ARE THE CONSERVATIVES MAKING AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE ERROR OVER BREXIT?
It is commonplace amongst political commentators that the voting public is not interested in politics and does not spend much time thinking about it. In fact the best example of how this has been explained that I have come across over the years was a commentator who said that the public only see politics out of their “peripheral vision”. If somebody actually manages to get the public to look directly at them then politically that is a game changer.
So this means that the current parliamentary parties of the British Political Establishment and, in particular, the Conservative Party, which I want to talk about in this article, have lived their whole careers, up until the Brexit vote, in at most the peripheral vision of the voting public. This has always meant that as long as politicians are looking as though they are going to say the right things whenever they come into view in the public’s peripheral vision, the public’s gaze flicks away from them and they are allowed to get on with it unchecked.
It is because of this lack of attention that the public does not hold Establishment Politicians properly to account and does not put any serious effort into thinking critically about the politicians that are being elected. This is the situation in which the current generation of parliamentarians have grown up and in which they have developed their careers.
So if, for example, you take Theresa May, she is a politician who has basically been able to get away with lying about what she stands for throughout her whole political career. Thus in order to get selected by the Conservative constituency party, any Conservative MP who is not genuinely a Eurosceptic has had to lie to claim that they are a Eurosceptic otherwise they would not get selected by the predominantly Eurosceptic Conservative Party membership. Once selected, in order to get elected, they have had to continue lying and pretending that they are Eurosceptics, because in most Conservative seats they would not get elected if they said that they were Europhiles.
Theresa May, for example, when she became Home Secretary, on any objective basis she did an appalling job of being Home Secretary. On almost every promise that she and the two Conservative Governments that she got elected but she failed to deliver on almost any of the policies that had been promised. The most glaring of which of course is on immigration, where they were elected on promises to keep immigration down to the “tens of thousands”. In fact, she presided over the biggest influx of mass immigration in the history of England, with, in her last year as Home Secretary, more immigrants arriving in that one year than had come to England in the entirety of the thousand years before 1939!
However whenever the public’s political vision flicked over her, there she was saying that was what she wanted to try and achieve a dramatic reduction in mass immigration. That was enough to satisfy the public so that their gaze moved on and so no critical analysis was brought to bear in holding her accountable for her actual lack of achievement!
This current generation of parliamentarians might have continued to live out their whole political careers just as previous ones had done, without there being a moment where the public would be willing to make any effort to properly hold them to account. That would however have been without the Brexit vote!
As a result of the EU referendum on leaving the EU, the public, for the first time in at least a generation, really focussed on a political question and gave an unequivocal answer based upon the largest turnout that has occurred for decades. The unequivocal expectation of voters was, and is, that the public’s decision would be implemented. This is where trouble has occurred for our dishonest and deceitful Remainer MPs, who had comfortably expected to be allowed to continue making decisions that suited them and their agendas without any proper accountability to the electorate for the rest of their careers.
Theresa May is just one of those parliamentarians who had expected to be able to carry on lying her way out of any inconvenient situation.
It is in that context that she has dishonestly conducted her own hidden Brexit policy which she unrolled to the startled gaze of her Cabinet colleagues at Chequers.
Theresa May’s Chequers’ proposal is not only completely contrary to the public’s expectations following the Brexit vote, but is also directly contrary to Theresa May’s Lancaster House speech about her “red lines” when she was still repetitively chanting “Brexit means Brexit”. Now the public is turning its eyes towards Theresa May and is focussing and so is noticing that she is a dishonest and incompetent Remainer, who is, in Jacob Rees Mogg’s words “a Remainer who has remained a Remainer”. This is despite the public’s vote and despite her pledge to implement it in her otherwise ill-judged General Election manifesto.
This leaves me somewhat torn between two conflicting feelings!
For the country, and as a patriot, I think that what Theresa May is trying to do is a travesty and a terrible missed opportunity, but as the Leader of what The Times newspaper was kind enough to call an “insurgent party”, I cannot help but relish the prospect that the parliamentary Conservative Party led by Theresa May could well be now heading irrevocably in a direction in which the public will clearly see that the leadership of the modern Conservative Party is composed of dishonest, incompetent, and unpatriotic Europhiles.
When the public truly realises what the modern Conservative Party leadership stands for, I think it likely that the public will regard them as unfit to hold Government Office ever again.
It may well be that many of the seventy plus per cent that Professor Sir John Curtice of Strathclyde University has identified as being “Leavers” who have been voting Conservative will decide not to come out to vote for the current alternative Establishment party (i.e. Corbyn’s Labour) but that does not mean that they will vote again for a Conservative Party that has so clearly and now noticeably betrayed the trust that was placed in them.
The purging of the Conservatives from being a Party of Government is the first step required for a reconstruction of our national politics.
We need a politics more in line with the two opinion blocks of real voters. These are for the patriotic, anti-mass immigration, pro-Brexit, pro-traditional values and pro-welfare and NHS nationalists. Against this block is the internationalist, pro-EU, anti-patriotic, liberal values, pro-mass immigration, individualistic cosmopolitan block.
The current mishmash of views is one in which the Establishment parties are at cross purposes with most voters. Most of us like some of what Labour has to say and also some of what the Conservatives have to say but we don’t like all of what either of them have to say. So, at the moment, voters have the awkward and unappetising choice at elections of having to choose between the least worst party, rather than being able to choose a party they actually fully agree with. Changing that ladies and gentlemen would be a reform of our politics well worth seeing!