At times of civil disturbance, what the government does is much more important than what the opposition says. But when far-right mobs go on the rampage within weeks of a general election campaign in which the Conservatives chose migration as their preferred political battleground, the former ruling party is no bystander.
Tory responses to the events of recent weeks might have illuminated a process of internal reckoning with their election defeat. Candidates in the contest to replace Rishi Sunak as leader could have reflected that the years of dialling up anti-migrant rhetoric helped to radicalise rightwing opinion. They might have admitted that cynical laws, drafted as campaigning instruments to scapegoat asylum seekers, have licensed public aggression.
Most senior Conservatives condemned the violence and did not flinch from naming racism and thuggery as its engines. But equivocation was not far from the surface. The reflex to cast immigrants as provocateurs of the prejudice directed against them still operates.
Robert Jenrick, a former Home Office minister and frontrunner for the leadership, agreed that “thugs and racists” had behaved disgracefully, but his analysis swerved into deflection, bogus equivalence with pro‑Palestinian demonstrations and a gratuitous call for police to arrest Muslim protesters who chant “Allahu Akbar”.
Kemi Badenoch, shadow communities secretary, intervened only to lament a lack of intercommunal integration, complaining that a formless “cultural establishment” has ignored this issue. Who is refusing to integrate with whom and what part 14 years of Conservative rule played in the process, Ms Badenoch does not say.
It is too early in the political cycle to expect prospective Tory leaders to admit every mistake made in office, but some honesty and a hint of contrition are not too much to ask. Allowing time for that audit was the reason to let the contest run until November.
Candidates might yet produce a coherent and honest appraisal of what went wrong. That is the precondition for developing a form of Conservatism that might one day earn the right to be taken seriously as a proposition for government.
The early indications are not encouraging. After years of factional feuding in office, the Tories are creeping towards a hollow kind of unity in opposition. There is abstract talk of the party having betrayed voters’ trust, but a collective recoil from naming untrustworthy former leaders. There is mealy-mouthed regret that a reputation for managerial competence was forsaken, yet no candour about specific acts of incompetence or the dogmatic manias that dictated them.
A convenient consensus is emerging that voters craved Conservative government – defined as low taxes, a smaller state, ever tougher immigration control – and rejected the Tories only for failing to enact that prospectus. This is a familiar trap for freshly defeated parties. Prospective leaders woo demoralised members from within their ideological comfort zone. It is a recipe for prolonging irrelevance. Labour will be glad to see the Tories burrowing deeper into denial, but it is unhealthy for democracy if the official opposition embraces cynicism and delusion, especially where immigration is concerned. The Conservative party has a moral duty as well as an electoral interest in restoring and reinforcing the boundary between itself and the far right. It is a line that should never have been erased.
