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THE CONSERVATIVE DILEMMA
John Papworth
(Submitted to The Salisbury Review on 10th February 2002)

As a former Labour Party stalwart who, for tactical reasons, found himself voting Conservative for the first time at the last election, (the emphatically anti-EUro Tory was in danger of being unseated by a pro-EUro Lib-Dem candidate), from the sidelines I can only marvel at the curious vein of self-destruction that seems to have overtaken the Conservative Party.

A combination of disparate events has put the Tory party in a commanding, election-winning position; it is one, it might be supposed, that any party leadership might be ready to grab with both hands and storm the country with it with all the gusto and fervency of a Victorian evangelical crusade. Instead there prevails a curious compound of complacency, timidity and me-too-ism, coupled with an almost total lack of foresight, eyesight and even any consciousness of birthright.

To be specific, Britain today is in a curious state of resentful ambivalence about most of the leading questions confronting it: its status as a nation before the twin threats of American and EUropean imperialism, about the role and function of its monarchy, about the massive, non-stop and apparently unstoppable wave of third world immigration, about its core religious beliefs, about drugs and the former established verities of family life, about the role of industry in face of third world competition based on near-starvation wages, to say nothing of mounting concern about the effects of industry on the environment, and much else besides.

Beyond all this is something even more fundamental, the collapse of confidence in the credentials of almost any form of authority. It might be argued that authority has always had its sceptics able to point to the incompetence, inconsistency the place-seeking and the corruption of those in high places, and this is surely true, but much of the awareness of it was by hearsay and rumour and generally authority could manage to preserve a front of integrity and continue to command mass acceptance.

Television and the intrusiveness of the tabloids has helped to destroy all that. Even now, after fifty years or more, it is still not appreciated that TV is probably the single largest form of power in any country today. In formal terms parliament controls this new form of power, in terms of real clout it is TV which is promoting and determining the values by which Parliament operates, and the medium itself is under the sway of a relentless battle for 'ratings' based on a strenuous competitive orgy of mass debasement to win the largest following.

So that in TV authority has met its match, and has largely gone down before it. In place of rumour and bar-room gossip there is now the relentless probing of interviews with journalists and presenters watched by millions. To this must be added the skilful visual presentation of seemingly factual but heavily slanted news items and reports, the broad slapstick semi-political comedies, the sophistication of comic parodies of the political process in programmes such as 'Yes Minister', the constant and constantly vivid sniping of the monarchy, the House of Lords, the established Church and so on. It has all helped to create a climate of cynical awareness of some aspects of power realities previously only dimly, if at all, perceived.

In this context the present Prime Minister appears to be holding all the cards. He is, first and foremost, in mass political terms, personally presentable; he is young, handsome and presents an engaging TV manner of freshness and straightforward sincerity which would appear to the unwary to belie his dubbing as Mr Tony, Crony, Phoney Blair. He is in fact not far short of being a political genius. He has, after all, taken the old Labour movement by the scruff of the neck, shaken it to bits and from the fragments has created a quite new big business funded party, which so far has had an unbroken record of sweeping success at the polls. It is a progress which has left the Conservative Party winded and floored, and so bereft of policy or conviction as to be reduced to playing a timid game of metooism which is not only outdated but which simply dates the party.

If the railways, the hospitals or the post office are not functioning well, it declares, it is because it is Blair's bogus brand of conservativism which is at fault and not ours, and if you vote for us next time round we will do it all so much better. This is not only dishonest, most people can see it is dishonest and are fully aware that the rundown of our major public services originates in the policies or lack of them of both major parties in generational terms. Tweedledum and Tweedledee do not suggest realistic or purposeful policy alternatives.

More to the point, it is a stance which indicates a gross failure to spot the soft underbelly of Blair's style of superficial, would-be conservatism in the guise of New Labour, and to recognise he is walking a tightrope from which he could be toppled with ease. Blair is in fact playing with political dynamite and his opponents are letting him get away with it when they need to be challenging him forcibly on many fundamental counts.
It is a tightrope stemming from a growing political mood politicians can ignore only at the price of biting the dust. Political disenchantment, reflected in declining voting figures, is ignored as political leaders continue to argue, for example, whether one public service or another should be nationalised or privatised. The argument is long past its 'sell by' date, it is old hat and belongs to an era when self-styled radicals believed nationalisation was the answer to everything. Conservatives do themselves no service in becoming involved in debates about the best way to run nationalised services. What they miss is the increasing sense of frustration of people who are fed up with being bossed around by officials in giant organisations, whether in public or private, organisations, over which they feel they have no direct control and who want to know why they cannot run things themselves locally.

This is a new voice, which, when considering our schools, for example, is increasingly disposed to wonder why it is so easily assumed that people who spend their lives trying to get to the top of the greasy pole should be the ones to decide how other peoples children should be educated rather than the people themselves.

They are beginning to worry about the degrading and abusive power of TV and how that power can be salvaged from commercial hands and made subject to due processes of regulation conducted independently of both commercial and political interests, a question indicating that the debate on how this potent new form of power can be made subject to democratic control has not even begun. They can see that parliamentary power has got too big for its boots and so centralised that MP's have ceased to be peoples' representatives and have become, like the people themselves, so much voting fodder at the behest of party machine men. People sense a general drift of power away from themselves to faceless bureaucracies and that elections, far from enabling them to counter this trend simply help to confirm it.

And nowhere is this more evident than on the question of EUrope and the monarchy. As understanding of the real nature of the Brussels exercise grows, so too does its unpopularity. People are aware, however little they may articulate their worries, that the fate of the pound sterling is not just a matter of holiday-travelling convenience but that it relates to fundamental matters of sovereignty, independence, the power of the citizen to control forces that dominate his life and much else besides.

It is also bound up with the fate of the British monarchy, and this is where Mr Blair's new aping of a superficial rendering of conservatism is not only riding high but riding for a fall: for despite much carefully manipulated media mischief the fact is that people are proud of being British, they are proud of its independence, of its history, its traditions, its culture and its identity, they treasure their heritage as a priceless gift of stability and assurance in an increasingly turbulent world and the monarchy continues to evoke a sense of affinity and identity which stirs them at the deepest levels of their awareness. Not surprisingly, as the EUroscheming develops they are looking increasingly askance at those who are plotting to reduce their country to the status of a minor province of a German-dominated federal EUrope, and Buckingham Palace to the status of a provincial mayor's parlour.

That the monarchy symbolises and personifies the sense of national consciousness and identity so profoundly accounts for the way up and down the country ordinary people are bestirring themselves to celebrate the Queen's golden jubilee. It is an event which Blair's subversive pro-EUropeanism and a pliantly subservient BBC, aware of its dangers to their EUroplotting, are desperately seeking to play down and ignore.

It might be supposed that the Conservatives, aware of the enormous popularity of the monarchy and of the idea of British nationhood and independence, aware of the increasing unpopularity of the multiple forms of top heaviness that has come to characterise the prevailing political climate, would be rubbing their hands in gleeful anticipation of the electoral bonus events have handed to them. That they would be extolling the Sovereign's jubilee for all they were worth, that they would be launching one fusillade after another at those seeking to destroy Britain's nationhood for a mess of EUropean pottage, that they would be showing what genuine opposition means by establishing commissions and issuing blueprints on how they proposed to restore power to the people over TV, education, hospitals, railways, power supplies, banking and numerous other matters now largely dominated by unelected officials appointed by Blair, who seems utterly unaware of the distinction in terms of status, dignity and sense of self-worth, between a public servant and a private employee.

Instead, there is silence, except when the Conservatives are busy raising a horselaugh asserting they could run the Blairite policies better themselves, even as they wonder why fewer people are voting at all, and why even fewer of them are voting for them. It expresses a Conservative mood which betrays Conservative history. For the Conservative Party has always been the party of the small man, the farmer, the shopkeeper, the independent artisan and the numerous persons deeply involved in local affairs and who manned (and womaned!) the committees which ran the local hospitals, organised the fetes to keep the show on the road and so on. All too easily Conservatives allowed the sweeping bureaucratic, top-heavy Fabianism of Aneurin Bevan and his colleagues to sweep the Conservative tradition of dedicated local public service off the map. Currently, it would seem, neither the old Conservatives nor the new labourites seem vitally concerned to conserve anything.

And this is the tragedy of Conservative policy, for the current of feeling and understanding which runs through a nation and determines its destiny runs deep and cuts across the preoccupations of day-to-day policy-mongering. This is what Churchill understood in 1940, when the higher councils were rife with appeasement and a disposition to surrender. He understood that the situation could only be rescued by firmly nailing his colours of an all-out battle against Hitler's Europeanism to the mast, in utter disregard of those who would temporise or compromise. And he won! He won because victory does not go to those who hesitate and calculate, it goes to those who dare all to win all. History is determined by those who insist on determining it. He won because he spoke for the people of England, and they responded because he echoed the feelings in their hearts for straightforward decency and the courage needed to sustain it and to make it prevail.

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