Elevenses: Fear and Loathing in the New Conservatives

This article originally appeared in our Elevenses newsletter.

Good morning. Somewhat by accident, I stumbled upon Gordon Brown’s 2009 speech to the Labour Party conference in Brighton this week. After 12 years in government, he listed off how the party had materially altered the fortunes of the less well-off in society, naming the winter fuel allowance, the shortest NHS waiting times in history, taking half a million children out of poverty and Sure Start among others to increasingly rapturous applause from delegates. 

Faced with a similar ‘what did the Romans do for us’ type scenario, I fear Rishi Sunak might come up short on the Conservative’s record after being in power for a comparable length of time. The NHS has been systematically run down, the less well-off are being forced to rely on a sprawling network of foodbanks, over 1,000 Sure Start Centres have been closed down and youngsters face eye-watering levels of student debt and the worst housing market in centuries. Hardly something to be boastful about. 

Which is why the party is increasingly pivoting to their intake of ‘New Conservative’ MPs who tend to eschew traditional performance-based methods of campaigning and instead appeal to voters’ sense of fear and loathing as a means of distracting them from the often-precarious situations they find themselves in. Asked how the Tory Party might revive their fortunes ahead of the next election, Ashfield MP Lee Anderson said they won in 2019 thanks to “Brexit, Boris and Corbyn” and now they’ll have to “think of something else”. He said the party should put a “mix of culture wars and the trans debate” at the heart of its election offer if they are to stand a chance. Not policies, but culture wars. And he said it as brazenly as that. 

Anderson also said illegal immigration and the influx of small boats were the number one issue for voters, while Jonathan Gullis, who recently took to the streets to call his own constituents “scumbags”, “scrotes” and “savages”, said deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda is “what people wanted when they voted Brexit”. Of course, when it comes to the real issues facing voters, they have nothing. Anderson tells food bank users to budget better and Gullis has taken to demonizing them, which as Labour councillor Sam Webster says is nothing more than a blatant abdication of responsibility. 

Quite how we’ve arrived at this point is one for the historians to debate, but the next time you hear about the ‘war on woke’, the re-writing of Roald Dahl’s books, the trans debate or any other cultural triviality, ask yourself, given all that’s going on in the world, are these things people should really give a shit about, or are they simply a distraction for a party that has achieved diddly in government and a media that is complicit in the cover-up? 

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