05.10.2005

Tories stuck in a rut

The Conservative Party is consumed in another leadership battle and, according to some of its leading supporters, is in danger of becoming a rightwing sect. Are they doomed? Can we afford to ignore them? Peter Prestwick takes a look

What is the Conservative Party for? Whom does it represent? These questions occupied me as I walked along the splendid beach at Frinton-on-Sea last weekend. Frinton is, of course, the archetypal Tory place, the population being overwhelmingly white, old and well-off. No wonder the proles from nearby Clacton call it "the gateway to heaven". It took the council years to decide whether they could allow a fish and chip shop into the town, because so many people feared it might lower the tone. Not a single black or brown face. The youngest people I met were celebrating their ruby wedding anniversary. It would be something of a caricature, but you could even say that Frinton is a microcosm of the current Tory Party. Old, reactionary, profoundly insular, stuck in a Dad's army world of nostalgia. Many of its 300,000 members will not live to see the next election, some not even the result of the latest leadership contest. It must surely be obvious to them that things have got to change if the Tories are to regain power. The party has to broaden its appeal. One MP in Scotland, three in Wales, and practically nobody in any significant big city outside the metropolis. The Conservative Party is perceived as being tied to the countryside and the home counties, leaving aside some better-off suburbs here and there. The most pressing strategic problem they have is the fact that we already have a Tory government. It is called New Labour, or, as Gordon Brown irritatingly insists on dubbing it, "New Labour renewed". Perhaps the "renewed" is some kind of mild flirtation with the left of the party, but to judge by Labour's conference, when Brown succeeds to the leadership, if he ever does, it will be a case of business as usual - especially big business, which gives the party those millions of pounds which would hitherto have gone straight to the Tories. Look at any area of policy and you will find that Lady Thatcher's political son and heir has gone further that she herself ever dared. Warmongering in Iraq, creating a virtual police state, in which an 82-year-old Jewish refugee from the Nazis, Walter Wolfgang, can be removed by brute force from the Labour conference for calling foreign secretary Jack Straw a liar about the reasons for going to Iraq and for being there still. Of course, Straw is a liar, and so are they all. But if you follow Wolfgang's example you get held under the anti-terrorism laws for opening your mouth with a word of criticism. Labour lies about everything and in the meantime we have the unfettered reign of the free market, privatisation, globalisation and so forth - if Thatcher still had her marbles, there is hardly anything in the New Labour programme that she could disagree with. This is not essentially a matter of the Blair government's preferences in terms of policy. It is determined by the present and urgent needs of capitalism, about how to cope with the system's increasing dysfunctionality. Michael Howard did what he saw as the honourable thing after the last election and fell on his sword. But why then? The next election will probably not be until 2009. Howard has effectively created an interregnum of seven months in which the party will be leaderless. Not until December 6 will we know the result. The contest will not be on his terms, however. Howard wanted to return to the days when it was the parliamentary party alone who decided the leadership question, but he had to consult the membership and was humiliatingly rebuffed. As one Tory councillor put it to me recently, "We elected the buggers and we want our say in who leads our party." So now the parliamentary party produces a short list of two candidates whom the members vote on. Not exactly extreme democracy, but better than nothing. The leadership nonsense has also transformed the Tory conference in Blackpool into a bizarre seaside beauty contest, in which all five contenders have their 15 minutes of fame playing Miss Tory World. Here is Ken (Hush Puppies and cigars) Clarke, for example: "My love of motor sports, cricket, football, my love affair with jazz, my refusal to bow before the strictures of political correctness and fashion - these are the things which give me what the political witch-doctors call 'authenticity'." Just how naff is that? Ken should appeal to the party, as he is already, at 65, qualified for an old age pension (but maybe it won't be like that for much longer - 'Work till you drop' is the latest 'New Labour renewed' theme). Then we have David (I was born in a council estate, so I'm a really honest bloke) Davis, who calls himself the "Heineken candidate", the man who can reach those parts of the electorate that others cannot. His speech to conference showed just how much a third-rater he is - nothing whatever of any intellectual merit, nothing to think about. It was the complacent, condescending speech of a man who thinks he has already won. He is the right wing's hope and there is already something uncomfortably presidential about him. Nonetheless he is the bookies' favourite, if that means anything. Speaking of bookies, we have Liam Fox, who has reportedly been funded by a rather wealthy bookmaker called Stuart Wheeler, who wasted £5 million on a man some people may vaguely remember as William (We have five seconds to save the pound) Hague. Some bookie. There is also Sir Malcolm Rifkind, with a razor-sharp brain, but not a betting chance, even at 50/1. And finally, as they used to say in Monty Python, a young chap called David Cameron - 39 next birthday and only five years in parliament. The media taunt him for being an old Etonian. It is an irrational prejudice. Nobody talks in the same way about Harrovians or Wykehamists. What he has recognised is that the Conservative Party needs to change absolutely fundamentally if it wants any chance of regaining its historical ascendancy in British politics. It must gain the trust of the majority of the electorate and show them that the Conservative Party offers them something to believe in and hope for. That means in essence recapturing the working class vote in the big cities and towns. A difficult task indeed. Where Hague and poor Iain Duncan Smith went wrong was to think that moving further and further to the right was the answer. Cameron's chances of gaining the leadership this time are minimal, but who knows? He has a fine and therefore dangerous mind, from our point of view. Of concrete new policies there is little to report at Blackpool, but underlying tensions still remain, especially over Europe. UKIP/Veritas have, unsurprisingly, lost their prima donna in the person of Mr Kilroy-Silk, MEP, until the next European elections. Many of the UKIP/Veritas adherents will return to the Tory fold. Where else can they go? The clear divisions still remain. Somebody (who was it?) thought up the idea of the 'flat tax': ie, whether you are a duke or a dustman, you pay the same rate of income tax. Just like the poll tax, only double the trouble, because it gets you where you work as well as where you live. It is a clear obscenity. Then we have an intervention from the new right in the form of Liam Fox's proposal that the abortion limit should be halved to 12 weeks. This wing can also be seen mimicking George Dubya's religious right friends by setting up an organisation led by Duncan Smith called the Cornerstone Group - 25 Conservative MPs pledged to "struggle against liberal values". So where does all this leave the Conservative Party at the next election? Beneath the gloss of New Labour's Brighton charade we know that Blair's party is not in a healthy state. For a start, membership has fallen off a cliff. Why? Iraq, primarily, of course. Our train to London for the February 15 2003 big demonstration was filled, for example, with the secretary and other members of the local Labour Party, with Liberal Democrats, Greens, and all manner of peace-minded people who wanted to tell Blair that this was an illegal war into which we had been led on the basis of false intelligence. The lies that we felt in our hearts at that time were proven later by a government enquiry to be just that. Yet still Blair denies the truth. He has to. Not just to cover up his part in furthering the Iraqi war as George Dubya's favourite and best trained puppet, but to justify the thousands of deaths, the devastating destruction and the descent into chaos in Iraq. Leave aside this barbarity. New Labour is vulnerable on many other fronts - a chance, you would have thought, for the Conservative Party. The economic downturn, public services like the NHS and education despite millions - or is it billions? - of investment in all manner of schemes. And what about the pensions crisis? And then there is just the arrogance of the whole Blair project that is creating so much distrust and despair. Yet, as Howard himself has said, all the Tories can realistically hope for is a slump. Fighting for the 'middle ground' with hardly a cigarette paper between the main protagonists will, all things being equal, favour the sitting government.