The Strange Death of Conservative England

The Strange Death of Conservative England

( 3.9.19)

[This is the first in a series of posts about CONSERVATIVES and UNIONISTS]

The Conservative Party that was familiar to all of us  in the twentieth century and for the first decade of the twenty first, and which dominated English politics for most of that period, has died. In its place has arisen a dreadful caricature, led by charlatans, cynics and the mentally unbalanced. Its unifying principle of behaviour is mendacity.

To see the difference between the old party and the new it is only necessary to compare their leading figures. Contrast the present Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary with their predecessors. Whatever the limitations of Theresa May, David Cameron, John Major and their forerunners, their integrity and commitment to public duty were never in doubt. The same cannot be said for those who have taken over their positions. Boris Johnson’s cabinet is peopled with figures who have in one way or another violated the traditional codes of behaviour shared by senior Conservatives. They do not even pretend to behave honourably. Priti Patel deceived Theresa May, Michael Gove betrayed two colleagues, Cameron and Johnson, who thought they were his friends. Johnson has appointed as his chief of staff Dominic Cummings, a man who flaunts his grubby T shirt in 10 Downing Street, and who wants it to be known that he ordered an armed police officer to escort a female employee off the premises. Johnson and Cummings have made it clear that Conservatives who embody the Party’s traditional values of truth-telling and honourable behaviour, people such as Jeremy Hunt, Nicholas Soames, Philip Hammond and Rory Stewart, are no longer welcome in the party.

It is said that politicians have always lied, and of course that is true, but it has usually been discreetly, infrequently and in the interests of their country, (or so they would claim). Today, lying is public, repeated and brazen, and pursued primarily in the interest of the speaker or his or her party. Senior Conservative ministers stare straight into the television camera, and proudly say things that their interviewer and much of the watching public know to be untrue . They are proud because they know that a large section of that public will admire them for their brazenness. Because they tolerate, even encourage, such behaviour voters are ultimately to blame for this state of affairs.

The change within the Conservative Party has been facilitated by changes in the membership of the Party itself. The recent contest for Party Leader revealed for all television viewers to see the change in the social composition of the grassroots activists. Traditionally upper middle class members have given way to the lower middle classes, whose values are very different. They are more xenophobic and less tolerant of differences of opinion. They disdain compromise and are excited by conflict. It is the difference between a John Major ( himself of lower middle origins, but who acquired upper middle manners and mores) sitting quietly all afternoon enjoying a Test match while elsewhere in the crowd drunken hooligans chant “Enger-land, Enger-land”. The Conservative Party is now competing with Nigel Farage for the support of the latter.

 It is such people who mindlessly support Brexit unaware and uncaring of the consequences for themselves or for others. Brexit is contemporary English nationalism in the flesh, inward-looking and backward looking, tearing down the values and achievements that made English civilisation the envy of so many other countries. The British constitution depends on unwritten codes of behaviour. In order to work it relies on those in power behaving in an honourable manner. In recent years they have ceased to do so.

Unfortunately, the political rot is not confined to England.  Similar patterns of behaviour are to be seen  in other Western countries. Confrontation has replaced co-operation. Written treaties are torn up while unwritten codes, “gentlemen’s agreements”, are broken. Japan has just announced it is unilaterally withdrawing from the International Whaling Agreement. Brazil destroys large swathes of its own tropical rain forest upon which the rest of the world depends.

Larger countries are rediscovering that they can push smaller ones around. The US versus Canada, the US versus Mexico, the UK versus Ireland. (If Ireland was not a member of the EU, they would probably get away with it.) Trump is deranged enough to try to push China around, to the detriment of both countries and the rest of the world.

People seem to have forgotten that none of this is new. We have been here before in international relations. It happened ninety years ago, between the two world wars. The First World War was so destructive that it ushered in dictatorships in Germany, Russia, Italy and elsewhere that replaced fragile but nascent democracies. The global cooperation in international trade and monetary arrangements that had existed before 1914 was replaced after that War by beggar-my-neighbour economic policies. The victorious powers in 1919 imposed an impossible burden of reparations on defeated Germany. They made demands on each other for the repayment of wartime loans that were equally impossible to meet. The result was the breakdown of multilateral international trade and monetary arrangements after 1930. Britain and France left the gold standard. When Hitler came to power in 1933 he began bullying Germany’s traditional trading partners, the smaller countries of Eastern Europe upon whom he inflicted grossly unfavourable trade deals.

The hard lessons of the 1920s and 1930s were learned during the Second World War, the most destructive in history. After that War, the Western world, led by the United States, set about the construction of multilateral co-operative arrangements for trade (GATT, now WTO), money (IMF), and development (World Bank) as well as defence (NATO) and politics (UN). It was on these foundations that the sustained growth of economic activity that has lifted the material living standards of all of us since 1945 took place.

 It is difficult to believe that those countries that should be leading the way in sustaining these developments should today be turning their back on them. The lesson of the 1930s is clear. The citizens of countries who pursue destructive policies at the expense of other countries will eventually suffer themselves. Aggressive unilateralism did not turn out well for Germany, nor for Japan. It will not turn out well either for a Trumpian United States nor a Brexit Britain.