Tories can’t get elected

Don’t get me wrong: as the last general election showed, people are happy to vote for Tory politicians. They just won’t vote for Tory politics.

Successful politicians sense this because they all come with a weathercock attached. They know which way the wind is blowing even if they know nothing else.

Hence, from John Major’s tenure as prime minister (1990-1997) onwards, Conservative politicians, keeping their noses to the wind, have clearly felt that they must out-Labour Labour if they want to rise to high office.

And you know the scary thing? They may well be right.

I’ve been struggling with this realisation for years, which led to this passage in How the West Was Lost, written in the early days of Tony Blair:

“Alan Clark, the late Conservative politician cum pundit, attempted to help by offering in a Daily Telegraph article of a few years ago that ‘Thatcherism is in, and of, the past’, and ‘the Friedmanite orthodoxies… were never entirely accepted.

“‘Almost lost to sight,’ he continued, ‘remain the three principal functions of the state: to ensure that its citizens are secure, that they are gainfully employed, and that they are enlightened.’

“Of the Three Functions According to Alan, the first is another word for social conscience, the glossocratic for socialism; the second is another word for wholesale nationalisation (the only way for a state to ‘ensure’ total employment), the glossocratic for socialism; the third is another word for ‘free’ education, wherein the government makes us pay through the nose for the illiterate nonsense pumped into our children’s minds. That, too, is the glossocratic for socialism.

“The three functions of the state can thus be reduced to one: being socialist. Therefore Clark’s Conservative Party must become, if it is not already, as socialist as New Labour but not quite so socialist as Old Labour, and then one day it may win another election in the name of conservatism…”

I’d love to claim prophetic powers, but this was written immediately after John Major left public life. Therefore the passage was more in the nature of reportage than prophecy.

For, immediately after moving his family photographs into 10 Downing Street, Mr Major, as he then was, swore his commitment to turning Britain into a “classless society”. That desideratum isn’t just mildly socialist or quasi-socialist. It’s downright Marxist.

For any large group (and most of even small ones) arranges itself in hierarchical sub-groups. In due course these sub-groups invariably acquire their own aesthetics, philosophies, general ways of looking at the world and themselves in it.

Since such is human nature, any attempt to create a classless society has to involve breaking up the natural order with wholesale violence. The existing social pyramid must be truncated to within millimetres of its base, with both the middle and upper classes obliterated.

Yet countries that tried this little exercise found out that it was still impossible to turn society into a horizontal, rather than vertical, structure. The social pyramid just wouldn’t go away. It would simply regenerate, with different human types moving up to the top and replacing the massacred millions.

Even Marx treated a classless, communist society pretty much the way Christians treat the Second Coming: as the end of earthly development. Man would no longer travel; he would have arrived. Such is God’s law according to Christ and historical law according to Marx.

Neither believed that the blissful end could be achieved by immediate action, especially political. Both insisted that man must first undergo inner changes, modifying his sinful nature to live down the heritage of original sin (Christians) or exposure to Christendom (Marx).

Major, on the other hand, seemed to believe that a classless society was an achievable objective within his seven-year tenure. ‘Seemed’ is the operative word here. For Sir John, as he now is, is a man of… how shall I put it charitably… understated intellect. That shortcoming usually means that the person finds it hard to use words precisely. Thus he probably meant not ‘classless’ but ‘equal-opportunity’, though that isn’t very clever either.

The only places where genuinely equal opportunities exist are prisons. In conditions of even minimal freedom, people will either be propelled forwards or held back by their abilities, families, upbringing, education and so on. What chaps like Major can’t understand or refuse to accept is that none of those can be equalised across the board.

Any attempt to do so would be identical to the truncation trick above. All families would have to be equally impoverished, all schools equally dumbed-down, all inherited wealth equally confiscated. For down is the only direction in which political action can try to equalise people – and even then it’ll fail. Human nature can be hidden under a black (or red) shroud, but it will still shine through.

This brings us to today’s ‘Tory’ government. It too is singing from the same hymn sheet – although upon closer examination those pages contain not hymns but excerpts from Das Kapital.

The main theme is the same classless society so beloved of John Major, but with a variation. Since today’s lot are marginally cleverer and much better educated, they try to avoid manifestly idiotic usages. ‘Classless society’ is one such, so they expressed it differently, as ‘levelling up’.

Yet the only way a government can level up is by not levelling down. It can only improve the economy by not damaging it. And one doesn’t have to boast an Oxbridge degree in economics (in fact, it’s imperative that one shouldn’t be weighed down by that ballast) to know how the government can bring the economy to its knees.

High taxation, rapacious and therefore inflationary public spending, inordinate growth in money supply, tight regulations – such are the anti-economy weapons in the state’s arsenal. And these are the weapons our ‘Tory’ government is firing in a steady barrage.

Last September Michael Gove was appointed Secretary of State for Levelling Up. Undeterred by his recent divorce (I’ve heard some interesting gossip about its reasons, but I’m not in the gossip business), Mr Gove never misses a beat in his Marxist tune.

Speaking to MPs recently, he defined his objective as “to shift wealth and power decisively to working people”. This shows laudable honesty: since Mr Gove knows that his remit is Marxist in essence, he expresses it in Marxist terms.

No subterfuge, no attempt to hide behind the smokescreen of ‘equal opportunities’, ‘levelling up’ or ‘restoring regional balance’. Power to the people, and workers of the world unite, pure and simple.

If our ‘Tories’ aren’t careful, they might find themselves sitting to the left of Labour. People may then vote for Keir Starmer, perceiving him as a sensible alternative to the loony left, aka Tories.

There are signs already that many Tory MPs would prefer Sir Keir to Johnson. That’s why they’ve pounced on Johnson for his remark about Starmer, in his earlier capacity of Director of Public Prosecutions, refusing to prosecute the paedophile Jimmy Savile.

Most resignations from Number 10 and most letters of no confidence from Tory MPs are supposed to have been inspired by that little ad hominem. This, though Starmer’s tenure in that office was by far the most subversive one in history, Savile or no Savile.

No, it’s those weathercocks again. The Tories sense which way the political wind is blowing, and act accordingly. Or perhaps they like their socialism neat, undiluted with quasi-Tory phraseology that they know means nothing.