Save the Tories

The Guardian has decided that it must save the Conservative Party from decline, as if it were an endagered species. In order to do this, it must first ignore the party's recent history, and then construct a mythos about the nature of conservative politics that reaches back more than a century to Weimar Germany, of all places. To get the ball rolling, Polly Toynbee first argues that we need a healthy Conservative Party. But what she is effectively asking for is the preservation of Thatcherism, which remains the essence of contemporary Toryism: privatisation, deregulation and a disdain for welfare. She herself admits that the Conservative Party "has presided, especially since the 1980s, over capital supremacy at the expense of labour, sky-high inequality, public service degradation and me-first individualism." There is no route from the present moment that offers a return to the One Nation conservatism of Michael Heseltine, let alone Harold Macmillan. Invoking either is futile nostalgia. Invoking both, as she does, looks like delusion. What Toynbee really wants is the restoration of the post-Thatcher cartel - i.e. an ideological spectrum running from Blair to Cameron - hence she talks up the likes of David Gauke. 

Her current fears arise less from her desire for a "better brand of conservatism" than from her recognition of Starmer's failure to establish a popular "grownup" politics over the last 15 months. What she cannot acknowledge is that Kemi Badenoch is a symptom of the cartel's steady rightward shift since the 1990s, rather than some aberration peculiar to the Tories, and that this is linked to Starmer's failure to hegemonise her preferred centrism. Ironically, the one thing that would have buttressed the Tories would have been a Labour victory under Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, as that would have encouraged them to shift towards the centre-right space and present themselves as a safe alternative for both traditional conservative and liberal voters frightened by the Red Terror, even as they insisted that the people's will must be observed over Brexit. They cannot do that now because Labour under Starmer has occupied that space, and adopted the same stance on Brexit, thereby pushing Tory voters further right, hence the escalation in the rhetoric over migrants and the European Convention on Human Rights.

In another wisftul paean to the "moderate right", Zoe Williams, citing Daniel Ziblatt's research on the National People's Party of Weimar Germany, claims that "When the mainstream right loses its confidence, when it starts to chase the buzzwords and symbolic politics of the far right, it hands them the steering wheel." This is a misreading of the DNVP's history and the dynamics of the Weimar Republic. The Deutschnationale Volkspartei was formed by the merger of multiple nationalistic, monarchistic and reactionary parties in 1918 and was virulently antisemitic from the start. Socially, it was the party of landowners, industrialists and the Lutheran middle-classes. It was strongest in rural areas, particularly in Prussia and Pomerania. Politically, it took an ambivalent stance towards the Kapp putsch of 1920 and regularly called for the assassination of government ministers as "traitors". In other words, the DNVP was both consistently hostile to the Weimar Republic and had already adopted the central plank of what would become the Nazi programme before the NSDAP's foundation. It wasn't chasing the Nazis. If anything, it provided a readymade social and political environment in which the Nazis could thrive.

The NSDAP came to national prominence largely due to the platform offered it by the DNVP's push for a referendum on the Young (reparations) Plan in 1929. If there is a parallel between the DNVP and the UK Conservative Party it was in the way the former's push for a referendum divided the nation and consolidated the right around a more radical locus. But the parallel breaks down when you realise that even after the merger of 1918 the political right in Germany was still fragmented. As well as being antisemitic, the DNVP was anti-Catholic, with the result that conservative Catholics gravitated to the Centre Party in the Rhineland and the BVP in Bavaria. These two parties were also more supportive of the Weimar Republic, participating in numerous coalition governments. In summary, the "mainstream right" did not lose its confidence until 1933, and even then Franz von Papen (on the right of the Centre Party) imagined he was manipulating Hitler, not the other way round. The DNVP were Nazis avant la lettre in their extreme antisemitism, hostility to the Republic, and violent hatred of the SPD and KPD. The DNVP's voters switched decisively to the NSDAP in 1930.

Williams' German history is bad, but her British history isn't much better. "What happened to the old-school Conservatives, who treasure stability, conservation, the constitution, the pride of Britain on the world stage? What happened to the modernisers, who described the nation in terms of powerhouses, not powder kegs? Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t wild about any of them either, but it’s absolutely striking how those worldviews – the one nation Tory, the Cameroonian Conservative – have been erased, in favour of relentless demonisation: of migrants, Muslims, benefit claimants and protesters." Like Toynbee, Williams seeks to invent a Tory who never existed. But whereas the former at least tries to locate this species in the distant past, the latter attempts to set up an opposition between the Cameronian party of 2015-19 and the Conservative Party of today, which requires a lot of forgetfulness. Would an old-school Conservative who treasured stability have risked the EU referendum? Was George Osborne a moderniser, his austerity wilfully misunderstood? Did Theresa May ever tell migrants to "go home"? Did Boris Johnson ever say anything disobliging about Muslims?

You might be wondering why the Guardian thinks the Conservatives should be saved, given that the Liberal Democrats are perfectly capable of offering a centre-right alternative that the paper would find congenial. Why not celebrate the eclipse of the Tories and go all-in on Ed Davey? The answer, I suspect, is that they recognise the risk that the Liberal Democrats could outflank Labour on the left, particularly over civil rights and a more humane attitude towards immigration. This would make it too obvious that Labour has become the actual conservative party of British politics: unwilling to gainsay the financial markets, instinctively authoritarian, and mawkishly patriotic. They need the Tories in play as well if they are to present themselves as the party of the nation. The analogy of society with a family hasn't really enjoyed a vogue since the days of George Orwell ("the wrong members in control"), possibly because Thatcher made the terms mutually exclusive, but it is useful here. If the left and the Greens are dismissed as foolish youth, and Labour and (to a lesser extent) the Lib Dems are the grownups, then Reform is your racist, raffish uncle and the Tories your racist, wealthy aunt. Starmer's backers in the press still want him to be the centrist dad of the nation, despite his utter unsuitability for the role, and will happily reinvent the Conservative Party if it helps to achieve that goal.