Boris’s stunning triumph is proof the Left is finished

THE general election was without doubt about the UK’S departure from the EU. Or about honouring the people’s decision in the biggest democratic exercise in British political history, the 2016 referendum.

Not to have done so would have put at risk the democratic integrity of our system of government by undermining, perhaps irreparably, faith in MPS’ respect for the people they serve and to whom they are accountable.

Yet the election, like the referendum, was also about something even more significant. For too long the liberal elite that runs much of Britain has assumed that its politically correct preoccupations are beyond question and that its patronising preaching would prevail.

December’s poll represents a wholesale rejection of a political paradigm that has held sway since the dark days of Tony Blair and the hollow triumph of New Labour. Back then, it was the height of fashionable thinking to believe in a “progressive” liberal majority, determined to impose abstract rights rather than timehonoured duties and promote a globalist worldview instead of British traditions and values.

I always knew this was at odds with what people thought and felt, not least from listening to the thousands I meet in my constituency and across the country. The gulf that’s grown between the liberal elite and the public was illustrated by the Lib-dem leader’s claim that gender was a matter of personal choice, not biological fact. No wonder the Liberal surge failed to materialise and Miss Swinson lost her seat.

Boris Johnson’s triumph is the final indication that the liberal Left is at an end. The zeitgeist is where people are, not where bourgeois progressives think it ought to be. The silent majority has rejected the sterile agendas of identity politics and abstract rights. That vast majority does not care one bit about judgments handed down by the Supreme Court because it knows that in a democracy the final say resides with the people, not unelected judges.

It takes no heed of the pompous pronouncements of foreign potentates such as Donald Tusk and Jean-claude Juncker, knowing such people have no mandate to govern us.

A Conservative reformer from a previous era, Rab Butler, concluded that politics is “the art of the possible”. What we see now is a shift in what is possible, a change in what politics can achieve.

The voices of the people that GK Chesterton said had “not spoken yet” now ring out loudly and clearly and in so doing embrace a politics that is noble and ambitious: a politics of hope.the Government must now return their faith by setting an agenda that amounts to the rebirth of British values, traditions and pride.

A people’s Government that is truly for the many, not the few, must strip away the destructive dogma of abstract rights and reward people for building a better future: making a commitment through marriage; raising a family; working hard to make a living and giving time to their communities. If we restore these values to their rightful place, then much will have been done to restore Britain itself.

OUR QUEST to “take back control” must go beyond the economic, permeating every element of societal restoration. The election is not the end of a conflict, but the first advance in a battle to bring a societal renaissance. It means distancing ourselves from globalism, rejecting the liberal establishment’s doubtfed, guilt-fuelled refusal to celebrate our heritage and history.

The denizens of the BBC and their like must learn that a grasp of how conflict, faith, patriotism and the institutions crafted by our nation’s heroes contribute to our island is necessary to inspire national confidence in an uncertain world.

In delivering our EU withdrawal, the new Government has an opportunity to reinvest in communities sacrificed on the altar of supranational utopianism. Re-establishing order to communities blighted by crime means no more soft sentences. Regaining a rooted sense of place means cutting immigration and securing a shared identity.

Abandoning an obsessive faith in free markets, by recognition of the good that Government can do by what it spends and what it stops, means standing up to the internet giants that permit the corruption of our children and facing down the corporations that stamp out competition.

It means understanding that our duty to the least fortunate obliges redistributing advantage.we have a duty to create a society of the kind envisaged by the greatest conservative thinker of our age – taken from us by cancer last week. Sir Roger Scruton’s vision was of a society in which all, regardless of from where they began, can be moved by beauty, inspired by a spirit of belonging and enlivened by relationships.

Tory politicians must learn what the electorate knows: liberalism, in all its incarnations (social, cultural and economic) is at odds with national interest and common good.

If they do, the Left’s concept withers and dies. Reaffirmation of the conservatism of Wilberforce, Shaftsbury and Disraeli will turn the votes workingclass Labour supporters lent us into a lasting gift.

‘The election is the first advance in a battle to bring a renaissance’