Tobias Elwood in The Times today has contributed a very good piece, and I say that as someone who has never voted Conservative in my life! I particularly like the call for consensus. Margaret Thatcher was the first mould-breaking party leader of my lifetime. Attlee created the Welfare State but it was World War 2 that spurred that. Attlee’s reforms were largely unchanged by governments of either Party. Until Thatcher came along. She did some good, some bad and some downright ugly things. But Major, Blair and Brown restored the centrist norm and a fair degree of consensus.
So what’s gone wrong – in one word it was Brexit. Cameron was a consensus politician – he even formed the first peacetime coalition of modern times. The Referendum screwed him, and then the country. We haven’t been polite to one another since !
The decline of the Tories was directly attributable to the “Leavers” in the Party and then to the grotesque Hard Brexit which, astonishingly, leaves us as the only country in Europe with no formal economic, commercial or social alliances. Except for Belarus. Strange company.
The Conservatives have morphed into “National Conservatives” , and they’re not very good at it. Reform has seen the nationalist drift on the Right and captured it. There’s probably only room for one “Hard Right” Party and Mr Farage’s “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists, mostly”. have taken over.
There are some decent One Nation Conservatives still around but they are leaderless, unrepresentated in Parliament, and rare as red squirrels.
Paddy’s Blogs in a crazy world 