning elections in its 117 year history is now regarded as a pariah and a
traitorous war mongerer by the members
of the party he led for thirteen years.
Europe
has been the cancer at the heart of our party for nearly sixty years. If you
read the history books it was only with great reluctance that Harold Macmillan’s
1961 Cabinet agreed to consider entry into what was then the Common Market. To
facilitate this Macmillan could have chosen no greater believer in the European
super state that his chief negotiator
Edward Heath who when he became Prime Minister in 1970 made sure by every means
he could that Great Britain would eventually lose its sovereignty and become
simply a province in a greater Europe. This was concealed from the general
public but one only had to read the Treaty of Rome to see that this together with
complete economic and monetary union was the plan. And every Conservative Prime
Minister from Margaret Thatcher through to Theresa May has fallen on the
European sword. It has nearly destroyed us. How can two former Chancellors,
John Major and Kenneth Clarke, who want to remain in the European Union and
two, Lords Lawson and Lamont, who want to leave the European Union, be in the
same party? No: the decision to hold a Referendum however desirable
was a way of papering over the cracks; a device to stop more Conservative
voters deserting to UKIP. And when in the course of time the referendum was
held and Leave won there was no adequate preparation for the outcome as the
Establishment and the Civil Service were for Remain. And that is why we are in
the current mess ; a minority government trying to negotiate its way out of a
bureaucratic nightmare with a Prime Minister who refuses to say which way she
would vote if the referendum were held now, a First Secretary and a Chancellor
of the Exchequer who are at heart both Remainers, and a Foreign Secretary whose ambition knows no
bounds but who judging by his speech at the party conference, at least seemed
to believe that there could be a bright future ahead outside the E. U.. And
what kind of Brexit? No one seems
sure. The European negotiators who know
that when we leave there will be a financial hole to fill are determined to
squeeze as much cash out of us as they can
They are placing all sorts of obstacles in our way and deliberately
making life difficult. I voted ‘Remain’
but with no real conviction (better to hold on to nurse for fear of something
worse) but having seen what is going on and the intransigence from the
Europeans I would vote Leave were there to be another referendum. Of course having never dreamt that any
country would be so foolish as to leave they are now being vindictive and petty
and against a country which from May 1940 to June 1941 stood alone with its
then Empire and American allies as a beacon of hope and freedom in a continent
over run by one of the vilest tyrannies ever known to mankind.
I
said at the beginning of this article that our party is dying. What then of the
future? What is the point of being a Conservative if it is only to mimic the
Labour party in the extension of state control over each and every one of us? Who is making the case for lower taxes, free
markets and dare I say it capitalism? We
seem more intent on not offending this group of people or that group of people
than of making any attempt to build a property owning democracy based on
conservative principles. And because we seem unable to do this we have lost a
generation of younger people who out of desperation look upon Jeremy Corbyn as
their saviour. We have to find solutions
and fast. We need to use what young
talent we have in the party to its fullest potential. It means giving a bigger
say to people like Ben Houchen the new mayor of Teesside and to our younger
Members of Parliament. It means less centralised control from Central Office;
it means that local associations are given the right to choose their
parliamentary candidates. It means that more people like Kemi Badenoch, the new
Member of Parliament for Saffron Walden, are encouraged to join the party, to
participate in policy discussion and formation... And to say why they support
the Conservative Party.
We
need to nail the lie that we are a party only for the rich. We have voters from
all creeds and classes; our M P s are far more representative of the population
as a whole than it has ever been. The Labour Party’s slogan ‘For the Many not
the Few’ implies that our party is exactly the opposite. We never ever seem to
question that assumption. We are too timid in defending our values. Too afraid
to say what we believe. The Corbynite luminary
Laura Pidcock is filled with hatred for the Tories and our policies and made
particular reference to the food banks in her constituency. Why has nobody
taken her up on this? For everybody knows that a Corbyn government would be
such a disaster that there would be plenty of banks with no food in them at
all. And how many millions starved to death under Joseph Stalin in the USSR, a
country so loved by the Pidcocks of this world.?
The
clock is ticking and time is short.
Brexit will probably happen in some form or other. Hopefully the
Remainers in our party would come on board and try to make it a success. The
prospect of a Corbyn government should concentrate our minds wonderfully. The
Labour Party policies would have far more scrutiny and surely we could not run
such an abysmal election campaign as in 2017.
I
cannot even bear to contemplate Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister leading the
nation’s mourning at the Cenotaph in Whitehall on Remembrance Sunday morning.
Yet that could possibly happen if our party cannot get its act together and
quickly. Courage and vision seem in short supply but they are sorely needed
now. Who in our party can rise up to the
challenge? Who is our new Winston Churchill?
