Many who fear the Tories think they do have a plan: to stay in office as long as possible, by any means possible, and obtain as much power as they can. The government “ seems to lack a sense of mission”, wrote Norman, a minister from 2016 to 2021. But the recent attack on Boris Johnson by the Hereford MP, Jesse Norman, one of the party’s more thoughtful figures, also reads like a critique of modern Conservative rule. Understandably, Tory MPs are more reluctant to put their disappointment with their party’s diminishing ability to govern on the record. Last month, the London financial newspaper City AM, an increasingly lonely champion of deregulation, asked with bleak sarcasm on its front page: “Would the last free marketeer to leave the Tory party please turn out the lights.”Ī similar gloominess and frustration pervades many readers’ posts on the popular Tory website ConservativeHome. Even in the Conservative party, there is growing doubt about the British free-market economy it largely created, expressed through panicky plans to rescue struggling regions and capitalism’s other victims with state subsidies. As the British economy she supposedly revived for good lags behind its competitors, and even the supposedly emasculated unions are still able to mount big strikes, Thatcher’s victories feel increasingly partial and distant. ![]() During the 1990s, the 2000s and for much of the 2010s, there was a British convention that to be a grownup politician of any party, or just a grownup participant in any political discussion, was to accept, if necessary through gritted teeth, that there was much the Thatcher government and its Tory successors had “got right”. That sense of achievement grew stronger when New Labour reversed few of Thatcher’s reforms. The last time a Tory administration got into terminal trouble, in the mid-1990s, Conservatives consoled themselves that at least they had won the big battles during their time in office, decisively weakening the trade unions and creating a dynamic free-market economy. If Britain’s problems have barely changed since the 1970s, then what problems have all the Tory governments since then actually solved? ![]() In 1979 … Margaret Thatcher lamented its declining economic standing, ‘Travel abroad, and see how much better our neighbours are doing.’” Such comparisons between the current crisis and Britain’s crisis in the 1970s have become so automatic in the rightwing press, as everywhere else, that one obvious question they raise has hardly been considered. The Economist goes on: “Britain has been here before. Four-fifths of that “rut” has been dug by Tory governments. In the Telegraph, Sherelle Jacobs despairs that, “ Mediocre Britain has resigned itself to a heartbreaking cycle of decline.” The Economist calls Britain a “stagnation nation”, “stuck in a 15-year rut”. ![]() ![]() “ Why is nothing working in broken Britain?” asks Josh Glancy in the Sunday Times. To adapt the famous slogan that helped Margaret Thatcher get elected in 1979, Conservatism isn’t working.Įven in the rightwing press, which has played such a huge part in sustaining the Tory ascendancy, there is a growing sense that the country is on the wrong track. Not just for its effect on people’s lives, but for the way it seems to be discrediting, bit by bit, a way of running the country that has held sway for 30 of the last 43 years. Yet the current crisis does feel significant.
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