Hang the BJ
Repurposed Smiths song sung in Westminster pubs that day Boris Johnson resigned
With less than a week to go, the UK appears to have run out of election. Everyone wants it over. Labour supporters are like children on Christmas Eve, caught in the hell of waiting. The Tories just want the mercy seat to spark up and take them to a better place. The smaller parties will be worried that in marginal but non-anti-Tory tactical seats, the sheer power of the Labour juggernauth will draw votes away from them, to the main chance.
They had a debate last night between both major leaders, and it felt like one of those debates attended by no major leaders, as if Plaid Cymru were going up against Count Binface. Both Starmer and Sunak accused each other of playing politics with political issues, which is a sure sign that politics is over. People have made up their minds. Further changes will be marginal.
That puts us in new territory. The numbers are sooooo large in some polls — with the Tories going down to 15% and 60-75 seats — that people are getting dizzy nosebleeds. Such polls not only suggest a Labour majority of 256 seats, but they also offer the possibility that the Liberal Democrats will gain 70 seats, nudge ahead of the Conservatives and become the official opposition. That would be a result beyond anything imagined even a few weeks ago — a structural shift in UK politics that the Tories delayed for a century after Labour first took office in 1924.
This being Britain, this is what they want what they really really want. They’re not going to get it, this being Britain. The vote will surely come in enough to lift the Tories above 20%, and 100 seats, and restore sanity under heaven. Surely in the shires, the anger will subside by polling day and the gods of interests will return. The latest collapse has been caused by revelations that Tory staff had been betting on the date of the election, which was being decided in the office two doors down the hall. This was delicious end-stage decadence, the bunker beerhall party as the Russian tanks roll in.
But even if the Tories do survive as the second party, would it be possible for the Lib Dems and the Scottish Nationalists to gazump them? Form a parliamentary alliance without merging their parties, with rotating leaders in the House of Commons and, with 110 seats, a demand to be recognised as the official opposition? That scenario, more plausible on the numbers, would really run the Tories into the ditch. Lacking the airtime given to opposition, and the sense of government-in-exile, and the extra resources the opposition gets, the party would surely rot away like a Scotch egg in a… well, like a Scotch egg.
Should that happen, would those who had backed Reform UK simply crowd into the Conservatives? It depends, of course, on whether, in this cracked first-past-the-post system, they can get enough seats. Despite running at 15%, they’re only on track to get three seats (which is what the Liberal Party was on when it almost winked out of existence in the 1960s). That result — gutting the Tories while not scoring enough to replace or supplement them — would be very funny indeed, because Nigel Farage would go from shires pin-up toad to cad and rotter in one evening.
Yes, yes, yes, remind yourself how unlikely it all is. Remind yourself that nothing ever really happens. Remind yourself that the vote will come in, that the polls can be a vehicle for expression of dissatisfaction, that people will lug themselves to the polls. Then ask yourself what happens if they don’t. For a century and a half, the Tories — the organic class representatives of first the aristocracy and then the bourgeoisie — have managed to serially recompose themselves to reflect Britain as it is, and thus gain the crucial support they need to stay in power. That in turn has composed Britain in a certain way.
Their departure from the stage, and their replacement by a Keir Starmer-led Labour, could be said to validate Margaret Thatcher’s claim that her greatest achievement was Tony Blair and the vanquishing of a genuinely socialist Labour party. The extraordinary demolition of Jeremy Corbyn — who will probably not retain, as an independent, his seat of Islington North — might be said to be an updated version of that. But Thatcher never imagined that the Conservative Party would destroy itself in the process.
How did the Tories get to this point? They were caught in the middle of a double contradiction. They had gone to the public saying that Brexit would give them secure borders, prosperity and freedom. But they faced such a labour supply gap without continued high immigration that the latter could only be preserved at the expense of the former. That Scylla was Charibidised by the decline in collective and individual character.
Conservatism only worked when it was, above all, a politics of national greatness of which one major feature was the market. Once that came to the centre of the party, it annihilated any values it once had (which for Labour are held together, however vestigially, by the socialist project and its implicit idea of universal flourishing). There is a Chernobyl effect here. A less corrupted party could have weathered the immigration storm. A party that honoured the true demand of Brexit — for many less foreigners — could have weathered the petty, sleazy corruption of COVID champagne parties and spiv punters. It was both together that blew a bit more than the bloody doors off.
“We are Thatcher’s children,” David Cameron once remarked, in an off-guard moment. They are, and this country and this party is Thatcher’s legacy, the waste of a place that won a war, built a social democracy, and gave it all away for loadsamoney. After Thursday, unless something rea— no, after Thursday, the fight to restore, rebuild and renew goes inside the Labour Party, and the real left struggle begins. For diehard Tories…
Organic class rep in a coma
I know it’s serious
Organic class rep in a coma
I know it’s serious
Do you really think they’ll pull through?
…let me whisper my last goodbyes
