Voters’ flirtation with Marxism is crisis of Tories’ own making

The party has spent the past 15 years failing to defend free markets and surrendering to the Left

Conservatism is in crisis in Britain, and it will take more than half-baked leadership plots to save it from calamity. The rot runs deep and wide; the Government’s pathetic inability to negotiate a proper withdrawal from the EU is merely its most immediate manifestation.

The appalling reality is that Jeremy Corbyn is on the brink of power and the Tories have only themselves to blame. They have failed, and disappointed, and failed again. Their party itself is a dysfunctional shell. Few understand what it stands for. Many of its own voters don’t trust its motivations; even the Brexit vote, which ought to have been its greatest opportunity for 30 years, happened despite, rather than because of, the Tory machine and establishment.

In the absence of any distinctive philosophy – the days are long gone when its ideology was a fusion of Whiggism and Toryism, a creed capable of inspiring and enthusing – the party is a coalition of convenience, committed to power for the sake of it.

Mayite Tories market themselves as slightly better managerialists, mercenaries capable of implementing the fashionable nostrums of the moment – and also, because they have to, some version of Brexit, presumably adulterated beyond recognition. We, too, will cap prices to stop those nasty “profiteers”, the Government promises us, but it will be more sustainable than if Mr Corbyn does it; we, too, will put up taxes, but only because we care about the public finances; we, too, will ban and restrict and chide and scold, because that is what TV celebrities like Jamie Oliver are telling us to do.

Is it any wonder that nobody, but nobody, can muster any enthusiasm for such a sorry show? Fear of a Labour Party that wants to seize private property and cosy up to Iranian mullahs and anti-semites, yes, there’s plenty of that, which explains why the parties are level-pegging – but love or excitement for the Tory “vision”? Nada.

You can’t sell yourself to an increasingly divided nation as a consensual delivery agency when everybody can see that you cannot actually deliver the goods, from housing to trains that work; and you cannot be ideologically passive when confronted with the fiercest, most fanatical Marxist army in British political history.

Emotions matter in politics, but so do ideas and visions, fought for over long periods of time. The Left has always understood that politics is a never-ending struggle; hence why it never gives up, builds movements and waits patiently for opportunities. The centre Right only fleetingly grasped this, most recently from the late Seventies to the early Noughties, and it is now back to invoking platitudes or clinging to the hope that the UK is uniquely allergic to the hard Left.

The Tory failure thus comes in three parts. The first is Brexit: every decision taken since the day after the referendum has been strategically or tactically flawed. The May Government must shoulder most of the blame, but Tory Brexiteers have also proved useless, reverting to the infighting and embarrassing stunts of the past. Where are the professional campaigners when we need them?

The second failure may turn out to be even more important. The British conservative tradition has generally been far more pro-capitalist than the European, Christian Democratic approach. Yet the last leaders to argue for free markets were William Hague and Michael Howard (and even then talk of truly shrinking the state was taboo). Ever since, it has been one long surrender on every front, allowing a Left-wing narrative to dominate.

The consequences of the Tories’ intellectual hara-kiri since the Blair era; their cowardly decision to abandon, rather than update, Thatcherism; their lazy slide into social democracy are now visible for all to see: there has been a seismic shift in broader opinion against free markets and towards a much more active state. There is widespread support for public ownership, private companies are demonised, we are told that the Government has all the answers and, among the young at least, Marxist ideas are in vogue again.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise: for the past 15 years, the Tories myopically refused to campaign for free-market principles, for individual liberty and responsibility and a property-owning democracy; and they have made endless concessions to interventionism, paternalism and virtue-signalling.

The party bought into the Left-wing interpretation of the financial crisis; it embraced quantitative easing and interventions that fuelled the housing crisis; it pretended that government failures were in fact market failures; it waged class war and turned the UK from a low- to a high-tax jurisdiction, boasting of its embrace of “progressivism”; it added thousands of pages of red tape; it refused to try to sell genuine NHS and social security reform, or to shift the UK towards a more insurance-based society.

Now that the Tories are renationalising rail companies and implementing swathes of Ed Miliband’s agenda, how can they argue successfully against Corbynomics? If you’ve conceded the practical superiority of moderate socialism, how can you fight the real thing? If spending £20 billion more is good, why isn’t £40 billion even better, or £500 billion? And if you are fixing the price of electricity, why not that of baked beans or petrol?

The third failure is cultural. The Tories have shown pusillanimity in the face of rising violent crime and acquiesced in the hard-left takeover of universities and our culture. There is barely a moral panic they haven’t piled into, and they have proved inept at defending free speech. They have failed to sketch out their version of an inclusive, individualistic Britishness, subcontracting the “thinking” to those obsessed with identity politics.

It is hard, given this litany of failings, to be optimistic. Yes, things can change; but lasting political revolutions go hand in hand with equally profound ideological shifts, and those take time to engineer. Leadership theatrics are all well and good; and Brexit needs to be saved, or else the Conservatives will implode.

But those Tories who want to rescue the party from its current mess, and not merely promote their own careers, need to focus on a much harder task. They must outline and relentlessly campaign for an entirely fresh conservative vision, a Thatcherism for the 21st century, an ownership society that works for millennials and pensioners alike, a series of bottom-up solutions to society’s problems. It’s either that, or the horrors of Corbyn.