ROCKED by a barrage of criticism in Nadine Dorries’s long-awaited resignation letter, the Conservatives have reached for familiar propaganda lines.
As “law and order” pitches go, the police being told they need to investigate crimes may be feeble. But conventional wisdom holds that the Tories thrive on this turf.
Mooting electronic tagging for asylum-seekers is also straight from the Nasty Party playbook.
Presumably this work will be outsourced to the usual suspects G4S and Serco, despite them both having been fined tens of millions of pounds for defrauding the public over electronic tagging in the past.
No matter. It all forms part of the systematic humiliation of refugees who have come to these shores seeking safety, and like the increasingly brutal mistreatment that has never reduced numbers (because the crises people are fleeing continue to worsen), it is not supposed to work but simply to promote a particular “tough on immigration” image.
The further the Tories fall behind in the polls, the more extreme becomes their hard-right posturing, but the political problem Dorries confronted Rishi Sunak with will not go away.
Her letter was not exactly accurate. To say “nothing meaningful has happened” on Sunak’s watch is to ignore viciously authoritarian legislation such as the Public Order Act or Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act restricting our rights to protest and strike.
But the blows Dorries landed — the abandonment of promises to “level up” poorer British regions, overhaul the social care sector or do anything at all about climate change — do point to serious political headaches for the party.
Her core argument — that the Tories have not delivered on the promises they made to the electorate in 2019 — is true.
What is not true is Dorries’s insinuation that this is all down to Sunak. Regional inequality widened throughout Boris Johnson’s premiership despite the blather over levelling up.
A study published early last year found some of the wealthiest parts of England were receiving levelling-up funding, while some of the poorest were excluded. Being represented in Parliament by a government minister helped your chances of securing funds, suggesting political manipulation of the project.
The reasons the Tories were not able to “level up” Britain are linked to a degraded political class for whom feathering their own nests outweighs national strategy: that was evident during the pandemic, with the award of health contracts and top jobs to friends and relatives of ministers becoming commonplace.
It has crippled proposals to act on a broken housing market too, with the high proportion of sitting MPs who are buy-to-let landlords obstructing progress on tenant and even leaseholder rights, although in principle the Conservatives have acknowledged reform is needed.
Beyond venality, the promises of 2019 were, for many MPs, made to be broken. A Thatcherite Westminster party was never happy with increased spending, but tolerated the manifesto because of the need to see off a socialist-led Labour Party whose promises on public spending and public ownership had proved very popular. Once Jeremy Corbyn was defeated, these offers could be discarded.
That’s why the specifics of Dorries’s attack on Sunak matter. The rewriting of history by our media and both main Westminster parties is erasing the real popular push for redistribution of wealth and a bigger, better-funded public sector that shifted British politics leftwards from 2015-20.
While in 2019 the Tories were forced to compete with a Labour offer, the situation is now reversed, with Labour aligning itself again and again with Tory policies despite the extraordinary unpopularity of the government upholding those.
The Tories are unlikely to revive their 2019 manifesto. It was in ribbons long before Johnson left office.
But recognising the reality that a socialist opposition was able to make the political weather by offering real change is a standing rebuke to today’s Labour Party — one which trade unions should make the most of.
