14.10.1999

Tory lurch to right

After Blackpool the Conservative Party under Hague looks unelectable, argues Michael Malkin

“Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” Had Euripedes been at Blackpool last week, he would have pointed to the Tory conference as eloquent proof of his maxim, for what we witnessed was a political party, once a mighty force, losing touch with reality.

With a pre-conference poll indicating that William Hague’s party was scraping the bottom of its post-1997 lows (Labour 52%, Conservatives 25%) and that his own popularity ratings - even among Tory supporters - were measurable only in minus quantities, Hague was confronted by a formidable task: to win back the millions of middle and working class voters who defected to Blair in 1997 by restoring some semblance of confidence in his leadership and in the Conservative Party’s electability as a viable and coherent alternative to New Labour. In both respects he failed dismally.

Only two years ago in the same hall, in the aftermath of its catastrophic performance in the general election, Hague blamed defeat on the “arrogant, selfish and conceited” nature of his party, which was, in his own words, perceived as “harsh, uncaring and greedy”. The age of “caring conservatism” was inaugurated (The Guardian October 5). It was time for the ‘Listen to Britain’ campaign. Two years and dozens of ‘focus groups’ later, the product of this implausible conversion to humility and compassion was unveiled. The common-sense revolution - a fatuous oxymoron - turns out to be little more than a ragbag of neo-Thatcherite, supposedly populist nostrums. This bombastic, bloated and intensely backward-looking document, with its “five guarantees to the British people” and its 60 policy initiatives, laughably endows all the most prejudiced and reactionary opinions of the home counties saloon bar ideologue with the status of political wisdom.

Take Europe. The renewed outbreak of civil war in the party on this question, set ablaze last week by the triumphant return of Thatcher - more rabid than ever - to the centre stage of Tory politics, calls to mind a striking historical parallel with 1906. Then, as now, the Tories were reeling from electoral catastrophe and wracked by internal divisions. It spent the best part of 16 years tearing itself apart in a vicious internecine conflict between free traders and protectionists. A similar, protracted and bitter struggle over the EU and the single currency now seems inevitable. This alone is enough to make the party unelectable for the foreseeable future. It is premature to speak in terms of a split, but nonetheless it is true that there are de facto two Tory parties.

In retrospect, the party leadership’s decision to seek Thatcher’s personal endorsement of its lurch to the right and to have her anoint Hague as the chosen one will surely be seen as a profound mistake. It was entirely predictable that allowing Thatcher to speak - even at a fringe meeting - would mean that she effectively hijacked the conference. Anyone who doubts the divisive impact of Thatcher’s interventions on Europe and (even more disgustingly) on her friend “Senator Pinochet” should take a look at the Evening Standard of October 7.

In a signed article, the paper’s editor, Max Hastings - previously head of The Daily Telegraph and long-standing proponent of one-nation Toryism - launches a vitriolic attack on what he calls the “freak show” and “xenophobic circus” at the Winter Gardens, an event that had “shunned the real world”. Describing himself as “a sad and bitter ex-Tory”, Hastings denounces Thatcher’s “semi-crazed chauvinism” and “jingoistic crudities” and openly describes her as someone “who had to be removed from office because she went mad”. Lamenting “the wreck of a great political movement ... held captive by the lost legions of Thatcher, talking only to a few thousand other lost souls of the same persuasion”, Hastings tells us that if a general election were held tomorrow, he “would have to vote Labour because Mr Blair is an effective leader running a competent government with a realistic view about Europe”. This is a measure of how serious things are for the Tories in the wake of Blackpool.

Turning to the detail of some of The common-sense revolution’s proposals, let us begin by examining the most eye-catching of Hague’s “five guarantees”: ie, the “tax guarantee”, whereby the party pledges that “tax will fall as a share of the nation’s income over the term of a parliament under a Conservative government”. Despite abundant evidence that what primarily concerns the electorate today is an increase in public investment to enhance the quality and accessibility of services such as health and education, Hague’s Tory Party - casting a nostalgic eye back to the ‘golden age’ of 1980s Thatcherism and still wanting to fight yesterday’s battles - remains fixated on tax. The “guarantee” itself is astounding. Given the exigencies of the economic cycle, no chancellor in their right mind would or could make such a pledge, yet shadow chancellor Francis Maude goes further and proposes that stringent controls on public spending and borrowing should be enshrined in a new balanced budget act, which would make it illegal for a government to borrow money in order to finance higher spending without raising taxes. At the same time he says that a Tory government would make it a priority to reduce the 40% rate of income tax currently paid by the well-off.

In some senses, this approach is Blairism taken to the extreme, in so far as it turns Gordon Brown’s much-vaunted ‘prudence’ into an iron and inflexible instrument of fiscal policy. Its implications for our class are especially serious, for, if the “tax guarantee” is carried out regardless of economic circumstances - which, if it is to be credible, it must be - then in relation to public spending it presages a potentially massive attack on the living standards of all those who are most dependent on public provision: ie, the working class.

Maude has the gall to suggest that any suffering that results from the application of his balanced budget act will be made good by an increase in donations to charity. Liberated from the ‘excessive’ burden of a 40% top rate of tax, the better-off will, he assures, feel more inclined to be generous to those less fortunate, because “the growing weight of the state has affected both our ability and our natural willingness to help others” (The Independent October 6). The reality behind this pernicious nonsense is vastly different. When challenged as to how the “tax guarantee” could be made affordable, spokesmen candidly pointed to an expected steep fall in the social security budget under the next Tory government: ie, a blitz on benefits.

This leads us to another of Hague’s pledges, the “can work, must work guarantee”. The party’s document makes much of launching a crusade against “scroungers and shirkers”, with total removal of benefit from all those who decline to take up just one job or training offer. Job centres will be contracted out to the private sector, and paid by ‘results’. These agencies will be given new investigative, quasi-police powers, akin to those of the tax inspectorate. No mention is made of the costs entailed in recruiting the small army of bureaucratic snoopers needed to enforce such a draconian war on claimants, but in its own perverse way it should lead to a further reduction in the unemployed. Again, rather than representing a new initiative, this “guarantee” merely takes to extremes the existing arrangements already put in place by New Labour. Shorn of its pretensions to “common sense”, it is meant to be the long desired revenge of ‘middle England’ against the ‘layabouts’ whom decent tax-paying folk keep in a life of idle luxury.

Turning, finally, to “the sterling guarantee”, we reach the nub of the matter. On the face of it, this pledge that the Tories “will oppose entry into the European single currency at the next general election” sounds relatively innocuous and on one level merely restates the party’s existing commitment to keep out of the euro “in this parliament and the next”. The common-sense revolution, however, and particularly Hague’s own conference speech, marks a qualitative development in policy. Eurosceptism is no longer enough. Frank, indeed proud xenophobia is now the order of the day. Tory apparatchiks assure us that Hague’s speech, larded with adulatory references to Churchill, calling for a new “battle for Britain” and replete with cringe-making references to nasty European food, dirty European lorries and thieving European fishermen, was written before the conference got underway. Nonetheless, it accorded perfectly with Thatcher’s absurd denunciation of all things foreign in general and European in particular:

“In my lifetime all our problems have come from mainland Europe and all the solutions have come from English-speaking nations who have kept law-abiding liberty alive for the future” (The Daily Telegraph October 6).

Hague’s speech underlined the essential message behind the party’s policy document towards Europe - in effect, a threat to sabotage the EU by vetoing the forthcoming Maastricht-style treaty that is to be negotiated in a series of inter-governmental conferences over the next two years: “When we’re in government the next new EU treaty must contain a flexibility clause or else I tell you there will be no new treaty” (The Guardian October 8).

What Hague refers to as a “flexibility clause” means that the British government must be given the right to opt out of any and all European legislation that is not to its liking: ie, Europe à la carte. If, by some miracle, Hague were elected in 2001 and proceeded to implement his threat, one of the paradoxical outcomes of such a stance would probably be to render unworkable the enlargement of the EU, to include eastern European countries, on which hitherto even Tory Eurosceptics have set such store. Furthermore, as Hague’s own talk about “the value of nation in the modern world”, his vision of “an independent Britain” and his bathetic promise to “give you back your country” suggests, what now amounts to a rhetorical flirtation with the idea of British withdrawal from the EU could become explicit Tory policy.

What can one say of a bourgeois party that has so clearly lost touch with mainstream bourgeois opinion - especially big capital - about Britain’s future in Europe, and about much else besides? Rather than giving it a platform on which to base itself as a viable party of opposition, Blackpool has set the Conservatives on the way to becoming a backward-looking, Europhobic sect, talking only to its own ageing and dwindling membership, and for the moment effectively marginalised. ‘Clear blue water’ may separate the post-Blackpool Tories from New Labour, but this also constitutes an ever-widening gulf between the party and an electorate which overwhelmingly takes as common sense not defence of Pinochet and the pound, but its interests as wage workers and consumers of public services. The task of this Blackpool conference was to try to recapture the middle ground so successfully expropriated from them by Blairism, the ground where elections in this country are won and lost. Instead, obsessed by the dream of recreating the glorious Thatcherite past, they have done the exact opposite.

Small wonder, therefore, that the Tories are increasingly inclined to try and mobilise forces such as the Countryside Alliance - dominated by its own supporters - and such campaigns as that launched by The Daily Telegraph to ‘save’ the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Given his impotence both in parliament and in the country, Hague has little choice but to engage in wrecking tactics wherever the opportunity arises of doing damage to the Blair project. This is what makes the party’s abandonment of bipartisanship on the question of Northern Ireland, in itself paradigmatic of the whole process characterised by extra-parliamentary agitation, so significant.

It is also the reason why this paper and our organisation have devoted so much time and effort to a thorough theoretical analysis of the problems posed by the democratic rights of the British-Irish population of the Six Counties. Some comrades, indulging more in logomachy than rational argument, maintain that the category ‘British-Irish’ has no content, and that the whole question is in some sense a digression or diversion from more pressing matters. On the contrary, as the Tories’ stance on the matter amply illustrates, it is, and will remain, a central question of British politics.

That the Tory Party is (for the time being at least) incapable of winning a general election, is a commonplace. It is true that nothing short of an economic or political cataclysm looks capable of unseating Blair at the next election. Nonetheless, the lessons of history suggest that it would be foolish to write off the Tories in the long term, just as it was foolish in the 1980s to talk of the death of the Labour Party and the onset of an epoch of one-party government.

The task of communists is to fight against all the forces of reaction, whether in their Blairite manifestation, or in the weird guise taken on by the Conservative Party at Blackpool.

Michael Malkin