Does the narrow and regressive Tory party have a death wish?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/24/david-cameron-tory-party-politics

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The Conservative party is at odds and at a loss. The combination of Ukip, voter disaffection and the ongoing pressure on living standards means the likelihood of David Cameron doing what neither Margaret Thatcher nor Tony Blair managed to do – lifting the share of the vote after an initial general election victory – is very low.

As a result, it is nearly certain there will be fewer than 300 Tory MPs in the next parliament. And, given the biases in the electoral system, along with growing acknowledgement that Mr Miliband may have some answers, there are almost certain to be more than 300 Labour MPs. For the Tory party whose vocation is to rule, this is unacceptable and it is opening up a fundamental debate about what Toryism means.

John Major is emboldened to intervene and remind his party of a different conservative tradition. Importantly, he was the last Tory leader to win a parliamentary majority. Tory MP Jesse Norman invokes Edmund Burke and his instinct to conserve institutions better to serve the mass of the citizenship. Some to his right insist the answer is make populist common cause with Ukip. Boris Johnson tells us we must celebrate the rich. Last week, Nick Boles, the minister for planning, entered the soul-searching, declaring that his party's single biggest problem was that it is still seen as the party of the rich; the public does not trust its motives, even if it likes its policies.

I have to disabuse the courageous Mr Boles – the problem goes much deeper. The country does not like Tory policies and values. Britain at its core has a profound commitment to fair play and the rule of law; it has a good-humoured decency and pride in the country. The institutions that command its affections include the NHS, the BBC, the tortured Church of England, the National Theatre, the courts, the British army, all of which in varying degrees are wholly detached from the contemporary Conservative project. The Tories are not just the party of the rich – they have gone rogue.

Toryism was never an inventive institution builder nor creative reforming force. Its agenda for much of the 150 years up to the end of the First World War was essentially defensive and narrowly based. Whigs, then liberals, defined the country's trajectory, owning the reformist, pro-science Enlightenment tradition and defining Britishness. The Tories were the party of the country and its regressive, anti-modern instincts.

What gave the Tory party its lien on power was the arrival of British socialism and the collapse of the Liberal party, many of whose MPs, such as Winston Churchill, became Conservatives. The fusion with the liberal tradition allowed the party to become a very broad church, the one nation party Disraeli had wanted it to be.

Harold Macmillan could champion the middle way; Michael Heseltine fought his first parliamentary seat as a National Liberal in alliance with the Tories. These broad church Tories embodied a non-socialist idea of Britain as the defender of enterprise and the country's core institutions before the socialist challenge. They accepted a sufficiently activist state discharging its obligations to the less well-off and the party's leaders were validated by being at the apex of the social pinnacle.

But unlike German Christian Democrats or Eisenhower Republicans, Britain's Tories were never the wholehearted allies of industry, innovation and technology, nor willing to subordinate the City and finance determinedly to drive British companies forward. They were gentlemanly capitalists happy to live on the bounty of two centuries of empire. They defined the political and economic problem as the Labour party and trade unions rather than the City and deep dysfunctions in the way British companies were owned and their lack of investment and innovation.

Margaret Thatcher's talent was to use the language of the fashionable free market to slay traditional Tory enemies – unions and nationalised industries – but in so doing to dodge what really needed tackling. Indeed, Thatcherite deregulation made finance yet more powerful, with baleful results. She never converted the people: the mass of Britons still look to the state for redress and leadership. Opinion polls show massive majorities in favour of renationalising the rail and energy companies. The public sees them as utilities whose mission is to serve them, not as profit-maximising plcs and the state as guarantor of that mission. It also looks to the state to create acceptable levels of fairness and to hold the elite to account for its mistakes and failures. The public is right to do so.

David Cameron understood that reclaiming the Tory majority would mean remaking the compact with liberal Enlightenment Britain. The NHS would be safe in his hands; his government would be the greenest ever; he would champion the Big Society, the aid budget and science; he would revive civic Britain; he would bring an integrity to government and have a truce with the EU. But his party, it is now obvious, was never persuaded. It wants to carry on where Mrs Thatcher left off – regressing to a comfort zone of smiting traditional enemies even if the returns are likely to be non-existent or, as in leaving the EU, self-defeating.

The interaction of a conservative, Thatcher-celebrating media with Conservative party constituency associations that in effect command rotten boroughs, despite their tiny membership, has made internal Tory politics close to unmanageable. MPs are returned reflecting comfort-zone politics rather than those of a broader coalition. The result is that the animating element in today's Toryism is a British version of the American Tea Party: an uncompromising and unrepresentative ideological faction capable of massive political disruption but zero creativity.

Europe and immigration are the two talismans. But British business, large and small, knows that to exit the EU and relinquish the chance to shape its rules is folly. Yet the party purporting to champion enterprise is bent on weakening it.

No one should doubt the extent of the conviction of the Eurosceptic right. It plots that the party will lose in 2015, elect a Eurosceptic leader, and win in 2020 – in the aftermath of a Miliband government it will have wrecked – on a promise to leave the EU with no referendum. Then the party will be free to complete Mrs Thatcher's unfinished business. Mr Cameron's manoeuvres – promising a permanently smaller state and an EU referendum, dismissing greenness as crap – are concessions he has to make to keep any semblance of party unity. His modernising project is dead, inducing the despairing Mr Boles to float the idea of a new liberal Tory party.

Maybe Britain will have to go through the catharsis of being misgoverned by the sceptic, rogue right to rid itself of the real enemy within. Maybe Mr Miliband will have the political luck and judgment to forge a long-term governing coalition, embracing progressive business, which can succeed. What is certain is that in times that are distrustful of politicians, politics has rarely been more important – or the stakes higher.

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