For progressive onlookers abroad, the Labour landslide now projected next month will seem a cheerful counterweight to the EU parliamentary elections’ lurch rightwards and will represent a huge, refreshing popular shift in Britain to the left. Yet according to at least one recent poll, this perception would be statistically mistaken. Add the Conservative and Reform support together, and on the ground the British left and right are neck and neck.
But never mind the numbers. The notion that an historically extraordinary Labour majority would betoken a renewed British enthusiasm for socialism is off the beam. Where is the emotion in this election? What few passions July’s contest stirs fester almost exclusively among fed-up former Tory voters. They’re furious. They’re so angry they can’t see, and so have become blind to their self-interest. Demented by loathing for their own party, they are about to elect, or be complicit in electing, an extreme left-wing government largely to punish the current one for being too left-wing.
Tory voters will elect an extreme left-wing government to punish the current one for being too left-wing
That doesn’t make any sense, so you can see why foreigners get the wrong end of the stick. Centre-right voters disgusted that fake ‘CINO’ conservatives are bleeding them dry with the highest taxes in 70 years will take their revenge by installing a regime that will raise taxes even higher. Tory voters still smarting over the authoritarianism of epidemiologically futile Covid lockdowns apparently plan to express their disapproval of these oppressive policies by electing a leader who lobbied for even more oppressive policies: locking down harder and longer.
Some voters dismayed that their meagre political power to choose MPs is systematically diluted by unelected civil servants, quangocrats and judges see the answer as putting a globalist in Downing Street who will further attenuate accountable democracy with loyalty to the UN, WEF, WHO and IPCC. Passengers incensed by paralysing transport strikes will express their frustration by handing government to a party that’s in league with the unions. Brexit supporters devastated that their representatives have refused to capitalise on restored sovereignty will castigate the still passively Remainer Tory party by electing an actively Remainer Labour party, whose leader plans to snuggle as cosily as possible back in the bosom of the EU. That’ll show ’em.
Plenty of alienated Conservatives are irate that so much of the money they work hard for is siphoned off to support millions of people who are too ‘anxious’ or ‘depressed’ to get out of bed. Yet to underscore the unfairness to taxpayers of widespread worklessness, disaffected Tories will ensure that the incoming government is even more redistributive, even bigger on benefits and even more economically punitive towards the few citizens who still get out of bed.
Sensible voters deeply disappointed that Conservatives haven’t used an 80-seat majority to stand up to faddish ‘social justice’ fanaticism will upbraid their string of cowardly or secretly wokey PMs by choosing one who only recently remembered what a woman is and who is likely to forget they don’t have penises the moment he’s elected; who wants to ban parents and therapists from trying to ‘convert’ children to being content with their sex; and who will only further promote the anti-meritocratic corruption and bigotry of DEI racial preferences.
Motorists exasperated by Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, Ultra-Low Emission Zones and 15-minute cities will chuck the Conservatives who’ve facilitated this war on cars, the better to install a party certain to make even more war on cars. Centre-right voters horrified by the technologically unachievable, economically suicidal deadlines of net zero will show the Tories the error of their ways by electing an even greater proponent of net zero, who aspires to entrench tighter deadlines that are still more technologically unachievable and economically suicidal.
Many householders straitened by Tory-era inflation seem to believe a Labour government that spends even more money it hasn’t got will keep prices down, when overspending of borrowed government money is what put prices up to begin with. Many Conservatives distressed by the escalating national debt will still help elect a party that is notoriously profligate.
Above all, Tory malcontents are enraged that during 14 years in power their government has allowed immigration, both legal and illegal, to soar, in defiance of the party’s manifestos. These voters’ logical retribution? Electing instead a government among whose first orders of business will be to rescind the only feeble measure to suppress illegal immigration that its predecessors managed to enact. Electing a government that has merely pledged to ‘smash the gangs’, as if no one has ever thought to tell the people smugglers in Calais: ‘Excuse me, we wish you wouldn’t do that.’ Electing a government not especially fussed about an accelerating influx that would take plenty of political capital, bravery, ruthlessness and maybe also money to constrain, and thus a government that will let immigration of every stripe soar even higher.
Granted, consumed with the vastly more important matter of keeping 15-year-olds from ever buying a packet of cigarettes, the Tories did not: leave the ECHR and Refugee Convention; overhaul the much-abused asylum system; eliminate the Supreme Court, Blair’s Commons-undermining import from America; ditch the divisive Human Rights and Equality Acts; ban gender woo-woo in public education by statute; address the structural failings of the cumbersome, management-heavy NHS; or gut the Home Office of activist civil servants, who deliberately obstruct policies they disagree with. But a Labour government will do none of these things, either. A Labour government will make everything moderate-to–conservative Britons care about even worse.
Whether by staying home, splitting the right-of-centre vote by opting for Reform or defiantly voting Labour, disgruntled former Tory supporters are obsessed with punishing their own party into oblivion for its wasteful, weak, lazy, lacklustre and anything but genuinely conservative governance. But the politicians will be fine; they’ll have a bit more time for their geraniums. A Labour government will punish the British people. It will be an economic, political, social and democratic disaster, which you poor bastards don’t deserve.
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