There’s a pattern: the foolishness unfolding under the Starmer government often gestated under the previous Conservative ones. The Online Safety Act is probably the most egregious example (although some Tories attacked it at the time, to no avail). Another might be that the UK embarked on the idea of offloading the Chagos Islands – a strategic blunder that may yet be countered by the Trump administration – under James Cleverly (then foreign minister). (Cleverly has, with some level of brass neck, since denounced the Chagos fiasco.)
Another example is creating a football regulator. The UK pioneered football (aka soccer) more than a century ago, and it has become a global phenomenon. The English Premier League is a big and profitable brand (judging by all the people I see watching games on TV when I am on business trips in Singapore, New York or Dubai). Yes, there have been controversies about players’ taxes, and crowd behaviour. But that’s what HM Revenue & Customs and the police are there for. But apparently the “beautiful game” requires supervision from a regulator. The usual warnings about “regulatory capture” apply, and one assumes that Conservatives might have been aware of such a risk. But no. The former administration proposed it. And unsurprisingly, the incoming Labour government liked the idea, because it likes regulation almost as an end in itself.
In the fag-end of the last government, Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt signalled that if re-elected, he would scrap the UK’s resident non-domicile tax system and replace it with a residency-based system. Hunt probably thought he was being clever in trying to “shoot the fox” of Labour, which has railed about non-doms for years. But he could have changed the narrative and challenged the economic illiteracy of those who want to hammer wealthy foreigners. Instead he conceded to Labour the terms of debate, which a good general never does.
Another case: shotgun licensing. The UK now requires that an application for a shotgun requires two referees, not one as before. This move was initiated under the past Tory government, reacting to a case of a shooting in Plymouth, southwest UK. While designed to stop problems, it also makes it that much harder for a farmer, for example, to obtain one to shoot game and vermin with such a weapon.
And so on and so on. Hence why you hear people refer to Labour and the Conservatives as a sort of “uni-party”. Even when that is a bit unfair, because differences genuinely exist, there is an edge to the criticism because it does speak to a genuine problem. The Tories contain a lot of people who are at base paternalists in how they think of the role of government, and also share some of the same post-colonial cringes of those on the Labour side. There is also, arguably, a failure of nerve and self-confidence that goes very deep.
Johnathan Pearce – the difficulty is that there was no Conservative government, whether it was making Mr Johnson impose “lockdowns” that he hated, or making Mr Sunak spend money like a drunken sailor – which Mr Sunak hated, the officials and “experts” delighted in humiliating and abusing the elected ministers.
And when a minister such as Jacob Rees-Mogg issued orders that the officials and “experts” did not like – they ignored them.
Sadly the problem with the basic system of governance in the United Kingdom is much deeper than elected people being no good – the elected people seem to have little power, and can be removed – as Deputy Prime Minister Raab was forced out, and Prime Minister Truss was forced out (in her case by the Bank of England Quango).
As for Mr Hunt – yes I agree, a deeply odd person.
For example, how could he think his wife is Japanese when she is not only Chinese – but works for Chinese state television news and current affairs?
Not for nothing do Manton’s us now make reference to the ‘Uniparty’ …
Oh, Behave JP! It is the end in and of itself. Why do you think the left and Islam are in (an admitedly co-abusive) relationship? Because both want rules for everything.
The Fake Conservatives liked to pretend there was nothing they could do about civil service policies which they supported. The Fake Conservatives had zero interest in reducing immigration, zero interest in reducing government spending and were all in on the ridiculous, oppressive and ruinously expensive lockdown measures.
There was no Conservative government because the party is a lie, made up mostly of people better suited to the LibDems.
Whereas in the 2000s and 2010 I’d wearily sigh about the inadequacies of the Tories but feel there was no real alternative at least in national politics, it became really easy in the 2019-24 years to just outright hate the Tories. Even putting COVID aside there was the ‘Global Britain’ rubbish used to justify the Boriswave. Sunak piously warning about a far-right threat, supposed Tory ultras like Steve Baker adopting woke causes. And so on. Just reprehensible. The revelations later about the likes of Ben Wallace organising bringing in tens of thousands of Afghan refugees quietly just makes them easier to just thoroughly dislike.
Yes the blob, the managerial class etc always sabotage Tory governments. But I don’t think that alone explains how bad the 2019-24 government was.
You could make an argument that the (recent) Conservatives abandoned their rightish principles for the sake of occupying the political centre.
And now Labour strike out for the left but are obliged to tack back towards the centre.
The famous poem “The Second Coming” written by Irish poet William Butler Yeats in 1919 contains the lines:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
and
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
and finally
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The poem is just over a hundred years old.