Are the Tories to blame for everything?

Weeds sprout in the fecundity of a swamp

No tie that binds us: David Cameron addressing Tory activists in 2010

With the Tory leadership hopefuls emerging like wounded turtles from the swamp of electoral disaster, many questions vie for their attention. What should the party’s position be on taxation? Defence? Immigration? General competence? The sense of enshittification that seems to pervade Britain?

All of these, however, collapse into a single basic conundrum: how conservative should the Conservatives be? Whatever the policy area, many voters, particularly the one in four Tories who defected to Reform, feel that the Right has become indistinguishable from the Left, only with the added whiff of sulphur that the Tories never seem able to perfume in the nostrils of the electorate.

In recent weeks, this convergence has started to widen, particularly regarding Israel. Sir Keir Starmer’s government has dropped Rishi Sunak’s opposition to the International Criminal Court’s move to issue an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, restored funding to UNRWA despite its links to terrorism, and kicked off a “policy review” to determine whether the Jewish state is still worthy of receiving British armaments as it battles for its existence. The Chief Rabbi, Board of Deputies and other communal groups have reacted with alarm. Where is all this heading?

Then there is the matter of tax. During the election campaign, Labour built wriggle room into its manifesto pledges that would enable it to increase various types of levies later without breaking its word, technically at least. Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, has been rolling the pitch by magnifying the woeful state in which the previous government left the economy; the Tories have objected, pointing out that we are growing faster than most other European countries and that our tax burden was last this high not the Second World War but in the Fifties.

But whatever the politics of the matter, there can be no hiding the legacy of Tory Britain. Tax, national debt, NHS waiting lists, immigration and general incompetence are at levels that should be unconscionable to any conservative. Prisons are collapsing. Defence has been left in a condition of entropy. Britain does not make sell or do enough of what the rest of the world wants, as is evident from our current account deficit. And so on.

Each of these problems has its causes. The Iraq war (in the case of our defence spending); the 2008 financial crash (which occurred under a Labour government but was left for the Tories to address); Covid (eat out to help out, anybody?); the effect of the Ukraine war on energy prices and the cost of living. But in all these cases, the Conservative response has not sufficiently expressed conservative values. The party’s years in power have represented a fundamental drift away from its moorings.

For 14 years, we were governed by a generation of Conservative politicians who have been more preoccupied with triangulation and marginal electoral gains than core philosophical values about a life well-lived, a society worth building and a country worth living in. They aimed to get ahead in the current parameters, rather than change the game. This lack of vision and leadership recalls Milton’s Satan: “better to reign in Hell than starve in Heav’n.”

Well, now the Tories are starving in Hell. How many of their senior figures of recent times have had a meaningful hinterland? How many have read Burke, or Hayek, or Oakeshott, or Joseph de Maistre, or Robert Nozizk, or Johann Gottfried von Herder, or Sir Roger Scruton? How many could quote passages from their work? How many could recite a line of poetry?

How many were able to speak to the country with conviction about the morality of family in the modern world? Or the nature of freedom and what it means? Or the ethics of taxation and the welfare state? Or British patriotism and how it contrasts with xenophobia and nationalism? Or the guiding value and relevance of tradition, such as found in the House of Lords or the monarchy? Or the tension between embracing newcomers from abroad and retaining the character of the society that they have chosen to join? Or the wisdom of “changing to remain the same” rather than crashing ahead with utopian planning? Or a coherent foreign policy doctrine (Disraeli? Gladstone?) in this age of instability? Or – shock, horror – the richness and legacy of faith?

Governing should not simply be a matter of coming up with turns of phrase and meretricious policies that may trick people out of their votes. It should not be about following social and political trends. It should be about leading. It should be a matter of holding a coherent, moral vision of the national good, persuading the electorate of that vision, and, if honoured with their support, putting it faithfully into practice.

Which brings me to the New Radicalism, from which the name of this Substack derives. It describes that alliance of causes known colloquially as “woke” – extreme positions on race, gender, sexuality, the environment, the manipulation of language and so on – with Islamist extremism. Key to its formation is “intersectionality”. The critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw’s idea began life as a way of ensuring that doubly marginalised groups did not slip from the radar. In its folk application, however, it quickly evolved into a principle of “all for one and one for all”. Fast-forward to today, and it has ended up recruiting devotees of transgenderism behind the cause of Palestine. Islamists are now embraced and defended by those who they would kill, given half a chance.

During their years in power, the Conservatives made solid efforts to deal with extremism on our shores. At the same time, however, they blindly fostered the growth of the New Radicalism by adopting trendy ideologies without understanding its anti-conservative implications – one thinks of Penny Mordaunt insisting in the House that “trans women are women” – and allowing taxpayers’ money to be used to push that agenda.

A few weeks ago, the journalist Charlotte Gill compiled an extensive list of examples. In January, taxpayers stumped up £185,627 to support a project entitled “Trans Performance Now: Glitching cisgenderism”. In March, it emerged that research on “decolonising gender-based violence” had cost the taxpayer £1million. That same month, the Soho Theatre, which was in receipt of £614,582 per year in public funds, told white audience members to “check your privilege” against the backdrop of a performance designed to be an “unapologetic celebration of comedians of colour”. Also in March, an £800,000, taxpayer-funded study concluded that Shakespeare made theatre too “white, male and cisgender”. The researchers vowed to stage a play that explored “queer, transgender and migrant lives”.

Had enough yet? The Tories hadn’t. In April, £64,000 of taxpayer’s money was given to the trans artist Krishna Istha to help find a sperm donor. In May, more than £50,000 of public money was given to a porcelain artist who used her work as a “critique of white supremacy”. Then there was the £113,220 in government grants awarded to the “Vagina Museum”; the £841,830 given to a Birmingham City University research project called “The Europe that Gay Porn Built”; the £189,017 handed to support a Royal Holloway University study of “Sequins, Self & Struggle: Performing and Archiving Sex, Place and Class in Pageant Competitions in Cape Town”; the £809,334 doled out to fund “Remediating Stevenson: Decolonising Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific Fiction through Graphic Adaptation, Arts Education and Community Engagement” at the University of Edinburgh; the £136,909 for “Perverse Collections: Building Europe's Queer and Trans Archives” at the University of St Andrews; the £123,470 for “Decolonizing South East Asian Sound Archive” at SOAS; and the £12,500 Arts Council England grant given to enable Oozing Gloop, the “world’s premier green, autistic drag queen”, to take part in an “artist and community development programme” entitled “New Queers On The Block”.

None of this encompassed Islamist extremism. But the principle of intersexuality – “all for one and one for all” – meant that radical activists who campaigned on gender, decolonisation, race and so on, were inevitably obliged to get behind the cause of Gaza with equal passion. There’s nothing wrong with supporting the Palestinians, if you do so without Israelophobia. But that is not the radical way.

So it was that after October 7, Gaza became the most prominent rallying cause for the range of disparate activists, with the Palestinian flag as likely to be flown at Pride marches as the pro-transgender Progress banner. Given the discovery this month of a stash of Hamas documents, which included a rule-book with instructions for interrogating suspected homosexuals and meting out the death penalty to those found guilty, this is quite the move. But the New Radicalism is the exact opposite of conservatism. Where conservatives tend to view change with suspicion, allowing established precedent to evolve to embrace new challenges, progressives with to rip up the past and are infatuated with ideology. There could be no better illustration of the way in which such an infatuation can divorce a person from the reality of the world that surrounds them than a transgender activist flying a Palestinian flag.

For this reason, any conservative with an understanding of his own values resisted the New Radicalism instinctively from the very start. It was clearly a vehicle for overturning all the traditions and freedoms that have made our society a success. It was quite obviously a dangerous, hard-left mutation. Therefore, as a measure of the extent to which the Tories lost their way over their 14 years in power, we need only consider the evident enthusiasm with which they embraced this pernicious movement that now swamps much of our culture.

It would be unfair to argue that the Conservative Party is to blame for the rise of Israelophobic radicalism in this country. But it would be wrong to suggest that they played no part in fostering the conditions that allowed it to thrive, as a weed sprouts in the fecundity of a swamp.