From The Grass Roots

 

FROM  THE  GRASS  ROOTS

(These are the writer’s personal views and not those of COPOV members)

During the last twenty or so years I have periodically visited Buckinghamshire and attended COPOV meetings organised by a wonderful couple John and Caroline Strafford.  The meetings have always been interesting and informative but given John’s vast knowledge of the inner workings of the Conservative Party and intimacy with its Leadership how could this not be so ?  

A few months ago I happened to light upon a video of a much younger John Strafford speaking at the 1997 Conservative Party Conference.   Reduced to 165 Conservative Members of the House of Commons in the May General Election of that year  when the party had suffered its worst defeat since 1906 John urged the party to adopt a new constitution and one in which the members were given a much greater say in both the leadership and in the making of policy. A message which has apparently gone unheeded in the twenty five  and more years since. And yet for me as some one who for nearly twenty years has been a  constituency party member but has never held  an office or been a councillor the catastrophic defeat on the 4^th of July  last year did not come as a surprise.

The seeds of the destruction were sown over thirty two years ago on black Wednesday 16^th  September 1992 when even though interest rates were raised for a short time to 15% the pound fell out of the ERM. It was at that stage that many Conservative members and voters rejected a  European project  intent on implementing full monetary, economic and political union. For the next twenty four years even though the party had two horses each pulling in different  directions ;a facade of unity was maintained only to be shattered by a referendum in which 70% of the membership voted to leave the EU(not the EEC) and 70% of the Members of the House of Commons voted to remain.   The subsequent 2017- 2019 Parliament served only to confirm that a House divided  against itself cannot stand.

In the writer’s lifetime spanning nearly eighty years there have been twenty one General Elections and I have voted in fifteen, eleven of which were for the losing Conservative candidate. The Conservatives may have been the natural party of government but this was always dependent on the voters in England,  both Scotland and Wales continually voting  for left wing parties.  On only three occasions since 1945 has the party won a majority of 100 or more. Harold Macmillan’s victory in 1959  was won against a weakened Liberal Party who only contested around half the seats ; Margaret Thatcher’s in 1983 and 1987 as a consequence of the Falklands War and the rise of the SDP/ Liberal Alliance taking thousands of former Labour voters.  In addition over the last forty years the Labour Party has elected four leaders none of whom was considered Prime Ministerial material by the wider electorate.

It remains to be seen whether Boris Johnson’s  80 seat majority  in  December 2019 was the Conservative  equivalent of Custer’s Last Stand.   But the omens are not good.  With the lowest number of Members of the House of Commons and the lowest percentage  share  of the electorate  at a General Election in its history the party is fighting for its very existence The four and a half years from January 2020 were absolutely disastrous and irrespective of the rights and wrongs of Liz Truss’s forty nine day premiership our record for economic competence was shattered for the second time in thirty years.

 Levels of  unsustainable immigration  both legal and illegal together with the ‘woke’ agenda  of radical progressivism (which the party in fourteen years of government did little if anything to alter) and the rise of the populist  Reform Party led by political bruiser Nigel Farage could well seal its fate and as to whether the party can continue to be a political force on the centre right of British politics.

For that to happen it would mean a radical shift in terms of policy and one of the reasons the writer has not renewed his  party membership is because of what he calls the ‘John Strafford Experience’ a situation whereby  you can write many pamphlets and speak at countless meetings up and down the country regarding your ideas for reform only for them  to be filed away  and forgotten about by those  who hold senior positions at the top of the party.  The eminent historian Dr. David Starkey  who in his recent podcasts is calling for the next government to introduce what he says is ‘The Great Repeal Bill’ reversing most of the constitutional vandalism of the Blair/Brown years would no doubt be regarded by those in authority as ‘a swivel eyed loon’

The writer is just one of the millions in the U K who believes we are now governed by an unelected  virtue signalling Elite who are(to quote the great USA classicist and historian Victor Davis Hanson) ‘never subject to the ramifications of their own ideology’.   Douglas Murray’s book ‘The Strange Death of Europe’ published in 2017 was a warning as to what had happened over the previous twenty five years and the rise of Islam, but nothing changed and millions more have arrived on our shores since.

The United Kingdom’s (is there such a country now ?) position, both economic and cultural, is perilous and unlike in May 1940 we have no Winston Churchill whose total commitment to the cause and powerful oratory gave his people courage and hope in their darkest hour.

Thirty or so years ago there was a programme on television ‘What has become of us ?’  This was about a United Kingdom in the process  of slowly emerging from the ‘Have it so good’ of the nineteen fifties into the ‘swinging’ nineteen sixties. It was at a time of much optimism. The question is even more relevant today yet the future is so uncertain that one can only live from day to day in a country completely unrecognisable from that of sixty years ago.

‘Wanting our country back’ as the saying goes  is no longer a feasible option.  Whether we enter a new dark age remains to be seen but  if so what will it be like ?

24^th March 2025