Conservative Party

Post-Election Left Wing Hate Watch, Part Two

Samuel Hooper17 Comments

Bankers Toffs And Tory Scum - General Election 2015 - London Protests - Downing Street

 

Long before the first votes were cast in the 2015 general election, this blog was warning that Labour’s arrogance and sanctimonious moralising was likely to cost them any chance of forming a new government.

One can almost forgive them their arrogance. After all, so commonly heard is the left wing worldview and so widespread is the belief that right wing ideas are inherently selfish and lacking compassion that many Conservatives – including some very prominent figures – have been forced to radically adapt their messaging to this most inhospitable of climates, sounding more like Diet Labour than the Conservative Party of old.

Even in the aftermath of David Cameron’s victory, many members of the public are still too afraid to openly admit that they voted Conservative or UKIP, for fear of the inevitable social backlash that would result: painful real world consequences for holding perfectly normal, middle-of-the-road political opinions.

But it isn’t just young and intemperate activists – the kind who scrawl obscene graffiti on a war memorial during the VE Day celebrations – who are now giving Labour a reputation as a party of sore losers. Take the case of Matt Woodruff, the mild-mannered owner of a garden centre in East Sussex, whose smarmy anti-Tory message, scrawled on his shop’s blackboard, was posted on Twitter and quickly went viral.

The Guardian reports:

The owner of a small garden centre in East Sussex whose anti-Tory blackboard went viral on social media says he has no regrets, despite admitting it could put him out of business.

Matt Woodruff, the owner of Woodruffs Yard in Lewes, said he was moved to vent his political views on his shop’s blackboard after the Conservatives took the local seat that had been occupied by the Lib Dem former Home Office minister Norman Baker.

The sign proposes a “Tory tax” of 10% on any customer who voted Conservative as one of the “‘tough’ decisions I need to make to ‘balance the books’ under your preferred government”.

The sign also says Ukip voters should “shop elsewhere”.

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Post-Election Left Wing Hate Watch

Samuel Hooper24 Comments

Tory Protests

 

I am angry. So angry. And I will take that anger to the streets when I can. I promise this. Because I’ll be mostly okay under a Tory government; I have a job, a home and a wonderful network of family and friends around as support. But I didn’t vote for me. I voted for society. Tory voters did not. Tory voters could not give a shit about anyone but themselves and their wallets. And I hate each and every one of you for this.

– Gareth Bundy, blogger and moralist

 

As this blog has noted, furious rants like this are not unusual among left wing activists. They were frequent before the election, and they have only increased in tone and volume as the Left lick their collective wounds after an unexpectedly heavy defeat.

So long as they remain the preserve of crusading online moralists such as Gareth Bundy – or the people who, in their sickness, deface a London war memorial – this is not really noteworthy. The problem is that many non-activist Labour supporters, normal people who have marinated in the same left wing groupthink since at least 2010, quietly concur with the anti-Tory hysteria currently consuming the Left.

Used to hearing anti-austerity arguments and accepting them uncritically, it is taken for granted by many people that conservative ideas are inherently selfish and evil, and that people who vote Conservative (or, god forbid, UKIP) are heartless monsters, idiotic dupes at best and eager participants in a genocide of the poor and disabled at worst.

This is not to say that left wing ideas are not misrepresented, attacked or ridiculed by those on the right – they often are, and one certainly finds comments section bores and internet trolls of all political stripes. But at the moment, it is a particularly acute problem for the British left, because so much of the angry, activist hyperbole is accepted as truth by society and the popular culture. Of course Labour want to help the poor. Of course the Conservatives only govern in the interest of their rich friends.

The truth is never that simple. There is good and bad in everyone, and in most political parties – but many on the left do not want to see this. While those on the right tend to see their left-leaning fellow citizens as misguided or naive, the Left are increasingly inclined to view conservative ideas as inherently evil.

According to this blinkered mindset, someone can only possibly support the Tories out of a selfish concern for their own wallet or business prospects, certainly not because they believe conservative policies might actually do the most good for the most people. This is particularly ironic given the fact that many Labour policies consist of nothing more than conscience-soothing exercises in money-bombing intractable social problems, failing to tackle the root causes and trapping millions of people in lifelong dependency.

Besides, the Conservative government whose victory plunged the Left into such a deep depression is hardly truly conservative at all, having enthusiastically adopted the language and many of the policies of the left in their desperate bid to stay in power.

Universal benefits and free perks for even wealthy pensioners? Check. Support for nationalised healthcare? Check. Run down national defence to prop up bloated but protected social spending? Check. Support Britain’s continued membership of the EU (as David Cameron does)? Hell yes!

But so common is the perception that the Tories are the “nasty party” – and that conservative policies are inherently regressive, embraced only through personal selfishness – that the Conservatives could only win their election victory by dressing up in Labour Party clothing. And still people who were planning to vote Tory were so hesitant to admit their preference that the polls consistently failed to predict the scale of David Cameron’s eventual victory.

The Labour Party can make a serious, good faith effort to understand the nature and scale of their defeat, or they can retreat into the angry denialism favoured by some of their most ardent supporters – and as they did in 2010 when they chose Ed Miliband as their leader. At present, there are few encouraging signs that the British Left will take the higher road.

Far easier to just keep shouting “Tory scum, off our streets!”

General Election 2015: The Morning After The Night Before

Samuel Hooper7 Comments

David Cameron - Conservative Party - General Election 2015 - Tories Win

On the eve of the 2015 general election, this blog complained:

David Cameron, the Prime Minister I supported for much of these past five years – and for whose party I voted in 2010 – spent the last day of the election campaign not making a powerful case for real conservative stewardship of the country, but by indulging in petty scaremongering about a Labour victory and pre-emptive expectation setting around the “legitimacy” of rival claims to power in the certain event of a hung parliament.

Well, inspiring or not, the Prime Minister’s strategy worked magnificently. David Cameron may have failed to inspire the British people with a burning, urgent vision for conservative government, but at least he managed (through endless repetition) to remind us that the economy is growing again under the Tories, and that a Labour-SNP coalition could put it all at risk.

And now, where only hours ago we expected the political parties to be commencing the first of many fraught rounds of coalition negotiations, instead we see David Cameron being driven to Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen, while the other parties (save the astonishing SNP) quickly and mercilessly dispatch their failed leaders.

First and foremost, this election result is a resounding defeat for Labour, and the confused non-values it stood for during the 2015 campaign. Having both repudiated the centrism of New Labour and failed to return the party to its ideological roots, putting himself in the ludicrous position of being against the Tories but not for a tangible vision of his own, Ed Miliband has brought Labour to complete and utter electoral ruin.

Ed Miliband went to his political Armageddon today flatly refusing to accept that Labour had made any mistakes during their last thirteen year spell in government, at least as far as the economy and public spending were concerned. The electorate took one look at this outright denial of reality and determined that the Son of Brown could not be trusted to take stewardship of the finances again.

But almost nobody expected the Labour Party to perform this badly against the Conservatives – poll after poll showed the Tories and Labour in a virtual dead heat. So when the exit poll results were announced at ten o’clock last night, people scarcely believed them. Paddy Ashdown confidently remarked that he would eat his hat if the Liberal Democrats were reduced to ten MPs. They currently have just eight. UKIP supporters (including yours truly) were convinced that UKIP would win more than two seats, picking up at least Thanet South or Thurrock. But only Douglas Carswell now remains, cutting a lonely figure.

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Why I’m Voting UKIP

Samuel Hooper18 Comments

 

David Cameron, the Prime Minister I supported for much of these past five years – and for whose party I voted in 2010 – spent the last day of the election campaign not making a powerful case for real conservative stewardship of the country, but by indulging in petty scaremongering about a Labour victory and pre-emptive expectation setting around the “legitimacy” of rival claims to power in the certain event of a hung parliament.

A real leader worth their salt would have been using those last precious hours to try to inspire people and positively win votes, rather than stoking fears about the other side and manoeuvring for position in the event of failure. But then David Cameron has repeatedly proven himself not to be a real leader.

From the London Times account of Cameron’s final pitch (+):

Speaking to reporters on his 36-hour tour of Britain, Mr Cameron accused Mr Miliband of ducking the question of whether he would refuse to enter No 10 rather than rely on SNP support.

“He has said so many different things about no deals or this or that. Basically what he’s doing is a con trick,” Mr Cameron said. “You can see what he’s doing: ‘Look at this strong language about no deals and no pacts, and ignore the fact that I can only become prime minister off the back of SNP votes.’

“The question he needs to be asked more directly is: ‘Are you saying that if there was a hung parliament, and Labour and the SNP had a majority of votes, you wouldn’t become prime minister?’ If asked that question, I suspect the answer is: ‘No, I’m not saying that.’

“At that moment he will in the eyes of the British people totally break with what he said about no deals and no pacts with the SNP. The last promise he made before the election will be the first promise he breaks after the election. He knows this and that’s why he is not answering this point. That’s why it’s the monkey he can’t get off his back.”

Incredibly, as the 2015 general election campaign draws to a close, all David Cameron can do is talk about Ed Miliband, Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP – not his own positive vision for Britain.

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Anyone, Anyone But Boris Johnson For The Conservative Party Leadership

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Boris Johnson - Conservative Party - Tory Leadership - General Election 2015

 

The Conservative Party of 2015 may be an ideologically confused shadow of its former self, but one instinct remains undulled: the hard-headed (some might say recklessly regicidal) way in which senior figures quietly position themselves, ready to quickly and ruthlessly dispatch their leader as soon as he or she is judged to have become an electoral liability.

Some have suggested that there are plans afoot to launch a “Keep Cameron” movement in the event that the Prime Minister fails to win the Conservatives an outright majority for two elections on the bounce, and fails to cobble together a workable coalition to keep the Tories in power. But this is extreme wishful thinking – David Cameron can barely muster the passion and commitment to conservatism to convince the British people he truly wants a second term, let alone that he has any bold new plans up his sleeve. If he struggles to show that he wants to remain Prime Minister after 7 May, he certainly will not want to return to the thankless job of being Leader of the Opposition.

And now many Tories, eager to avoid a prolonged and damaging internal power struggle should Cameron go, are agitating for the swift coronation of London Mayor and Uxbridge parliamentary candidate Boris Johnson.

To be fair to Boris Johnson, he makes a decent pitch for the job, better than most. An a new interview with The Spectator, Johnson was asked why people should vote Conservative, and gave this mini stump speech in reply:

‘If they want Britain to be a strong independent nation, if they want Britain to lead in Europe, if they want an economy which is dynamic and competitive and is based on the spirit of enterprise, then they should vote Conservative. If they believe in a culture of aspiration and achievement rather than scrounging and trying to pull people down, if they believe in levelling up rather than levelling down, they should vote Conservative. If they believe that it is wrong in principle to try to settle the problems of the economy by decapitating the tall poppies in society, they should vote Conservative.’

[…] ‘If they believe that the job of government is to nurture all the flowers in the flower beds rather than attacking some, then they should vote Conservative. That is the essential difference between us and Labour. Every single policy of Ed Miliband and his lot is precisely calibrated to divide society, to foster a sense of injury and injustice. We want to heal any sense of injury and injustice, to bring society together.’

Most of this is good stuff, red meat for true conservatives.

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