Kelly’s Eye
THE results of this week’s two by-elections won’t be declared until the early hours of Friday, but the Conservative party’s approach to them pretty much mirrors the way it is currently running the country. In other words, it’s given up.
In 1979, the then Prime Minister, Labour’s James Callaghan, reflected: “There are times, perhaps once every 30 years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It does not matter what you say or do. There is a shift in what the public wants.” The election victory for Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives that year proved him right.
Are we at a similar turning point now? Initially, it appears not. Most people – not least the Tories – appear resigned to Labour winning the next election, whenever it is called. But outside of the latter’s most fervent activists, it is hard to detect a flicker of enthusiasm for what will be a triumph by default: Keir Starmer gets the keys to No.10 by not being a Conservative.
It could be equally argued that the Tories will lose by not being Conservatives either. Instead what we have – to go back even further in history – is an updating of Disraeli’s Two Nations. Though this time it’s between on one side a political establishment of two main parties which is effectively indistinguishable on immigration, net zero and identity politics, backed by a well-cushioned progressive middle-class elite from which it draws its numbers.
And on the other, a deeply dissatisfied mass of voters, paying ever more tax for ever diminishing services, whether from the NHS, the police or their local authorities, who despair that their neighbourhoods have been made unsafe and unfamiliar by an epidemic of knife crime and unprecedented levels of newcomers, both of which go unchecked.
Yet who are also only too aware that to express disquiet is to invite crude stereotyping and silencing by speech codes that only shift in one increasingly censorious direction.
One thing’s for certain: an incoming Labour government will only widen that alarming disconnect. After a five-year term of it, the half-century anniversary of Callaghan’s prophecy could see an even more profound political sea-change next time.