In about a year’s time, maybe less, the British people will collectively hand the Tory government their P45s. Rishi Sunak will be mildly disappointed for about five minutes and then move on to a cushy billet in a Silicon Valley tech firm. The Cabinet members will mostly return to the backbenches. Some of them will be able to wangle regular gigs in the newspapers or on TV, where they will argue for the red meat policies that they failed to pursue in office.
And so will pass one of the most incredible missed opportunities in British political history. A Tory majority of a size not seen since the Thatcher years has been used to achieve a great deal of nothing at all. There was not a single measure from Tuesday’s King’s Speech that could not plausibly have appeared in a Labour manifesto.
The Tories talk a good game. Ever since the early Cameron era, in the dog days of New Labour, they have floated reform of the Human Rights Act. There have been countless promises to cut police paperwork, to get them focused on real crime, and to put ‘more bobbies on the beat’. The party has promised to cut immigration at every election since 2010. More recently they have been loudly opposed to wokeism.
But there is no follow-up. The government seem unwilling or unable to use the levers available to address the structural and systematic causes of the problems they lament, and inexplicably afraid of the opprobrium of people who hate them and will never vote for them anyway. This week’s kerfuffle over Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s article in the Times is a perfect illustration of both points. Ms Braverman was correct. Public order policing in the capital is in a bad way. It is perhaps defensible – the Met would say that by treating some large-scale demonstrations with a certain indulgence, they are ensuring good community relations and avoiding large-scale disorder – but it is surely unsustainable in the longer term for the police to turn a blind eye to lawbreaking by particular groups. The hysterical reaction to her very moderate and measured arguments has been highly instructive.
But in politics it is not enough to be right. You need to have a plan and you need to get things done. If the Home Secretary is concerned about these matters, she has actual power to address them. She is not a pundit, fulminating uselessly on a Fleet Street op-ed page. She is not Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells, spluttering into his marmalade over the latest instance of the country going to the dogs. She has extensive authority over the domestic affairs of this country.
They are content to play by the rigged rules drawn up by the Blair revolution; they do not care that the aim of modern liberal politics is to make conservative politics impossible.
But instead, she writes an opinion piece, letting the media make the story ‘Tory splits over Braverman’s attack on police’ rather than ‘Sectarian Islamist activists plan yet another weekend of disruption’. If she thinks there is a problem with the police’s operational priorities and with the rise of Islamism, she should be working quietly and diligently to fix those problems: to rein in radical mosques and organisations, to control immigration from countries where radical Islam is a problem, and to sort out the police.
All that said, the decision to effectively throw her under the bus by other senior figures in the government demonstrates the other part of the problem: the rank cowardice frequently shown by senior Tories in the face of bad faith criticism from their political opponents. Number 10 has briefed against Braverman; Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has distanced himself from her remarks. One has to wonder what on earth they think they will achieve by doing so. The government is becalmed in the polls, twenty points behind. Some projections suggest that they may have fewer than 100 seats after the next election. There is literally nothing to lose at this point from urging the police to take a more robust attitude to sectarian marches in central London on Armistice Day. They might even gain back the confidence of conservative-minded voters who have given up on them in disgust.
The common factor behind these two aspects of the Tories’ inertia problem is that they do not have the stomach or the intelligence to dismantle the Blairite settlement, which has the effect – if not the intention – of making rightwing politics very difficult. We have seen this year how human rights law has hamstrung the government’s attempts to address the Channel migrants crisis, and to deport foreign criminals. The Equality Act has embedded a doggedly egalitarian moralism throughout most of the public sector and a good deal of the private sector, making them institutionally left-wing. The Malicious Communications Act 2003 and the Public Order Act 1986 both contain loosely drafted provisions that are now used by the police and the courts to suppress ‘offensive’ speech in a way that would have considered outrageous not long ago. Just in the last week or so we have seen two appalling cases: a Tory MP, Bob Stewart, received a criminal conviction for being mildly rude in an argument, and several former policemen received one for sharing an off-colour joke in a private WhatsApp chat.
The Conservative government could undo all this quite easily. But they don’t. As far as I am aware, they did not raise a squeak of protest about either the Bob Stewart case or that of the retired policemen. This suggests that they are objectively happy with this state of affairs – which is conceivable – or that the possibility of unpicking it through their still-substantial majority in the Commons has just not occurred to them. They are content to play by the rigged rules drawn up by the Blair revolution; they do not care that the aim of modern liberal politics is to make conservative politics impossible. They dare not even try to level the playing field, to write their own rules, to reject fake ‘constitutional norms’ invented by civil servants less than twenty years ago.
Electoral oblivion, whenever it comes, will be richly deserved.
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