Samizdata

From time to time the question surfaces on Samizdata: how come the British Conservative Party is doing so badly? One of the most coherent and convincing answers I’ve come across lately is to be found in Free Life, the (now all electronic) journal of the Libertarian Alliance, from Manchester based libertarian historian Steve Davies, responding to a piece by Sean Gabb. Davies explains how the British electoral system now hurts the Conservatives. But, he says, their problems go deeper.

… Simply, the electoral coalition put together in the 1920s has split into two sharply distinct and increasingly hostile groups of voters. This happened between about 1989 and 1997. So the split in Conservatism today is not just a matter of divisions within the Parliamentary Party or the wider Party. It’s a split in the electorate. That means the issues facing the party are much more profound than a matter of who the leader should be. It also makes everything far more problematic, given our electoral system.

The two groups of ‘right wing’ voters today can perhaps called Tories and Whigs. To use stereotypes, Tories are older, of either below average or well above average income, live in seaside resorts, rural areas and older industrial areas. They are Daily Mail and Telegraph readers, they are strongly socially conservative, very hostile to the EU, dislike multiculturalism and favour very strong controls on immigration, are supportive of the war on drugs. They are hostile to socialism and much of the welfare state but support some parts of it such as the NHS (for now). Although they generally favour free markets this is becoming less true all the time. They increasingly do not like globalisation and dislike large corporations. Whigs are younger, average to above average income, and live in suburban areas including suburbanised parts of the countryside. They are economically liberal, often very much so. They hope that the government is going to sort out the welfare state but suspect it isn’t and are becoming increasingly hostile to it. They are very socially liberal, much less bothered about immigration and dislike anti-immigrant campaigns. They favour relaxing laws against drugs or outright legalisation, they are very relaxed about homosexuality. They don’t like the EU particularly but don’t have the visceral hostility of the Tories and they don’t like appeals to nationalism because they have a very different sense of national identity to the Tories. They like and support many kinds of multiculturalism. Many read the Telegraph but they are also Times and Independent readers. They absolutely hate and despise the Daily Mail.

… The problem is that, increasingly, Whig and Tory voters just do not like each other. Policies and, above all, rhetoric that appeals to or inspires one group of voters will alienate the other. So having a campaign concentrating on attacks on asylum seekers, family values and national sovereignty will inspire the Tories but alienate the Whigs. Emphasising personal liberty via ‘hot button’ issues like homosexual rights and drug liberalisation will please Whigs but enrage Tories.

Davies goes on to speculate about how all this will play out. As far as the Conservatives are concerned, he reckons they’ll be captured by the Whigs, and won’t actually split.

I am no expert on the general state of current events, national politics, etc., so I will (try to) keep this short. Basically, I was watching This Week on BBC1 last night, and they (Michael Portillo, Diane Abbott, Andrew Neil) were saying that Tony Blair is in real trouble. We have become so used to Blair being badmouthed by his lefties that this time we might be missing that it may actually matter.

I believe that the underlying story is that the Conservatives are now in such unprecedented disarray, or are thought to be, that the lefties now reckon they will have a five-to-maybe-even-ten-year run of doing their worst before the voters come to their senses and switch to someone else – someone else dull, sexually bizarre, bald, embarrassing, in a word Conservative, but someone else. Whether the lefties are correct about this isn’t the point, it’s what they now think. The same underlying fact explains why Labour now feels that its stealth taxes don’t any longer need to be so stealthy. Blair’s problem is that he has done such awful things to the Conservatives that the Conservatives no longer function as a threat to wave in front of his lefties, the way they have since the mid-eighties until about three months ago. In other words this could be another of those “sea changes” you read about, the last one being when Labour got its act together in the late eighties. Now the Conservatives are regarded as more hopeless than ever before, and the lefties are getting bored with merely humiliating them. That’s no fun any more. They want some lefty action.

Glenda Jackson (Oscar and bar but now also MP) did a very dramatic soundbite type speech in the Commons yesterday, along the lines of: “I’m not ashamed of my Party. It’s my government I’m ashamed of.” The times they may be achanging.

There’s to be a big demo tomorrow in London against the “war”, and it may actually be quite big.

Portillo (who does very well on Newsweek by the way – he is now the one true Conservative heavyweight performer, in my opinion) reckoned that if the UN doesn’t oblige with another anti-Saddam resolution Blair might be f*%*ed. Only Chirac can save him, quoth Portillo. Which, it occurs to me, is not only an extremely bad position for Blair, but also for Britain (i.e. for all of us anti-EUers).

Chirac: we support your Guerre, you support EUrope on everything else. Blair: okay.

Parenthetically, it was also much discussed that the New Labour reputation for spin, culminating in that embarrassing “report” that was cut and pasted from something on the internet and then doctored embarrassingly, has resulted in our government simply not being believed about all this Heathrow security flapping. Just when they really need to be able to face the cameras and say this is for real, and be believed, they are being accused of using the Army as theatrical stage props.

Are you allowed to say at the end of a posting that you don’t know if any of the above is true, but that in the meantime it sounds like it might be interesting and important? I hope so, because I just did.