From the Grass Roots
(This article is by a Member of
the Conservative Party who is an observer of the political scene. It
does not represent the views of COPOV nor of its members although they may be
in agreement with some of the writer’s conclusions).
So we won after all! Despite the polls, the pundits and the media
the electorate (at least in England and Wales) decided to place its trust in
our policies. David Cameron and his team of ministers have
now been handed the mandate which they were denied in May 2010. It is
a great responsibility given to a party which has existed for over two hundred
and fifty years born from the aristocracy, the landed gentry and the Church. It has
produced many great Prime Ministers – Pitt, Disraeli, Churchill and Thatcher –
to name but four and even today can attract the votes of millions of people of
all ages and from all walks of life, classes and creeds. Why is this? The writer suggests that it is rooted in
history – the party was there before the people and mass universal suffrage and
although it had certain aims, ideas and principles these have never been
rigidly adhered to but have been moulded to suit the time and the occasion.
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A simple example will suffice. The writer comes from Wales and in 1998 the
party was opposed to the Blair government’s proposals for devolution and a
Welsh Assembly. The vote in Wales
remained on a knife edge until the last constituency declared, voting ‘Yes’ and
as a consequence the Assembly was set up by the narrowest of margins, 51% to
49%. At this point we had no
Conservative Members of Parliament (Wales had become Conservative free as a result
of the 1997 general election) but with proportional representation and our sole
Assembly Member under first past the post (David Davies now M.P for Monmouth)
we were able to make the Conservative voice heard, our members taking the view
that now the Assembly had been established there was no going back and no
possibility of returning to the status quo.
Our Conservative members worked
hard to re-establish the party as an effective force in Wales. Three of our
current members Glyn Davies (Montgomery), Alun Cairns (Vale of Glamorgan) and
David Davies (Monmouth) were Assembly Members.
We are the main opposition in the Assembly (which is Labour controlled)
but ten days ago returned eleven Members of Parliament, the highest number
since the 1850’s (apart from1983 when we had fourteen) winning the Gower
(albeit by only 27 votes) for the first time since 1906. We are
supported by 25% of the electorate, the figures being higher in the rural and
coastal parts of the country. Nationalism is not as potent a force in Wales
as in Scotland being confined mainly to the rural Welsh speaking parts of
Wales. Inroads have been made in the industrial
former coal mining areas once dominated by the Labour Party and although there
has been the odd success this is not reflected in the number of Members of
Parliament, Labour holding on with substantial though falling votes and
majorities.
The writer was surprised to find at a recent
COPOV meeting how little was known about the Conservatives and Conservative
successes in Wales. With such a small
overall majority the eleven votes from Wales may well be vital in any close
division.
However the writer does not think that David
Cameron will have similar problems to those encountered by John Major twenty
years ago (as his (Major’s) majority was slowly whittled away) for a number of
reasons. Firstly John Major’s
government was scuppered by Black Wednesday of September 1992 and the
subsequent economic crisis and draconian measures needed to rectify the
position; secondly, we had already been in power for fourteen or fifteen years
and many ministers were exhausted and tired; thirdly in Tony Blair Labour had
found an electable leader of Prime Ministerial material; and, fourthly Labour
had, at that time, over 270 seats so the opposition was much less fragmented.
With Sinn Fein not taking up their seats , the Unionists probably voting with
the Conservatives on major issues, the Liberal Democrats decimated and Labour
shorn of its forty Scottish Members, the writer thinks the majority for all
practical purposes will be around 30 similar to that of Edward Heath after the
1970 general election.
Scotland, however, remains a major problem. Conservatives have always opposed
proportional representation in the belief (probably mistaken) that with it we
will never have a chance of being in government. Yet with just 50% of the total vote (not of
the electorate) the SNP holds 95% of the Scottish seats in the House of
Commons. A second referendum is being mooted presumably
because they now believe they will get a ‘yes’ to cessation. The difficulty of course is that those
wanting to retain the union are split between Labour, Liberal Democrat and
Conservative voters. The Labour Party must take full responsibility
for this state of affairs. For
years they peddled the lie that Scotland was being short changed by a skinflint
Tory Government at Westminster who had few Members of Parliament and cared
little for Scotland (Margaret Thatcher, unfortunately, fanned the flames of
this resentment by imposing the hated ‘poll tax’ on Scotland first) . All, they said, would be well once a Labour
government was at Westminster and devolved powers to a new Scottish Parliament.
And so it proved. The
West Lothian question regarding Scottish Members being able to vote on matters
relating to England but not on Scottish matters the preserve of the Scottish
Parliament, has never been satisfactorily resolved. Labour thought that they could never lose in
Scotland and we now have what can only be described as a ‘constitutional mess’
which could turn into a crisis with the SNP refusing to countenance any
austerity measures.
We are constantly reminded that when we vote we
are electing a parliament not a president. That, of course, is technically
true. Our Queen is Head of State but governing the
country is the responsibility of the Prime Minister and the ministers he
appoints. In any poll as to who would make the better Prime Minister, David
Cameron was the overwhelming choice. Ed
Miliband suffered not only because of his left wing views but was hampered by
the fact that he was not even the choice of his parliamentary colleagues and of the individual party members but of the trade
unions who got their man elected by the narrowest of margins. In the age of television
and relentless examination by the media how you come over as an individual
counts for a lot. We may regret it but it is a fact. And the writer is certain that many people
voted Conservative simply because they could not envisage Ed Miliband as prime
minister , the more so because he refused to deny that the last Labour
government had overspent.
When Nick Clegg led the Liberal Democrats into
the coalition in May 2010, little did he think that five years later the
Liberal Democrats would be reduced to a minibus of M.P’s. As Conservatives we
should not gloat at their demise for we have to face the fact that in May 2010
the electorate was not prepared for whatever reason to put its trust in us
alone. Coalition was the best answer
because it provided stability at a very critical time and meant that there was
a secure parliamentary majority for the economic measures which had to be
taken. Liberal Democrats provided that stability at a critical time. Coalition does involve compromise and the
writer thinks that under the circumstances it worked reasonably well. In any
event the main ministries, Chancellor, Foreign Secretary, Home Secretary, Defence
Secretary, Justice etc. were always held
by us. Vince Cable was always going to be a thorn but, in a way understandably
so, as he was a Labour candidate in Glasgow in 1970 and a former member of the
now defunct SDP joining the Liberals in the 1988 merger of the Liberals and
Social Democrats.
The Labour Party continues to fight the battles
of the past and it is ironic that its most successful Prime Minister was the
public school educated Tony Blair who realised that Labour could not win by
just appealing to its ever decreasing core vote but had to connect somehow with
‘middle’ England. Ed Miliband has taken
the party back thirty years and it is now shorn of its Scottish heartlands
which are going to be difficult to regain. Outside London it only has its Midland and
Northern industrial base together with the parts of Wales I have already
referred to. It is totally dependent on
the trade unions who fund either directly or indirectly ninety five percent of
its MPs. It is no good talking about
privileged Tory toffs when not only your own former leader sits in the House of
Lords but also his wife; when that same leader, left wing firebrand as he was
in his youth, now has a massive pension from being a European Commissioner (an
institution he once despised), a £700,000
house in a leafy part of South Glamorgan and
a son given a safe seat simply because of his connections. Champagne socialism certainly but a resulting
disillusion from people whose loyalty in the past could never be doubted but
who now no longer bother to vote. But
only a fool would write off the Labour Party and we can base that on our experience.
In 1945 our party suffered its heaviest defeat
since 1906 and with the country turning left and electing the Attlee government
it seemed likely that we might be out of power for fifteen maybe twenty years. Yet
reform we did, paving the way for thirteen years of government under four
different Prime Ministers. By 1966
Harold Wilson, then Prime Minister, claimed, falsely as it turned out, that
Labour was now ‘the natural party of
government’ and even though Edward Heath
lasted less than four years as Prime Minister, we were able to come back less
than six years later and retain power first under Margaret Thatcher and then
under John Major for a further eighteen years. The 1997 catastrophe when we won only 166
seats (the lowest since 1832?) although it led to thirteen years in the
wilderness gave us time to regroup and to widen our base. 7th May
2015 saw that work completed with the most diverse parliamentary party ever
with the greatest number of women and ethnic minority members ever and the
promise by the Prime Minister to govern as ‘one nation’. Yet even at the height of this most
unexpected victory there are warnings: in many constituencies there were small
swings to the Labour Party; we have no representation in large areas of the
north, nor in any of the northern cities such as Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds
or Newcastle. Birmingham, once a bastion of Unionism has no Conservative M Ps
other than Andrew Mitchell in Sutton Coldfield. Scotland is a completely lost
cause. The minority parties, particularly
UKIP and the Greens, complain at the unfairness of the voting system . Only 66%
of the electorate voted (just 1% up on 2010) in what was supposed to be the
closest election for decades. Europe and the forthcoming referendum will
dominate the current parliament.
The writer sat out most of the general
election. He did not watch an election
broadcast, did no canvassing, no delivering of leaflets, no telling. It was
only at 4 a m. on the Friday morning that he listened in on the radio and heard
the words: ‘The Conservatives have now taken Cheltenham’. His reaction was ‘well this was not part of the
script’ and he then switched on ITV to hear of the Conservative gains and how
many seats we were likely to win -316 a minimum, possibly an overall majority
in single figures. At 3 p.m. he watched
the 70th Anniversary of the VE day commemorations at the Cenotaph he
reflected thus :
Then, released from and relieved that we had
defeated probably the most monstrous, vile sinister and vicious tyranny ever to
set foot on this earth, we were so united that nothing else seemed to matter. Seventy years later we as a nation seem to be
splitting apart with the northern most part of our island wanting apparently to
govern itself independently despite our common language and common history. Another four million or so blame all things
European on our present plight wishing us to withdraw from the European Union
and to have strict control as to who comes to live in this country. Another one
million or so put the environment at the top of the agenda. How can a Conservative government – or any
government for that matter – reconcile these differences particularly when only
37% of the voters backed your party?
In May 1940 in his first broadcast as Prime
Minister Winston Churchill said this: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil,
tears and sweat.’ Will this be the epitaph of the 2015 – 2020 Parliament?
