Tories need to tell voters what they stand for
‘The only poll that matters is the one on the day,” Tony Devenish, the Tory London Assembly member, tells me. That’s the mantra Tory activists will arm themselves with as they knock on doors this weekend, ignoring projections that the party stands to lose almost 100 council seats in the capital in local elections next month.
Conservative campaigners in the city are actively avoiding bringing up two names on the doorstep: Sadiq Khan, the most popular London politician at the moment (though nobody seems to be quite sure why), and Theresa May. According to a senior activist, Mrs May is “grudgingly respected at best” among London Conservatives. A tough lesson learnt from the 2017 general election is that she is not going to get the votes out for the Tories.
But the lessons from last year don’t end there, and breaking away from the main party to create a London version modelled on the Scottish Tories won’t be the quick fix some are reportedly looking for.
It won’t do anything to tackle the much deeper problem the Conservatives have been failing to address since last year, which will have just as great an impact in determining their success in the rest of the country as in London: a lack of vision.
What does the current Tory party stand for these days? Law and order? Recorded crime rose by 14 per cent last year, according to official figures. We’re now in a strange situation where two thirds of burglary cases go unsolved. This year, there have been over 50 suspected murders in London alone. How is this happening on the Tories’ watch?
Meanwhile, only one in 10 Londoners claims to see the Tories as the party of low taxes, according to a poll published last week. The view outside London is unlikely to be hugely different. The supposed party of low taxes, limited government and free enterprise seems to have little appetite for championing any of these principles in its current incarnation.
It seems to me that the Tories have drawn the entirely wrong conclusion from the 2017 general election. Perhaps dazzled by the unexpected success of Jeremy Corbyn, the party is engaged in a bizarre attempt to reinvent itself as a high spending, pro-government intervention party, where the state must provide the solution to every problem.
The Conservatives seem to be trying to outdo Labour at every stage, even adopting Labour’s narrative to define and measure their own success.
If the Conservatives stop making the case for their core principles of a small state and personal freedom, then the public finance constraint of the past few years will seem nothing other than the cruel ideological exercise which Labour claims it to have been. It is up to the Tories to remind the electorate of the moral case for keeping public spending down, as high levels of debt are just deferred taxation, and that individuals and businesses are best placed to decide how to spend their money, and so taxes should be kept low.
In London and beyond, it is time for the Conservatives to shake off the trauma of the lost majority and focus on governing. They need to tell the electorate what they stand for. But first, they need to convince themselves that their values are worth fighting for. FOLLOW Dia Chakravarty on Twitter @DiaChakravarty;
at telegraph.co.uk/opinion
The first Cold War was about ideology. It was, at least ostensibly, an argument – conducted on a global scale – about how people should live. What is the new one about? Because there can be no doubt any more that this is where we are. As shocking and unexpected as it might seem, we have no choice but to conclude that Russia is now engaging in wilful provocation that exceeds even those revanchist acts of aggression in Georgia and Ukraine within what it regards as its own territorial sphere. Its belligerence goes beyond any comprehensible political disagreements. It is simply visceral nationalism.
There are no more abstract moral justifications for its involvement in disputed regions of the world: the old communist logic that the Soviet Union was defending the poor peoples of developing countries from imperialism and capitalist exploitation has been superseded by – what? A reckless, almost anarchic, programme of disruption designed to confound normal expectations in Western political life and set its leaders against one another. Sheer adventurism and defiance of international ethical codes carried out with truly shocking bravado in the first instance and then denied with childish lies when challenged.
Oddly, this gratuitous onslaught comes after the original argument – which was the basis for the great confrontation between East and West – has been lost. The modern Russian economy is a form of gangster capitalism largely unencumbered by legal or political restraint. No one in the Kremlin pretends any longer that Russia’s role on the international stage is to spread an idealistic doctrine of liberation and shared wealth.
When it intervenes in places such as Syria, there is no pretence of leading that country toward a great socialist enlightenment. Even the pretext of fighting Isil has grown impossibly thin. All illusions are stripped away and the fight is reduced to one brutal imperative: Assad is Putin’s man and his regime will be defended to the end in order to secure the Russian interest. But what is that interest? Simply to assert Russia’s power in the world – which is to say, the question is its own answer.
This strange pattern has found a clear expression in the spy poisoning incident on British soil, which has gone from sinister to surreal. If you watched the 90-minute press conference given by the Russian ambassador to London last Thursday, you must have been struck by its sheer weirdness. Giggling and grinning his way through a series of quite meticulously detailed questions from a room full of journalists, Alexander Yakovenko behaved as if this whole show was ridiculous.
Three people – one a British police officer – struck down by a deadly nerve agent? The innocent people of a historic British city exposed to unfathomable risk from a substance that was known to be developed in Russia? Ha, ha, ha. This was an absurd charade which would backfire against the UK and those countries that supported its unfounded accusations against Russia.
It only stopped being funny when somebody, commenting on his jocularity, asked if he (and Russia) thought this was a joke. Then the mask slipped. “Don’t [be misled] by smiles,” he said ominously. Like the embassy’s notorious “humorous” tweets, they were just his manner. The goofy grin vanished as he went on, “We take this very seriously – for us it’s not a joke, believe me.” That was the voice of Russia more familiar to me: the spokesmen I encounter look as if they are about to pull out a pistol and wave it in the air.
The smiles had completely disappeared by the time of the UN Security Council meeting later that day, which Russia had demanded when it failed to get the exoneration it wanted from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. All semblance of reasonable behaviour was well and truly gone by that point. Vassily Nebenzia, the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, went for outright blood-curdling threats: “We have told our British colleagues that you are playing with fire and you will be sorry.” Somehow we seem to have returned to a pre-détente era when the Kremlin used the UN forum to attack the imperialist West for traducing Russia’s blameless intentions.
And all of this was happening roughly five years after Barack Obama confidently ridiculed Mitt Romney’s claim that Russia (rather than Islamist
He was dividing the world once again into two rival camps: those who were implacably opposed to Russia and those who were not
at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion terrorism) was the greatest global threat to American security. “The Cold War has been over for 20 years,” he pronounced triumphantly, and added, for good sarcastic measure, that the Eighties had just called “and asked for their foreign policy back”. Maybe it was the persistence of that delusion that accounted for Obama’s fatal withdrawal from his red line in Syria (which, interestingly, also involved the use of chemical weapons), thus encouraging Putin to believe he had a free hand in the region.
How ironic that the most pessimistic predictions about the post-Soviet international order were that it would be dangerously unstable: the absence of two counter-balancing power blocs that had maintained a mutually acceptable stability would unleash countless small but unpredictably contagious eruptions. Well, we got some of that with al-Qaeda and Isil – but we now seem to have the original threat from a rogue rampaging Russia back on the scene, too. A Russia determined to reinstate its claim to be a superpower, but this time without even the moral scruples of an ideological mission: the country that had once joined the respectable association of modern industrialised nations to make it the G8, rather than the G7, prefers to be an outlaw.
Where does this leave us? It was notable that Mr Yakovenko during his stand-up comedy routine made several references to those nations who were supporting Britain being members of the Nato and EU “blocs”. He was dividing the world once again into two rival camps: those who were implacably opposed to Russia and those who were not. That clearly is the only reality with which his country is comfortable.