Conservative Blues

PETER HITCHENS contends that the Tory Party should be shoved down the plumbing and jumped on

Right at the end of Animal Farm, the poor betrayed beasts stare through the window to watch their porcine masters banqueting with their human guests, and see both, wreathed in smiles and guzzling happily together, so similar to each other that they are no longer distinct. "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

The modern British voter has a similar problem as he prepares himself for the next election. True, the parties are dispiritingly similar, but that is actually not my point. It is even worse. It is that the elections are virtually the same - or at least that is how the punditocracy want things to turn out, and they have seldom been more powerful.  If they succeed, then the many legitimate discontents of the British people will be muffled and lost in a fog of talk about meaningless "change", in which nothing of substance will in fact alter.

Anyone who voted in 1997 will find the whole process of voting in 2009 strangely familiar. As then, the apparent consensus is that a tired and bungle-prone government, wallowing in sleaze and bereft of ideas, led by a grey and inadequate substitute for his predecessor, must be replaced by a new and fresh one, clean and bright (as if newness, by its nature, does not always vanish with time, and the real test of a government, or anything else much, is how it performs when it is no longer new). There is no substantial political issue, just one of competence, image and personal credit. The supposed youth and glamour of the new leader is an important part of this process. The influential people in the incoming party describe their views as "modern" and their purpose as "modernisation". Their leader is anxious to present himself as hip and approachable, and displays his attractive young family as often as possible.

The interesting thing about the screenplay for 2009, as compared with that for 1997, is that the parties have been reversed, and it doesn't seem to matter at all. New Labour was the future once. Now the future is ceded by almost all commentators to the party called "David Cameron's Conservatives". It is they who now offer themselves as the end of all our griefs and the start of a new era. But they are only allowed to do so because they have purged themselves of all distinctly conservative positions on tax, the welfare state, selective education, crime, the EU r social and cultural tests such as civil partnerships. Interestingly their only creditable distinct policy from Labour is opposition to identity cards, which most Tory MPs happily supported under Michael Howard. This opposition is conservative only in a Burkeian way - perhaps the only Burkeian aspect of the Cameron Tories.

So, at two points where the electors have felt rightly weary with an incumbent government, in that exasperated way that sometimes seizes voters, they are presented with exactly the same remedy as in 1997 - a virtually politics-free change of personnel. This time, the Tory leader has identified himself as the "heir to Blair". Last time, Lady Thatcher let it be known that she saw something of herself in Anthony Blair. Thus the legitimate succession goes Thatcher-Blair-Cameron. Such moments of discontent are potentially dangerous for the establishment, but the concentration upon "youth" and "change", rather than on policies, avoids this risk, which is that a genuinely radical party can ride the wave of discontent, come to office and actually bring about major reform. This certainly happened after 1906, and after 1945. Some believe that it also happened in 1979, though I think the lasting changes wrought by the Thatcher government were surprisingly small.

In both 1997 and the planned 2009, the actual prime minister in office is a sort of irrelevance. He is there, but he does not count. Most people who endured those times cannot now believe that John Major was actually prime minister for seven years, a period longer than the second world war. He, whether John Major or Gordon Brown, is not seen as being connected with his immediate predecessor (even though he was). And those predecessors (Thatcher or Blair) are viewed with a strange nostalgia by people who were far from enthusiastic about them when they were still in office. What an odd formula it is, by which we are granted the illusion of change while actually making sure it doesn't happen.

Long ago, in my Trotskyist days, I believed that Labour and Tory were identical twins, both dedicated to the capitalist system. And to an extent I was right. Labour, before the 1980s,  kept its revolutionaries well out on the wings, and was deeply uninterested in any sort of revolution. Seen from the hideouts we Trotskyists inhabited, it was hard to descry the important differences that then distinguished them from the Tories, especially under Ted Heath, a virtual social democrat.

Now, after many years spent with my nose pressed against the windowpane of British politics, and no longer a Trotskyist, I find that my old suspicion has turned out to be justified, but in a completely different way from what I then imagined. Both parties continue to have fringes of people who believe in things. But at their cores, they consist of people who believe in nothing save management of Britain's post-1989 society - if they even believe in that.

For 1989, almost as much as 1914 or 1945, marks a deep, irreversible change in the nature of this country. Though seen as a triumph of the "West" over "Communism", the end of the cold war - in Britain at least - saw the final defeat of British patriotic conservatism, paradoxically at a time when the Conservative Party was politically dominant. Britain's illusory status as honorary world power resulted from our having managed not to be conquered in world war two.

Regrettably, while we had not lost that war, we had not won it either. After the Tehran summit we were relegated to observer status in the councils of the great, a truth rubbed in rather hard in 1956, when vessels of the US Navy actually harried the British fleet as it steamed towards Suez. When that didn't work, we were quietly threatened with national bankruptcy and made to withdraw.

But for more than 40 years after Suez, in an attempt to salve the painful bruises left on Britain by America's refusal to support Suez, Washington and London quietly agreed to pretend that all was well and that Britain was more important than she was. We were awarded the consolation prize of Polaris missiles, given a fair amount of intelligence co-operation, and allowed to prate of a "special relationship". The outward forms of 1945 were maintained. British troops still sat in Germany, though we could barely afford to keep them there. We imagined ourselves to be important participants in the cold war, while in fact the USA was putting pressure on us to sacrifice our sovereignty to the (then) slowly growing European Union.

The end of the cold war meant the end of this comforting reverie. British conservatives were deprived of an enemy against which they could pose as neo-Churchillian saviours always a fake. The Tory Party were furious with Churchill's attacks on the Munich agreement, and would have deselected him from his Parliamentary seat if Hitler had only waited a little longer to attack Poland. The alliance with the USA was deprived of a purpose. The collapse of the Communist Party in Moscow severed the link between domestic political leftism and sympathy with a hostile foreign power. It also greatly accelerated the consolidation of the European Union, thanks to the momentous and largely undiscussed reunification of Germany, at least as significant in 1989 as it had been in 1870.

But perhaps most important of all, while British conservatism suffered a crisis of purpose, the British left were liberated. No longer in any way tied to the economic and political disaster of the Soviet empire, they were suddenly electorally potent. They also discovered tactical voting, which informally introduced a sort of proportional representation and allowed the left-liberal vote (long the majority) to combine to achieve huge parliamentary majorities.

To do this, they needed to shed just three policies which damaged them in the eyes of many voters. One, the policy of weak defence in face of the Soviet power, did not really need much shedding by this time. It simply dissolved as the USSR dissolved, and by 1997 the Major government had already devastated Britain's pre-1989 defences in the name of the "peace dividend". The second, of union power, had likewise become a cardboard giant. The disappearance of Britain's major manufacturing industries during the Tory government did far more to weaken the unions than the subtle but seldom-used new laws pushed through by Norman Tebbit. A new style of public-sector unionism - a powerful pressure group for public subsidy and regulation - now took over. It had no need for wildcat strikes and mass pickets. The third embarrassment, a supposed enthusiasm for nationalisation, had not really been Labour policy since the days of Harold Wilson and posed no real obstacle.

What was not discussed, and what was not altered, was Labour's continuing enthusiasm for other, more effective routes towards an egalitarian, regulated, republican society - comprehensive education, the establishment of powerful quangos with strong regulatory powers, the campaign to reduce the role and authority of parents in children's lives and to dissolve what remained of the independent institution of lifelong marriage. These beliefs and policies had for some years been of far more interest to Labour supporters and left-wing intellects than had the state ownership of the coal mines.

The Tories, trapped in the political categories of 1945, had never appreciated the new direction which the left had taken, nor opposed it (in fact in many ways they had adopted it, not as conscious policy but out of convenience) during the "long 1960s" which lasted from Suez till the Yom Kippur war of 1973. Yet it was deeply controversial and radical, and was only restrained from being implemented in its full force by the continued existence of a Tory government until 1997. That government, still containing serious social conservatives, was open to some pro-marriage and non egalitarian arguments. While Mrs Thatcher's cabinet was almost wholly uninterested in morals and culture, and often followed radical agendas in these areas because it was easiest to do so, it did make significant gestures, such as "Section 28" to hold back the cultural revolution in schools. These had no practical effect except to increase the left's fury against the Tories.

But, while it was the Tory Party's cultural conservatism on issues of morals, crime, national independence, mass immigration, multiculturalism and education which actually endeared it to most of its voters, it was precisely those positions which were abandoned by the Conservative Party in the search for renewed popularity during the Blair years. Not that holding on to them could have saved it. The real problem with the Tory Party was not its policies, but that it had been exposed as a relic by the changes of 1989. Its language, its categories, its interests, its very tone of voice, hairstyles and clothes suddenly became so outdated that younger voters were not so much hostile to the party as baffled by it. They would as soon have smoked pipes (if male) or worn roll-on girdles (if female) as voted for it. At the same time it had become irrevocably hated, for good reasons and bad, across the old industrial areas of northern England, Wales and Scotland where Thatcherism was seen as a purely destructive force.

Not much can be done about this in the short term (see below). Just when Britain could have done with a serious, radically Conservative Party to argue against political correctness, for the married family, for national independence and well-guarded borders, it finds itself instead with David Cameron's Conservatives, a party which has discarded its most effective policies in the hope of changing its image, thus throwing away the wrong bit.

But the punditocracy, bored after ten years of New Labour, and with much effort and many lunches invested in the Cameroon front bench, yearns for a change of personnel and a change of face. And Mr Cameron's obedient dumping of every policy that might threaten the new post-1989 consensus reassures them that it will be the kind of change they want, that is, one that doesn't threaten the post-1989 settlement. For the punditocracy, like every other part of professional Britain, is now firmly in the hands of the 1968 generation, who could never have supported a party with even vestigially conservative policies on education, crime, migration and the rest.

This they hope to get a continuation of Blairism by other means, to achieve a change of government without a change in direction. They probably realise that another New Labour election victory in 2009 risks a possible explosion of discontent, perhaps benefiting dangerous extremists, in the unlucky year of 2013. They fear (if they are thoughtful) that a fourth Tory failure in 2004 will destroy that party, so quite possibly destabilising the existing two-party system.

And thus they write constantly as if Labour is finished and the Tories the hope for the future, they report opinion polls selectively to suggest that the Tories are doing far better than they are, they are rude about Gordon Brown and complimentary about David Cameron, and in general behave as if they wish to create a self-fulfilling prophecy of Tory triumph.

The evidence is that this won't work. No party has ever come from opposition to government without scoring at least 51% in the opinion polls during its period outside government. The Tories have never been anywhere near this magic figure, even if you exclude (as pollsters tend to do) around 35% of voters who say they won't vote or won't say how they will vote, or who refuse to support any of the major parties. In raw figures, the Tories are seldom above 30% of the electorate and persistently refuse to perform well at any real election. The parliamentary boundaries are still heavily weighted against them. They are still weak and disliked outside the south east. Anti-Tory voters have not forgotten how to vote tactically. And Labour support will drift back at a general election, not least because of its enormous payroll vote of public sector workers.

The likely result of this will be that the next election will not end in the result the punditocracy want, because the Tories (unlike New Labour) cannot easily shake off their old and much-loathed image. Nobody will win. Nothing will change. I predict that we will see anything from a Labour minority government to a Labour majority government, a Tory opposition bigger than it was but still unable to win office - and a frustrated electorate with nowhere to turn to express its wrath.

A far better result, and the one we would get if the punditocracy would only stop trying to puff Mr Cameron's chances - would be a spectacular Tory failure, the collapse of the Tory Party, and the first chance since the days of the SDP and the Gang of Four for Britain to get a new and interesting political party. It's a pity we are unlikely to get it, but - if enough people refuse to do as the punditocracy tell them - it's still just possible.

Peter Hitchens is a columnist for the Mail on Sunday, and blogs at http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/