Tory capitulation to the soft-Left orthodoxy has ruined Britain.
Don’t blame Reform. Sunak’s party is unravelling because it succumbed to socialist delusions that were impossible to implement. Janet Daley.
Rishi Sunak is doomed and the party that he leads may not survive his electoral collapse. That is the consensus accepted with varying degrees of despair, or glee, within conservative circles. There are two quite separate grounds for this belief. One is a personal judgment on the Prime Minister himself, who is seen as the chief assassin of a leader who had won a spectacular general election victory, Boris Johnson, and then as the usurper of a subsequent leader, Liz Truss, who had been duly elected by the party’s membership. That history, which effectively robs Mr Sunak’s position of democratic legitimacy, is an original sin that can never be expunged.
But there is a larger and more important reason for what is assumed to be the inevitable extinction of the Tory Party as it is now composed: that it has failed in the most critical areas of governmental responsibility, allowing essential public services to become dysfunctional while taxes rose to the highest levels in living memory. When the performance of those agencies for which the government is ultimately responsible – healthcare, policing, postal delivery, public transport – range from barely acceptable to not-fit-for-purpose, the party in power is inevitably (quite rightly) blamed. In this respect, the present Tory leadership is not unique.
Centre-Right parties are in deep trouble all over the Western world and they are not losing support to Left-liberal opponents. It is the rise of further – sometimes much further – Right-wing forces that are pushing established conservatives to the brink of extinction. This is most noisily obvious in the United States where Donald Trump, an incendiary populist, is telling the last traditional Republican left in his party’s primary contest, Nikki Haley, to get out of the way of his campaign steamroller.
In Europe, political leaders and their new (or reconstructed) parties of the Right are gaining degrees of power and influence with the sort of rhetoric that most people had never expected to hear again after the terrible events of the last century. In country after country, some of which have always been regarded as volatile, such as Italy, and others with historic liberal inclinations like the Netherlands, mainstream conservatism is being sidelined – made irrelevant – by angry demands for more radical Right-wing measures. This is not, as many righteous liberals may be inclined to think, being driven purely by resentment of migration. In Germany and the Netherlands, there is an important farmers’ revolt, which is more to do with green policies than migrants.
What all these swings further Right (including our own to the Reform party) do have in common is the sense of abandonment: great swathes of the population clearly believe themselves to be disenfranchised in the current system. There is a prevailing sense of bitterness and alienation, which is not just a danger to the existing centrist parties, but to faith in the idea of democratic accountability. Elected governments are now simply seen as a ruling class that can preside with the arrogant insouciance of an aristocracy. That might just have been sustainable if those in power had genuinely delivered what most people wanted: if they had, in other words, functioned as an effective benign oligarchy. But when they fail to deliver the goods – when almost every vital service that is assigned to them seems to be failing – then the rage is all-consuming and the voters look for more drastic solutions. When people are asked what makes them dissatisfied with the Tories, they almost invariably cite the uselessness of public sector services: the trains, the GP practices, the policing of crime, the state of the roads.
So, paradoxically, the reasons that Sunak’s Conservatives and many of the soft-Right parties of Europe are so vulnerable to attack are not to do with Conservative values or principles at all. What has really caused their undoing is that they bought into the centre-Left orthodoxies of state power and control, and then failed in their implementation of them. They accepted the democratic socialist model and then could not make it work. And that is because nobody on the Right or Left could make it work.
The expectations that were encouraged under the name of “social fairness” – equitable wealth redistribution; infinite support for those unable to cope with the demands of a modern economy; permanently available, unlimited services of a quality to rival the best private provision – were never going to be affordable or deliverable. The last Labour government had already admitted this with that infamous missive left for its successors, “There’s no money left.”
But even if there were infinite amounts of money available – which there can be if you just keep printing it – there is a problem with democratic socialist programmes. The state is not good at running services that require efficiency and responsiveness to change, commitment to the consumer’s preferences, value for money, an interest in constant innovation and an appetite for progress.
Those things, in fact, are positively discouraged in the public sector as almost anyone who has ever worked for it (including me) will tell you. The solution offered by the Left is always more funding, which is largely irrelevant to the ultimate, endemic flaws in the functioning of publicly-owned services and will eventually simply break the bank. It is the competitive discipline of the market that makes the providers of private services improve and maintain their standards of performance.
Everybody on the centre-Right should know this, but they have accepted the great post-war mythology that depicts free-market economics as heartless and exploitative. What we are living through is actually the failure of soft-Left politics that won the great political argument of the 20th century and is now being tested to destruction in the 21st.
The current generation of Conservatives have the accidental misfortune of being in power at the moment of peak disillusionment. But in fact, the truth had already become clear under Gordon Brown, who made a serious attempt to create a new model of socialism that would incorporate capitalist virtues. Note: it didn’t work. What it did do, as the man said, was bankrupt the government.
