Nothing left to steal

Ben Wildsmith

The death of the Tory party has been a drawn-out and undignified process. The wrecking ball that Margaret Thatcher sent crashing through society has swung back towards the party with karmic inevitability.

The short-term planning, the economic fantasies, the greed, the tolerance of corruption, the cruelty, and jingoistic refusal to face up to Britain’s place in the world have caught up with the Conservatives at last. We’ll be rid of them soon, quite possibly for good.

This week, Theresa May announced her retirement and it was telling that people saw her as a remnant of a more decent age. How quickly our villains are washed clean by the sins of their successors.

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Hostile environment

May was the author of the ‘hostile environment’ and the devastation it wreaked upon the lives of so many from the Windrush generation. She bribed the DUP to support her doomed Brexit deal; hers was the first government to be found in contempt of parliament.

You could pinpoint the moment of Tory demise to be May’s conference speech in 2017.  Through a hacking cough, she tried to restore her personal standing as the letters fell off the slogan behind her and a comedian handed her a P45.

If the party possessed dignity, it would have sloped off to the potting shed with a revolver that very afternoon, but it’s not in the nature of the beast. Since then, it has abandoned the pretence of government altogether in favour of ransacking the deceased’s personal effects before the creditors arrive.

May is the latest in a long line of departed Tories at whom centrist dads look wistfully, insisting that decent conservatism is a thing. Ken Clarke, Nicholas Soames, Douglas Hurd etc. carried echoes of pre-Thatcher Toryism: a seemingly benign, paternalistic stewardship that had its roots in feudalism. There are a still a few who try on those clothes: the comically earnest ex-Security Minister Tom Tugendhat did a fair imitation.

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Making money

Since the financial crash of 2008, though, there’s been no disguising what the modern Conservative Party is: a vehicle through which people make money. All the ideological talk of self-reliance, individualism, and small government was exposed when George Osborne extorted the British public to ensure that de facto bankruptcy of financial institutions didn’t interfere with the lifestyles of those responsible for them.

We weren’t treated to the story of Norman Tebbit’s father getting on his bike and recapitalising his bank from private sources, nor were bankers directed to conform to Thatcher’s ‘thrifty housewife’ economics when their cupboards were bare. Profit is private, loss is public.

The past forty years have seen virtually every UK asset hoovered up by private capital and ruthlessly monetised. The list of services we can no longer afford is now indivisible from the list of services we need to run as a functional nation state.

Suffering

The idea that the suffering inherent to this was in the service of some sunlit, libertarian future is the confidence trick of our age. We used to own things, now we don’t. It really is that simple. Find the lady…

As another Miners’ Strike anniversary passes, its significance only swells in the wreckage of what was to come. We’ve been severed from each other and individualised into powerless units.

Every Prime Minister since then has supported an economic system that has unpicked our social fabric before flogging off the threads.

Every short-term, venal financial decision they have made is playing out as starved public services go into endemic decline. The dynamic individualism of the 1980s has petered out into a lonely, frightening old age.

The Tory Party is dying because there is nothing left to steal.