We are living in a period of great political storms and stresses. Every single political party will be buffeted by events and be subject to contradictory strains and pressures in the coming months and years. Conflicting personal ambitions will interweave with pressing social crises and the inevitable splits and fragmentation that will develop in all of the main parties.
In the Labour Party, there will be growing friction between on the one hand, the aspirations of workers, as they are reflected through the affiliated trade unions, and on the other, a leadership basing their entire outlook on preserving the capitalist system. But the Tory Party too will experience division, and we can see the outlines of future splits in the two conferences held in recent days, organised by two different dissident groups opposed to Sunak.
The first of these was the misnamed Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO), which in effect is a group campaigning for the restoration of Boris Johnson to high office. Probably its most notable speaker was former Home Secretary, Priti Patel, who accused the Sunak leadership of having “done a better job at damaging our party” than Keir Starmer’s Labour party over the past year.
Linked to the Republican right wing
But the most significant of these dissident meetings has been the National Conservatives (NatCons) conference, linked to the organisation of the same name in the USA, which is an offshoot of the extreme right of the Republican Party. Indeed, a Republican Senator and supporter of Donald Trump addressed this conference by video link.
A parade of right-wing populist speakers has graced the rostrum throughout event but it has also been addressed by sitting Tory MPs and ministers, mostly notably Suella Braverman, Michael Gove and Jacob Rees Mogg.
The event was sponsored by the Edmund Burke Association, which according to its website, “is a public affairs institute founded in January 2019 with the aim of strengthening the principles of national conservatism in Western and other democratic countries”. This is a well-funded and utterly reactionary organisation that like all similar groups aims to “restore” lost pride in the “nation”, “family values” and the like. Not surprisingly, the speakers at its conference pressed all the right buttons, like “globalism”, “wokeness” and the left in general, including the ‘liberal’ Rishi Sunak.
Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, a US thinktank, spoke by video-link. His Foundation, which denies the global consensus on climate change, has been one of the mainstays of the US Republican right for decades. For the NatCons here, he dutifully condemned “The new left, greedy, elitist, woke and globalist, has foresworn every principle their ideological predecessors once espoused: democracy, equality, diversity, justice.” This was typical of many of the speeches and clearly, there was only one hymn book from which they were all singing.
Rees-Mogg admitted Tories tried to rig the votes with ID law
Jacob Rees-Mogg’s contribution was notable for the fact that he admitted that the Tories introduced voter-ID to rig the voting in their favour. Taking up the idea that Labour might allow some EU citizens and 16-year-olds to vote, he warned that “Parties that try and gerrymander end up finding that their clever scheme comes back to bite them, as dare I say we found by insisting on voter ID for elections”.
Then he let the cat right out of the bag. “We found the people who didn’t have ID were elderly and they by and large voted Conservative, so we made it hard for our own voters and we upset a system that worked perfectly well”.
But it was Suella Braverman’s speech, predictably attacking those desperate refugees seeking to come to the UK on small boats across the Channel, which received the greatest publicity. Among her more bizarre statements, she admonished UK workers for not queuing up to train as farm labourers or lorry drivers to fill vacancies in these sectors. What she did not mention, of course, was the fact that many of the sectors currently experiencing a shortage of labour are among the worst paid of any jobs.
Several other sitting Tory MPs spoke, including John Hayes, another trying desperately to bring ‘culture wars’ to the forefront of British politics. He hinted that “true conservatism” was being stymied by liberal forces, aiming his remarks at the government of Rishi Sunak.
“You know, as I do”, he said, “that the solution is to be found in conservatism. But not in the desiccated, hollowed-out, sugar-free conservatism deemed to be just about acceptable by our liberal masters. Too many conservatives opt out of conflict, instead seeking the approval of the very establishment which wants to grind them into the dust.”
Suella Braverman’s speech was a tilt for the leadership
There is a serious side to this mad carnival of reaction. Most Tory MPs have given up on the possibility of winning the next general election; certainly Braverman has. Her speech was not an academic think-piece designed to make for an interesting discussion. She was making an early play for the Tory leadership contest that will inevitably follow an election defeat and it will not be her last.
The CDO and NatCon conferences show the outline of the inevitable splits that will envelop the Tory Party in the future. Although the pace of events sometimes appears to be slow, over recent years and even more in the future, the Tory Party is facing an historic crisis. Recent Tory leaderships – and we include Cameron, May, Johnson and Truss in this – are probably the worst political representatives of British capitalism in its entire history.
Whereas the Tories in the past represented the whole of the ruling class – landowners, bankers, and manufacturers – it is arguable that they have lost the confidence of a significant part of the capitalist class today, particularly those connected to manufacturing. These parvenus have catapulted a once ‘great’ party, the most successful conservative party in Europe over two hundred years, into what may turn out to be an existential crisis.
The ambience of calmness cultivated around Rishi Sunak was always only tissue thin and the battering the Tories got in the elections earlier this month is now bringing the opposition out of the woodwork. But it is a new form of opposition. As the NatCon conference in particular showed, there is a strand of opinion that veers sharply to the right, which openly voices racist ideas, even toys with anti-Semitism, (as the US Heritage Foundation does) but which will above all, take aim at the democratic rights of workers.
The main concern of this wing of the Tory party will not be economic policy, but democracy itself: the right to protest, the right to strike, the rights of women and all the other social liberties that have been established over many generations. The anti-democratic measures of this Tory government – undermining the right to protest, making effective strikes more difficult, giving police almost arbitrary powers of arrest – all of this is the music of the future, merely a prelude to more draconian laws that NatCon Tories would introduce if they were given the opportunity.
As the interwar years showed, any capitalist class would take desperate steps if it was the only way in the last analysis to defend its position in society. Powerful capitalist interests financed and actively supported National Socialism in Germany and Fascism in Italy, as a means of destroying the labour movement when it veered in the direction of revolutionary change as a way out of social crisis.
We are not at that stage yet in British politics and we always need to maintain a sense of proportion. But the ghosts of the dark forces of the 1930s lurk in the far right of the Tory Party today, in their racism, homophobia, xenophobia and in all of their anti-democratic instincts.
As much as we can laugh at some of the absurd speeches at these conferences, there is something to which the labour movement should take notice. It is not a big step from the jingoism and right-wing populism of the NatCom Tories today to the ultra-nationalist and totalitarian monsters of the past.
