Tories went badly wrong by drifting from the Right
PART OF the essential character of democratic politics is that different people see things very differently. The reason we have elections is to peacefully resolve these differences by giving the most popular ideas a mandate to be implemented.
But that doesn’t make it any less surprising when interpretations of events wildly at odds with reality become received wisdom. One such bizarre take is the idea that the Conservatives are in electoral trouble because they have “lurched” too far to the Right.
Less than two years ago, the once-sensible Financial Times declared the Tories “the most right-wing government on earth”. RMT union leader Mick Lynch echoed that verdict, stating that the Conservatives were “on the brink of [being]… the most right-wing government in history”.
Numerous pundits have used assessments like these to seek to explain the depressed poll ratings of the Tories. The idea is that if you stray too far from the “centre ground”, you are bound to become unpopular.
If Rishi Sunak invests any credibility in this analysis, then he and his party are truly doomed. Because it is precisely the opposite of the grim reality, which is that Sunak and the Tories are in the doldrums because they have abandoned gutsy conservatism for a mushy centre-left agenda.
THIS IS why polls show that more 2019 Tory supporters have switched to the right-wing Reform party than have transferred their support to Labour and the Lib Dems combined. And why another huge chunk of Tory voters from five years ago are proposing to sit on their hands on polling day.
The past few days have been full of events that hint at the true reason for normally trueblue voters abandoning the party in disgust.
First, we had a report that the Government had told police to cut down on the numbers of people being arrested because it had run out of prison places.
Ministers are also currently extending early release schemes so many villains do not even have to serve half their official sentences behind bars. So much for the party of law and order.
Then, on Thursday, Sunak confessed the Rwanda plan to deter illegal immigration – conceived more than two years ago – would not even get started before polling day. And Home Office insiders say there is every chance “systemic challenges” to it will be heard in the courts – just as the right-wing ex-ministers Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick predicted when criticising his legislation for not being tough enough. Thursday also brought forth the latest figures on legal migration: 2023’s net migration came in at a gargantuan 685,000. Across the whole of the 1980s and 1990s, net migration totalled 606,000.
So arrivals in a single year under Sunak eclipsed the cumulative total for the 20 years up to the end of the 20th century and yet the problem is that his policy is too right-wing? Hardly.
It’s the same story with every usual Tory rallying point for voters.The party has brought us the highest taxes since the Second World War and shrunk the Army to a size not seen since before the Napoleonic Wars. It is signing more people off onto taxpayer-funded sickness benefits for less convincing reasons than almost any other government in history, too.
In the 1980s, Norman Tebbit declared his unemployed father had “got on his bike and looked for work”. These days, such an utterance would probably be regarded as a hate crime against the bone idle. When Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride dared to wonder, in much milder terms, whether the benefits regime might have become too soft, Sunak initially did not even dare to support him.
IF THE Tories are to have any hope against Labour, their manifesto will need to offer disillusioned former supporters a radical shift back to proper conservatism: an absolute annual cap on legal immigration numbers, leaving the European Court of Human Rights’ jurisdiction so illegal migration can be curbed, a major prison-building drive and stiffer mandatory sentences for knife-carriers, and the unfreezing of crippling tax thresholds.
The ludicrously expensive net zero agenda needs slashing and slowing down, too.
Those nestling in the Reform column in opinion surveys and those intending to swerve the polling stations on election day do not wish the Tories to become even more like Labour or the Lib Dems. They want to be sure a patriotic and robust Conservative Party is back in business. Sunak has less than six weeks to convince them of that and so far he is not trying nearly hard enough.
‘The Tory manifesto will need to offer proper conservatism’