Tories are still in denial about the true Labour threat

It’s a comforting delusion that a Starmer government will rapidly fail, ushering the Conservatives back in

Iwrote back in January that the Tory party was in a state of unwarranted complacency about its political prospects and in denial about the message of the polls. That article got me into some trouble with the party hierarchy. But it looks even more correct three months on. Indeed, the polling is getting worse, not better. More ministers and MPS are stepping down. And election day creeps inexorably closer.

But self-delusion hasn’t gone away, and it is now emerging in another form. I’ve been told several times by senior Tories recently that a Labour government, if elected, will inevitably and rapidly implode in an economic, fiscal and social crisis; and therefore the Conservative Party can safely wait for that explosion, and then get back to power.

That is dangerous stuff. Obviously, I agree that Labour’s policies are quite unable to deal with the country’s problems. Some, like the purported plan to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030, are either phantasmal or, if ever seriously tried, actively dangerous. Others, like VAT on school fees, are just a sop to the many deranged Leftists still haunting the party.

And senior Labour people still seem to believe their own propaganda: that the country’s main problem is that Tory ministers have deliberately and incompetently, for ideological or perhaps venal reasons, misrun a basically sound system of government. They therefore think the simple act of replacing them with Labour ministers will improve things.

This is such a profound misdiagnosis of the problems Britain faces that it is hardly surprising Labour’s ideas are essentially irrelevant to fixing them. Take, for example, Rachel Reeves’s Mais lecture earlier this month. In contrast to Rishi Sunak’s intellectually serious speech from 2022, the shadow chancellor’s was a word salad of the current economic establishment’s fashionable statist pieties.

She seems to think that the past two decades have been characterised by the “state get[ting] out of the way” and “leav[ing] markets to their own devices” – this, when the state spends nearly half of all the country’s money! And she resorted to the now familiar advocacy of the “active state” and a modern industrial policy, as if clever Labour ministers will miraculously know how to run a modern economy from on high in a way denied to their predecessors.

None of this is going to help. The UK doesn’t need more of the “stability” that Reeves repeatedly lauds. We need a programme of huge and disruptive reform and change if we are to get the country growing again. Labour is not going to deliver that.

But that doesn’t mean that they are going to crash and burn if they get their hands on the levers of power. Indeed, it’s precisely because they are not going to try anything different or new that they will keep us sliding comfortably downhill, blaming every problem on the evil Tories and big bad Brexit. Many people may be comfortable with that. As Adam Smith famously said, there’s a good deal of ruin in a nation. Things can go down a long way before a crisis hits.

To assume Labour will rapidly fail also neglects one important fact – that governments have agency, and oppositions don’t. Governments can do things. They can put their people in key jobs. They can react to problems. They can steal their opponents’ policies – indeed, Labour is already starting, by appropriating “levelling up” for itself. They can flood the media with their world view, their explanation of difficulties, and their justifications for their solutions. Just because the current Conservative Government has failed to do much of this doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

In short, when Labour is in power, it may not be that easy to get out again. So why are so many on the Right comforting themselves with the belief that Labour will blow up rapidly?

I can’t speak for Reform, but perhaps it helps justify that party’s view that the country can’t afford the Conservatives as a political bed-blocker over a long period, and that the Tories must therefore be destroyed and replaced fast so as to get real conservative policies in front of the electorate when the opportunity comes.

For us Tories, it is in part psychological accommodation – the people will soon learn for themselves how bad Labour is and then they will turn back to the Conservatives – coupled with the deep-rooted belief many Tories have that they are the only party really fit to rule Britain.

But more importantly, it is also an excuse to avoid confronting the situation now. Why face up to the hard fact that it is still, painfully, and with difficulty, possible to do something about the current mess, if we will soon be able to rush in and save the country from a Labour disaster instead? Why do all the hard political work to bring back supporters and get the party advocating some semblance of conservatism again, if victory will soon drop into our lap anyway?

We mustn’t give in to this temptation. Woodrow Wilson famously, and derisively, said: “A conservative is a man who sits and thinks. But mostly sits.” Just sitting isn’t enough. We must not give up trying to stop Labour.

Hard thinking is needed – and then action.

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