Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

What really makes the Tories toxic

So, who is to blame for the Conservative party’s supposedly appalling showing in last week’s council elections? The party leaders seem to have concluded that the loss of Birmingham and Southampton councils and more than 400 councillors nationwide is somehow down to the poofs, and their incessant clamouring to be allowed to marry one another. Perhaps the party sources who suggested, the morning after the elections, that out of contrition the government would ‘backtrack’ on the commitment to legalise gay marriage are right; it was this commitment which, through some complex psychological process, possibly rooted in Freud, turned the voters against the government. Their personal financial worries and more general anxieties about the state of the economy were transformed somehow into a revulsion at the thought of homosexuals fondling one another near a font. It was an expression of homophobia possibly exacerbated by repeated exposure to the gloomy prognostications of television weathermen — all of whom are homosexual — which drove millions of voters away from the Tories and into the welcoming embrace of the, er, Labour party.  

This apparent concession to the Tory right, who are popularly believed to dislike sodomites, was dressed up as being a realignment of priorities, shedding the stuff which might be a ‘distraction’ from the big issues of the day, i.e. the fact that the country is financially wrecked. These ‘distraction’ issues are largely the metro-liberal positions which the party adopted in order to supposedly convince a sceptical public that it was no longer a ‘toxic’ party, and could be voted for in all good conscience.

I was never terribly convinced about this myself. Hand-wringing platitudinous drivel about global warming, the building of wind-farms, the embracing of multiculturalism and the rolling out of successive rights for gays, transgendered and ‘intersex’ persons is seen as counter-toxic only by Steve Hilton, the Guardian, the BBC and a few score thousand voters in, primarily, north London.

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