We’ve all been to a gig where the lousy support act vastly outstays its welcome. And then the booing begins. This is your party, Mr Sunak: a decrepit syndicate that’s way beyond its sell-by date. So, what’s stopping you from doing the decent thing and calling an election immediately? Why are you resisting?
Not liking
In resisting, your party is ignoring two major problems:
First, behind your party’s inability to improve the health of people’s pockets is a more ubiquitous contempt. Yours is perceived as the party of incompetence, dishonesty, hypocrisy and casual cruelty.
It’s the party that:
- delivered us Boris Johnson (the PM who made lying sexy), the mess of Brexit, Liz Truss, the HS2 fiasco, and broken Britain;
- rejects effective climate action whilst churning out sewage;
- and endorses lavish CEO bonuses whilst penalising families via restrictions on benefits and child tax credits.
It’s also the party that:
- partied whilst we obeyed Covid rules;
- tried to remove homeless peoples’ tents and made rough sleeping a fineable offence;
- is fanatical about deporting a few hapless souls as a symbolic threat to migrants, and paints over children’s murals in detention centres;
- attacks and ignores the very care and key workers on whom our well-being depends;
- and is already gaslighting its way through the mother of all dirty election campaigns.
Not listening
Second: Even if we were able, in principle, to approve of your policies, the other nail in your coffin is that you aren’t believed any more. During your tenure you have tried remedy after remedy – the conference, the King’s speech, the cabinet reshuffle, the autumn statement and the recent budget – all designed to alter the destiny of a tired party “tail-spinning into opposition” (The Week In Review, 9 March). But not one of them saved your fortunes. The reason is not just that they all failed to address the glaring problems of people’s ordinary lived experience and the critical state of our services. It is also that people had already stopped listening.
This is one of the reasons why the March budget didn’t shift the dial on your fortunes. However hard you try to come up with a new policy that might turn the corner for you – a budget rabbit, a new fiscal promise – it isn’t registering. It’s too late. The train has left.
Nor is drumming up yet another culture war a workable substitute. The extreme end of your support-base is currently leaking to RefUK. And Lee Anderson’s defection shows that your own MPs are prepared to follow suit. In an attempt to damn the flow, you are further tightening the screws on immigration, climate activism, judicial independence, and our rights to protest and vote. This ugly shift to the extreme right is a desperate attempt to claw back favour. But it isn’t even working because for every vote you re-gain, you lose at least one other, possibly more, in disgust.
Furthermore, RefUK insist they won’t come to your assistance at the last minute by standing aside in certain seats. They may well tolerate Labour winning since they believe Labour has manoeuvred itself to a position where returning to the EU is now impossible; also because the demise of your party is a necessary first step in acquiring proportional representation, something RefUK desperately wants. So I’m afraid RefUK is probably going to stand by and watch from the ship as your party drowns in the sea below. Heartless, I know, but ‘that’s democracy’.
Torching the building as you leave
Part of your budget involved poaching Labour’s non-dom tax policy. But this little wheeze was embarrassing as your own party previously spent months protesting about what a terrible idea it was. The wheeze was also pathetic in highlighting that your party is so short of ideas, it has to pickpocket the enemy’s. Lastly, it was destructive, spiteful and punitive – a scorched earth policy to wring further vestiges of fiscal opportunity from the next government that would have helped turn around the country you so comprehensively trashed.
Your budget also contained an uncosted plan to scrap national insurance. This glitter bomb was chucked in as a failsafe last resort in case the rest of the budget failed to work any magic. But the NI scrappage was such a wild plan it made you look even more unhinged and reckless than your own caricature of the opposition. How petty. How ‘small-minded’. How short-sighted and self-serving: a glaring illustration of your ‘party before country’ ethos. And how clearly it shows the need for your party to be gone.
Trading places
Some 61 Conservative MPs are planning to stand down at the next general election. One factor behind this exodus, and a reason why your party is dragging its feet so painfully, is horror at the prospect of being in opposition.
For parties that put country first, there’s some point in being on the opposition benches. They inhabit this position fairly stoically, in part because there is, at least, an opportunity to influence policy for the better and increase their field of influence by adding to their cohort of parliamentary MPs at elections.
But, for a party with an historic sense of entitlement, that, in the last 200 years, has predominantly been in charge, and that habitually ‘puts party before people’, being in opposition is an insult and a void. You have at times had an impatient sojourn in the wings. Under Tony Blair it was protracted. But these token gestures towards democratic ‘balance’ are uncomfortable for you. It’s not part of the Conservative parliamentary culture to be the underdog, on ‘the other side’, minus the perks of power. It’s an affront to your perception of yourselves as having an inalienable, historic right to be ‘on top’. As lords of the parliamentary manor, expecting you to leave your ‘natural home’ and trade places with the opposition is a humiliation to be frantically staved off.
Limboland
So, despite all the evidence stacking up against your party, it clings on to power. How sad is it when the only reason left for hanging on is the hope that fate will intervene and cause something bad to happen to your enemy, the opposition?
But, meanwhile, how is the ghastly eight-month limbo we’ll be left in going to endear voters to you in any way? As the months drift on, more children’s teeth fall out, more RAAC threatens to collapse in schools, more people lose their homes and livelihoods, and we are submerged under ever more effluent, how is your waiting game in any way helpful to the country? And how are you possibly going to salvage yourselves?
You are like the crazed hostage-taker clinging on to his captive in the hope that the encircling rescuers might be hit by a thunderbolt.
Of course, with you gone, life will be slow to improve. But at least the nation won’t be trapped in the dismal dystopia you created and to which you are now so staggeringly indifferent. The terror of needing a hospital, the dread over the expiry of our fixed term mortgages, the struggle to source food, won’t evaporate. But at least there will be a fresh start and hope.
You against the mob
And now, in your enervated death throes, you are railing against ‘mob rule’. At one level this is a last nasty attempt to use racism to scare voters back on board. You’d like us to think that ‘Islamists are taking over’, that the groups on the streets from every conceivable background, some with their kids, protesting against Israel’s treatment of Gaza, or failures on climate action, are a dangerous mob. You know perfectly well that extremist elements often infiltrate protests, including those in support of your own values. They aren’t the majority, but it suits you and your client media to ignore this vital point and paint the current protests as ‘dangerous’.
At another level, calling such actions ‘mob behaviour’ is actually your expression of rage at us, the nation, for not obliging you by closing the polling gap. It’s the wokerati at whom you are shaking your fist – the progressives and a rapidly accumulating multitude of the ‘deeply fed up’ who are not doing your bidding, but instead rising up and saying ‘enough’. And we will continue to make our voices heard: on the streets, in the local elections, and in the general election. We are your ‘mob’ now: undaunted, getting louder and not ‘playing the game’.
Hanging on for an unforeseen boost is pathetic. So, stop it. For once, do something out of character and do the honourable thing: call an early general election. As the executioner would say, “It’s time”.
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