Do the Tories face electoral oblivion or will they morph into a hard right Braverman/Faragist Party?

Do the Tories face electoral oblivion or will they morph into a hard right
Faragist Party

Sunak has called an Election for July 4^th while getting soaking wet outside 10 Downing St on 22^nd May. According to the BBC’s Chris Mason he was strongly advised to do so by self-styled Deputy Prime Minister and political idiot Oliver Dowden.

The crisis for Sunak keeps getting worse.  YouGov poll showed the Tories would be reduced
to a rump at the forthcoming Election. Sunak is the second unelected PM the
Tories have had since 2019 and even now with an Election called some still want a third.

The Tories remain around 20% behind Labour in the polls and are badly split. Nadine Dorries resignation letter to Sunak last Autumn was partly farcical but partly sharp in pointing to numerous Tory policy failures.

Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman on the hard right of the Tories has renewed calls for Britain to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights and ban demonstrations against genocide in Gaza

In 2005 Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote a book arguing that the Tory Party had reached the end of its historic existence. As the years since 2010 have unfortunately demonstrated he was wrong. However in a recent Guardian article he returned to the point, arguably more persuasively. He has now published a new book, Bloody Panico (Verso,May 2024) where he returns to the argument about the historic demise of the Tories.

The Tories as a party representing ruling class interests have been ‘shapeshifters’ pragmatically shifting positions and policies to fit the demands of the moment. So the Tories resisted demands for an extension to the vote with force at Peterloo in 1819 and in Parliament with the 1832 Reform Act. However in 1867 they passed a further Act extending the suffrage.

Likewise they were the party of the landed aristocracy but in 1846/7 repealed the Corn Laws because this was in the interest of the rising industrial manufacturing class. In much more recent times Tory leader Edward Heath took Britain into what is now the EU in the early 1970s. 50 years on the Tories are focused on Brexit and staying out of the EU.

The problem they have is that beyond making money for their mates and sometimes themselves they no longer have a single coherent view of what a ruling class politics which can also win elections is. There have been five Tory leaders since 2015 each seemingly more incompetent than the last.

Boris Johnson personified the crisis. He was not a supporter of Brexit and notoriously only became so not out of some great principle or understanding of ruling class interests but because it served his personal ambition to be Prime Minister.

I don’t agree with Wheatcroft’s argument that the Tory Party is finished is an absolute certainty.

There are several factors which might see it survive in some form.

The first is Labour. Despite huge majorities in 1997 and 2001 Blair while tinkering with reforms determined that his real focus was illegal wars. Then in the financial crash of 2008 Gordon Brown decided that the key thing was to save the market economy and in doing so ushered in an era of austerity. Unsurprisingly Labour votes declined significantly and the Tories who had looked finished made a return

Starmer has his own variant on this. If the Tories are busy making themselves redundant then perhaps the way forward is to move Labour into that space. His own version of the Great Moving Right Show. So hapless are the Tories at the moment that this strategy is very likely to work, if only briefly.

The Tories however might shapeshift again and move themselves further to the right still, around the racist politics of Suella Braverman and others. Nigel Farage and the Reform Party, while a minority, have the capacity perhaps to mobilise votes around such a grouping. Farage’s decision to stand at the Election where there is an Essex seat he might actually win this promotes that project. He can’t be the Parliamentary leader of a rejigged hard right Tory Party if he is not an MP.

There remains scope for such a political reconfiguration on the hard right mirroring
developments across the rest of Europe and in the US. With Truss sharing a platform with fascist Steve Bannon and Lee Anderson outside the Tory Party and in Reform UK after a racist rant too many, the possibility is growing

Opposing it rather than joining in the Great Moving Right Show is essential.

For the left while ousting the Tories electorally is essential the real response to this is in workplaces and on the streets. Strikes and protests on the cost of living, climate and Palestine won’t win Starmer’s support but they can exert real political pressure from the bottom up. That is essential as a counter to top down Parliamentary politics