31.07.2002
What next for the Conservatives?
"This has been a bad fortnight for the Conservative Party." Who can argue with David Davis, a contender in last year's leadership election who eventually threw his weight behind Iain Duncan Smith and was rewarded with the chairmanship of the party, a post from which he has now humiliatingly been ejected after just 10 months? Davis gave public voice to his bitterness in a whingeing statement about a "cowardly campaign of character assassination" founded on a "tissue of lies" that had led to what at this stage looks like his political demise (The Daily Telegraph July 29). However, rather than retreat to the backbenches and there nurse his slender majority of just 1,903 votes in the Haltemprice and Howden constituency, he has agreed to accept the meaningless post of shadow secretary of state for the office of deputy prime minister. Gone are the chauffeur-driven car and the plush offices in Smith Square. Ahead lies a series of futile parliamentary jousts with 'two jags' Prescott, another duffer, but one who at least rejoices in the title of deputy, a role pointedly denied to Davis in the Tory reshuffle. How long Davis can hope or even wish to survive in his new job is open to question. Having implicitly accused his own leader of treacherously heeding the calumnies of a bunch of back-stabbing conspirators in central office, Davis unconvincingly says that, "It is time to draw a line under the events of the last week" - as if the whole sorry fiasco can quietly be forgotten. His position looks crass and untenable. Arrogant, ambitious, lazy, disloyal, stubbornly resistant to such obviously necessary changes as giving the party a broader appeal by cultivating a caring and inclusive image - these were just some of the charges levelled at him by the whispering campaign which enlivened the dog days just before the summer recess and the onset of the silly season. The one scant comfort that the party can perhaps take from this episode is that outside the incestuous corridors of Westminster and the editorial rooms of political scribblers on the broadsheets, hardly anybody can have noticed what was going on, and even those who did could not give a twopenny damn. After all, who actually cares? Alright, the anonymous men in grey suits have shown that, from their clubland armchairs, they can still engineer a ruthless political assassination, but what they have also demonstrated, to anyone who has an eye for it, is that, far from being a party remotely fit to form a government, the Conservatives are not yet even a credible opposition. So much was actually obvious already. The Tories' problem is not that they are beset by factional infighting between modernisers and traditionalists; nor that the top of the party is riven by the rivalries and conflicting ambitions of those who would hope to succeed Duncan Smith when (rather than if) he fails to deliver at the next election; nor, for that matter, the fact that the Tories' Harrogate relaunch earlier this year signally failed to produce any concrete improvement in their standing (see Weekly Worker March 28). No. The Tories' real problem is that they are fast becoming an irrelevance, a party with no programme, no strategy, not even an identity, and that they patently have not got a clue what to do about all this. Davis was no more than a hapless scapegoat for this lamentable failure. He will not be the last. What can be said about Theresa May, the erstwhile shadow secretary of state for transport and now Davis's anointed successor? A little over five years ago she was not even an MP. Trawl through your press clippings and you will find that she is primarily best known for her shoes; secondly for the fact that she supposedly played a role in the downfall of Stephen Byers, which is nonsense. After Railtrack and his other failures, Byers was a political corpse. Everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before the stench of putrescence would make it essential to remove him from the government. But May undoubtedly has a number of useful attributes: she is a modernising Duncan Smith ultra-loyalist, a political lightweight and most importantly, of course, a woman. Conducting Mrs May like a prize exhibit to a press conference on the steps of Central Office, Duncan Smith began by saying, "I'm in charge" - sounding for all the world like a latter-day captain Mainwaring. He then graciously allowed the lady to utter a few carefully scripted words: "I believe that the Conservative Party is changing and my appointment as the first woman chairman symbolises that change." She went on to tell us that, "the Conservative Party is an open, decent and tolerant party", terms straight out of the Portillo/Harrogate lexicon, words just as ludicrously incredible now as they were before. Apparently, she has it in mind to enfold "the vulnerable" in her perfumed embrace, so watch out. It did not seem to occur to May or her beloved leader that by stressing the Tories' revolutionary boldness in choosing a woman as their new 'chairman' (something of a lapse in PC-speak there), she was drawing attention to just how far behind the times the party actually remains. Labour's front bench is positively stacked with females, not to mention the ranks of 'Blair's babes' who fawningly adorn the back benches. To digress for a moment, a similar point could be made about the curiously coincidental decision of Alan Duncan, a Tory front-bench spokesman on foreign affairs, to reveal to the world the fact that he is a homosexual. Quelle surprise. The encomia heaped from all sides upon a grateful Duncan for his "courage" and "bravery" in finally leaving the closet again have much to tell us. Historically, the Tory Party has probably had more homosexuals in its parliamentary ranks than any other. But the golden rules were 'not in front of the voters' and 'don't get caught'. Anybody, like poor Ian Harvey, who was caught in flagrante delictu committing 'an act of gross indecency' in St James's Park with a member of her majesty's footguards, or the wretched Harvey Proctor, mercilessly set up by a Sunday tabloid, was expected to fall on his sword immediately and disappear into oblivion. If these things are changing, then that can obviously only be for the good. That the Tories simply must change or risk even losing their role as the main party of opposition is obvious to all. When the party's fortunes were at a low ebb in the middle decades of the 19th century, it was reduced to being the party of rural England. The same - give or take some county and market towns in the old heartlands, the more prosperous suburbs and the richest metropolitan areas - is true today. Since 1992 the Tories have lost around five million voters (around 40% of what used to be regarded as their core support). Two landslide defeats later, and these voters show little sign of returning to the fold. Although the party's nominal membership (in so far as such things are important) is actually bigger than Labour's, its demographic profile is woefully narrow: overwhelmingly white, comfortably off and entitled to a bus pass. No wonder Davis, whatever his inadequacies as chairman, was reluctant to try convincing these people of the virtues of all-women shortlists or more black/brown candidates. Rhetoric at conferences is one thing, reality on the ground of middle England another. Short of simply waiting passively for an economic downturn, ideally accompanied by an upsurge in industrial unrest and consequent mass disillusionment with Labour - which is probably all that the majority of the grassroots activists, while trying to keep the core vote intact, are actually doing - the only alternative, inevitably, is to undertake fundamental reform of every aspect of the Conservative Party's life: first and foremost, a clear strategy and programme based on a cross-class appeal, but also root and branch organisational reform, even if this means losing some diehard supporters along the way. Death will be dealing with that problem soon anyway, but there is no time to wait. How to bring the Tory Party back to something resembling real political life is the question that innumerable think tanks have been set up to answer. So far they have failed to come up with anything more coherent or original than the Portillo schema of essentially creating a sort of New Labour mark II, aping the supposedly inclusive and caring values of Blairism in an attempt to garner support from much wider strata of society, especially from the urban working class and from ethnic minorities. They recognise, as does Blair himself, that the public services are Labour's most vulnerable point, but have so far come up with not a single comprehensible and workable alternative. Hardly grounds for any sorrow on our part, of course. To see the historically most bitter and determined enemies of the working class stewing in their own juice is a pleasure, but no cause for any complacency. For us, it is self-evident that the Tories - or, for that matter, Blair's New Labour neo-Thatcherites - have nothing whatever to offer our class, except more oppression and misery. Under their rule, working class liberation and self-emancipation are, and always will be, out of the question. That is what makes it so crucially important to present a viable socialist and democratic alternative to these twin enemies of all that we stand for. Life itself demands that we should do everything in our power to achieve a single, united party of the working class. Maurice Bernal
Worker