After 13 wasted years, can this broken party ever be truly Conservative AGAIN?

Tomorrow, the Tories will have been in power longer than New Labour – but there’s depressingly little to show for it. A despairing STEPHEN GLOVER asks...

What a dismal time this is for those of us who regard ourselves as conservative, either with a small or a large ‘C’. It’s not just that the party appears to be heading for defeat in next year’s election, and probably a long time in the political wilderness.

there is also a widespread feeling that Britain is a divided, dysfunctional and fractious country in which many things from the NhS to the railways don’t work, and privatised water companies brazenly pump sewage into our rivers and seas.

Net immigration is running at about three times the highest rate notched up by New Labour, while the economy groans and splutters under the heaviest burden of taxes ever experienced by this country in peacetime.

tomorrow, the tories will have been in power longer than New Labour. an incredible thought. But imagine if it were the other way around. Pretend it were Labour politicians who had ruled for the past pretty miserable 13 years. how we would scorn them!

What have the Conservatives achieved? One or two things, to be sure, which I’ll come to. But it’s impossible to draw up a list of notable accomplishments, and, believe me, I’ve tried.

tory apologists might point to the external calamities and difficulties that have dogged the party — from clearing up the economic mess created by the 2008 economic crash and bequeathed by Labour, to the stormy aftermath of Brexit, to the convulsions of the pandemic.

But successful governments must cope with the bad times as well as luxuriate in the good. the tories have been dealt a challenging hand, which for the most part they have played abysmally.

Might it be that there is something fundamentally wrong with the Conservative Party — a failing caused by having the wrong people in charge or an absence of authentically tory guiding principles, or both?

the question has particular salience because of a conference that took place in Westminster earlier this week, organised by an american movement calling themselves National Conservatives, known as ‘NatCon’.

their meeting made the national news after two Extinction Rebellion activists interrupted a speech by home Secretary Suella Braverman. What she said also attracted interest. She criticised the lax immigration policies of the very Government of which she is a leading light.

I admit I went to the conference in a slightly suspicious frame of mind. It had been represented in some quarters as a gathering of extremists, or even dangerous lunatics, some of whom were said to be supporters of Donald trump.

NOt that I take my prejudices from the Guardian or the BBC. the former ludicrously described National Conservativism as ‘a divisive, far-Right movement’. auntie dismissively referred to a meeting of ‘Right-wing Conservatives’. If Conservatives are pretty awful in her eyes, Rightwing ones are beyond the pale.

No, what had put me on my guard — mistakenly, as it turned out — were the misgiving of sensible people, often tories. Professor tim Bale, an expert on the party, opined that NatCon’s focus on ‘culturally conservative’ policies was likely to be a ‘dead end’ in ‘a country that is becoming more socially liberal over time’.

In the event, I heard nothing nasty or extremist. On the contrary. there were lots of ideas that could help regenerate a moribund and beleaguered tory party staring defeat in the face after 13 mostly wasted years — if Rishi Sunak has the gumption to listen.

I was struck by the large number of young people, and a standard of debate higher than anything I’ve ever heard at a tory party conference. Speeches and interventions from the floor conveyed an almost universal disenchantment with the Government.

the guru behind NatCon, and its chairman, is Yoram hazony, a 58-year-old Israeliamerican political philosopher who is a devout modern Orthodox Jew. he spoke on the first morning.

hazony’s essential thesis is that National Conservatism is the opposite of ‘liberal internationalism’. this has fostered globalism, undermined the nation state and promoted disastrous american-led wars in Iraq and afghanistan, in which the West attempted to impose values it regards as universal.

In his analysis, liberal democracy finished off fascism in World War II and saw off communism in the Cold War. For a time it reigned supreme. But now it is ceding to what he calls ‘woke neo-Marxism’, with its transgender obsessions, its excoriation of colonialism and ‘white’ culture, and its catastrophising about climate change.

For hazony, tradition is paramount. It flourishes in the nation state, sustained by national customs, laws and institutions. Family is the bedrock of society, and religion a valuable influence.

Liberal internationalism and globalism are, in his view, the enemy. It is a natural and laudable instinct to be loyal to one’s country. the capitalist who uproots his profitable factory, and transplants it to China in search of cheaper labour, is a contemptible figure.

National Conservativism is the child of the Edmund Burke Foundation, named after the 18th-century British political philosopher, and based in Washington DC. a famous utterance of Burke’s was quoted more than once during the conference. It is a stirring thought, which might serve as NatCon’s battle cry.

‘[Society] is a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. as the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.’

One aspect of hazony’s speech which I found especially moving was his insistence on the exceptional, and possibly unequalled, contribution of Britain to the modern world, in science, political philosophy and literature.

he claimed: ‘there has never been a people like the British, and that gives people hope... Like many people round the world, when Britain is weakened, when Britain is confused, I feel weakened, I feel confused. But when Britain is strong, it strengthens all democratic countries, it strengthens the entire West.’

Doubtless there is a large dollop of flattery in these words. But I think there is a sincere recognition of Britain’s historic and enduring importance, to which Little Englanders in all the main political parties, often obsessed with decline, are oblivious.

It isn’t, of course, necessary to concur with everything Yoram hazony and other NatCon speakers said, and I should anyway stress that there was a healthy divergence of views. Some may think the NatCon prospectus implies too powerful a state. Or that the conference was strong on ideas, less so on implementation.

OthERS may be alarmed by the word ‘National’, mindful that the Nazis described themselves as National Socialists, and that Marine Le Pen’s far-Right party in France is called the National Rally. But in this context ‘national’ really means ‘patriotic’.

Whatever one’s reservations, NatCon’s commitment to the importance of family, tradition, nation, religion and mutual loyalty should appeal to most tories. It certainly does to me.

Indeed, what the tory thinker t.E. Utley (father of my Mail colleague, tom) said over 40 years ago bore a remarkable resemblance to what hazony says now. there’s little new under the sun, and the National Conservatives are not as novel as they think.

I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that the Left, in the shape of the Guardian, should denigrate NatCon, though even I was astonished by an article in the newspaper which alleged that one of the main speakers, Kevin Roberts, president of the heritage Foundation, used an anti-Semitic trope.

Mr Roberts repeatedly blamed ‘globalists’ for the world’s political problems. according to the Guardian, the word ‘globalist’ is ‘a term associated with the far-Right and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories’. this is surely nonsense.

It seems a desperate move to

smear Mr roberts with antiSemitism, not least because NatCon’s leading voice is Jewish. And this from a newspaper which recently carried a grotesque cartoon of former BBC chairman richard Sharp with tropes that were indubitably anti-Semitic, as the Guardian later conceded.

The Left is bound to hate the National Conservatives, no doubt partly because it recognises that some of their ideas could have widespread electoral appeal. But will the Tories listen?

Several Conservative MPs have publicly disapproved. one, quoted anonymously in The Times and supposedly on the Left of the party, claims that NatCon is ‘about transporting extreme right-wing culture and American division and rhetoric, which we need to reject’. This epitomises the philosophical insularity, smugness and ignorance of some Tories.

Such a response is indistinguishable from the Guardian’s, and misrepresents what NatCon stands for. Here are the Tories — adrift, unpopular even with many of their natural supporters, and apparently about to lose an election.

You might think they would show some humility, as well as a smidgeon of common sense, since institutions in crisis, which the Tory party undoubtedly is, need to look outwards for help.

If only the Conservative Party since 2010 had had more respect for traditional Tory values — which, as I say, NatCon is reviving rather than inventing — it wouldn’t have made such a mess of the past 13 years.

Granted, David Cameron and George osborne were hamstrung by their coalition with the Liberal Democrats, so that manifesto pledges such as raising the inheritance tax threshold to £1million were abandoned. But these weren’t resuscitated even after the Tories won an overall majority in 2015.

Almost the first thing Cameron and osborne had done was to cut the defence budget by 8 per cent. It was already squeezed as a result of our ill-conceived entanglement in Afghanistan. They were trying to balance the books, but reducing our Armed forces to the bare bones was profoundly un-Tory.

our Army, Navy and Air force have remained underfunded ever since, so much so that a senior American general not long ago declared that this country is no longer capable of defending itself.

even now, in the midst of a european war, and with China presenting an ever greater threat, the Government is increasing defence spending by only a derisory amount. What’s the point of the Tories if they won’t properly defend our country?

They have shown a similar carelessness towards the British people over net immigration. David Cameron repeatedly undertook to bring it down to ‘the tens of thousands’, though in 2015, the year before the eU referendum, it reached 329,000.

This administration has done even worse. Next Thursday, we are likely to learn that net immigration in the 12 months to December 2022 increased by between 700,000 and one million — an all-time record, and a betrayal of Brexit.

Already overstretched public services are put under immense pressure by uncontrolled immigration, while the housing crisis is exacerbated. And our national culture — the precious, delicate organism cherished by Yoram Hazony — can’t continue to absorb numbers on this scale.

Meanwhile, more than five million adults under the age of 65 are ‘economically inactive’. About half of these are said to be incapacitated by illness (can they all be?), while the rest are reluctant to work. They have been abandoned by the Tories.

As the academic Matthew Goodwin pointed out during the conference, Britain has some of the highest rates of family breakdown in the Western world, with more than 40 per cent of children no longer living with both their parents when they turn 18. This obviously isn’t all the fault of the Conservatives, but how have they made things better?

The list of Tory failures goes on. They cut back the police. Cameron and osborne sucked up to China, and recklessly encouraged Beijing to invest in British infrastructure. They invaded Libya for no good reason, and then forgot all about it. They have consistently built fewer houses than they promised.

Have there been any achievements in the past 13 years? Michael Gove, who spoke at the conference on Tuesday, cited improving school academic standards (for which as a former education Secretary he was largely responsible) and Iain Duncan Smith’s Universal Credit, which has revolutionised social security.

AND then there is Brexit, for which no preparations were made by Cameron and osborne, and on which this timid Government has failed to capitalise. But it lives on as an idea whose time could still come — unless or until Sir Keir Starmer takes over.

Governing is difficult, I know that, and it is easy enough to criticise. But who can doubt that these past 13 years have been largely wasted? The Tories have been managerial, rather than strategic in their thinking — and they haven’t been much good at managing.

In many ways, the Tories’ period in office might as well have never happened. As I shall discuss in tomorrow’s Mail on Sunday, we live in a state largely fashioned by New Labour. Unlike successive ineffectual Tory administrations, the Blairites and Brownites knew what they wanted to achieve. They left a legacy.

And now, in what may be the dying days of the Tories, the National Conservatives come up with some interesting ideas, many of which sound familiar to those of us with long memories.

Might not championing these ideas help revive Tory fortunes among voters who feel ignored and marginalised by a Government whose preoccupations seem so very far from their concerns?

I believe in miracles, so maybe the Tories will astonish us and win next year’s election. More likely, they’ll find themselves in the political wilderness. In either event, I live in hope that this broken party will one day become Conservative again.