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Why The Left Loves The Tories
Are the emasculated Tories more than New Labour's faire-valoir?
David Cameron's "New Conservatives" have enjoyed an extended honeymoon among pundits in the left-wing media. Both the Guardian and the Independent have published approving coverage of Cameron's ecological initiatives and his determination to transform the nasty old Tories into a modern, caring equal opportunities party. Even the BBC has invited Conservative MPs on its discussion shows and treated them as (almost) human, rather than the marginalised oddities they were under previous leaders.
But the Tories, as a party, seem to be on their way out.
Pollsters believe Conservatives need a huge swing - perhaps more than three million votes - to secure a parliamentary majority. Cameron's soft-centrism might flatter BBC journalists, but he has failed to persuade his party. Large numbers of Conservative MPs want a tougher line on Europe; want to see immigration limited and hoodlums punished. His opposition to Grammar schools - one of the few machines of social mobility in an increasingly stratified society - sparked a mini-rebellion among MPs, not to mention outrage at Conservative grassroots.
Blair's New Labour was able to work with contradictions: The former PM was perhaps his party's most right-wing member. MPs and activists ranged from Blairite centrists to unreconstructed Socialists.
However, the difference between New Labour in the 1990s and the Tories now is that Labour's hard left had nowhere to go. Voters in British elections repeatedly rejected the doctrinaire left; the Thatcher revolution made much of their policies archaic; the collapse of the Soviet Union had discredited Communism altogether. Had Labour's left tried to break away, a lonely life of distributing angry leaflets in provincial town centres beckoned. Party members knew it, and like sell-outs everywhere they threw their lot in with Blair, muttering plans of "changing the system from within."
The Conservative right, however, believes with some justification that a large number of Britons share its analysis on Europe, crime and immigration. Why, they ask, has Cameron been so eager to scorn their beliefs, while taking their support for the Conservative Party for granted?
Why are Cameron and the left-wing media so eager to woo one another? Few Conservatives seriously believe that the BBC or the Guardian will ever endorse the Conservative Party. Indeed, some might well wonder why Conservatives were not content to allow the liberal media to choose its leader for them: Now, it seems, they are dictating party policy.
Peter Hitchens has an interesting angle on the left's affection for Cameron's Tories. Speaking to a left-leaning pollster, he found the Labour man was keen that the Tory party in its present incarnation survived, because "there will always be a need for a centre-right party."
"One of the great virtues of British politics," he continued, "is that we have not had a substantial far-right nationalist xenophobic party in Britain. A substantial Conservative Party is our best bulwark against the kind of politics that I think could become very nasty".
Hitchens responds:
"The scary language about 'far-right', 'xenophobic' and 'nationalist' is just the jargon that Labour Party people ... use to describe those who want to leave the European Union, those who don't want mass immigration and those who think that criminals should be punished. As for things turning nasty, I think myself that this would be far more likely as long as there continues to be no mainstream party to speak for the people of Britain on such issues.
"He is absolutely correct to see the Tory Party as the Left's best line of defence against the development of a party that was properly pro-British and socially conservative... The Tories are the left's outer line of defence, and the left-wing media's love affair with Mr Cameron runs deeper than you thought."
