THE BIG READ: How low can they go and is total wipe-out now a risk for the Conservative Party?
With ministers such as Gillian Keegan as their chosen public face, the Tories will struggle to command the support of even a quarter of the voting public
THERE has been a lot in the past week to upset those of us who believe that social cohesion and the social contract are being sacrificed on the altar of mass, uncontrolled immigration.
There is the case of convicted sex offender and suspected chemical attacker Abdul Ezedi who managed to convince a gullible clergyman he had genuinely converted from Islam to Christianity and then a gullible immigration judge to believe it too. Then there were revelations of clergy near the Bibby Stockholm barge in Dorset and RAF Wethersfield in Essex assisting in mass conversions by Muslim asylum seekers, in effect providing them with a pathway to follow Ezedi’s thwarting of legitimate deportation.
There were those projections from the Office for National Statistics of immigration adding another six million to the population by 2036. That’s six million net and nearly 14 million extra migrants gross, by the way.
There was the spectacle of ministers failing to block a declaration by civil servants at the Home Office that Turkey was not a safe place to deport illegal immigrants. There was even a report that a rapist could not be deported to Iran because it might treat him like he was a rapist.
And there was the confirmation that there were more illegal migrant crossings of the English Channel in January this year than there were in January 2023. So much for Rishi Sunak “stopping the boats”.
All of these stories underlined the sense one gets of a government incapable of getting a grip on liberal judicial activism, civil service activism and clerical activism in the cause of dismantling national borders.
But none of them stuck in the craw quite like the performance of the Education Secretary Gillian Keegan on the Sunday morning media round. Keegan is a classic offering from the production line of Cameronian centrist women who now populate Rishi Sunak’s Cabinet. Michelle Donelan, Laura Trott, Claire Coutinho, Lucy Frazer and Victoria Atkins are also cut from the same establishment cloth.
And while all the stories mentioned above came as punches into the guts of social conservatives, Keegan’s showing went straight into the solar plexus, inducing feelings of acute nausea. Confronted with the shocking facts of the Ezedi case and asked to explain how a twice-refused, sex offending asylum applicant from the most misogynistic country in the world had been able to stay in Britain to attack a woman and her two young daughters, Keegan just didn’t get it. She even declared that the case “is not really about asylum”.
That absurd response crystallised everything for me: this administration, this Conservative party, this prime minister are never going to be moved into serious action to make the protection of the British public a higher priority than following obsolete and damaging agreements in “international law”. On the same morning, former home secretary Suella Braverman also appeared on television and once again hammered home the need for the UK to break away from that thicket of compacts and conventions. Yet she was sacked by Sunak, while Keegan continues to prosper in his regime.
This is all more than usually important at the moment because for the first time in the 40-plus years I have been following politics, there is a real possibility of a realignment that strips the Conservatives of their monopoly of the right-of-centre vote in general elections for the long-term.
Back in 2015, we in UKIP managed to do that for one election, scoring a 14 per cent vote share in England and 13 per cent overall despite the general election being a close race between David Cameron’s Tories and Ed Miliband’s Labour. We did it not just on the back of anti-EU sentiment but also by connecting with discontented socially conservative voters on immigration levels, foreign aid, taxation policy, untrammelled multiculturalism and a sense that the entire Westminster elite was out of touch.
Of course, it wasn’t enough to break the mould and then Brexit handed to the Tories the socially traditionalist segment of the electorate they had neglected for so long. But the potential for a permanent realignment is very much greater now.
For a start, voters who thought that at last the Conservatives would be able to deliver on their pledges to reduce immigration, being liberated from EU free movement obligations, now realise this was a con and that the Tory establishment believes in mass migration for its own sake every bit as much as does Labour. Despite the disastrous evidence of the baleful consequences of social disintegration stacking up – from anti-Semitic marches to grooming gangs to Islamist intimidation of teachers – the Prime Minister decided to sack the one minister in a great office of state who spoke of the need for radical change.
Sunak has also gone soft on law and order – deciding to spare many prolific offenders from being sent to jail – and sustained a tax regime for middle-earners that positively punishes ambition and wealth-creation.
So much political space has been vacated by the Tory leadership on its right flank at a time when a financially-stretched electorate is feeling very scratchy anyway that an alternative offering would have to go some not to cut through. For a while it seemed as though the plethora of micro-parties on the right – the remnants of UKIP, the Reclaim thingy, Heritage etc – would split the vote, leaving people ready for a proper revolt unsure which way to turn. But finally the Reform Party has managed to send a big signal that it is the only game in town by chalking up double figure poll scores where its rivals barely feature.
Reform currently remains a plausible outlet for patriotic, traditionalist voters rather than a compelling one. But it is a stroke of luck for it that the Conservative high-ups continue to help it along by positively repelling voters in the manner that Keegan did on Sunday. Each time another tranche of traditionalists is left enraged by ministerial weakness, ineptitude or a basic lack of ideological “bottom”, it now knows where to turn.
People in Reform are growing increasingly upbeat about their prospects in the two by-elections that take place on February 15, particularly the one in the rock-solid pro-Brexit and socially conservative constituency of Wellingborough. Getting into double figures as a percentage of the overall vote is the aim in both contests. If turn-out is very low, Reform may even do rather better than that.
And all of this with very little recent involvement from Nigel Farage, the lone remaining superstar of the right since the departure of Boris Johnson.
The main reason Reform now has much better breakthrough chances than UKIP had back in the day is that the Conservatives under Rishi Sunak have no realistic way of disarming the issue that is causing their poll ratings to bleed: mass immigration. Cameron did partially disarm the UKIP challenge and turn up the pressure on Labour too by promising a referendum on the flagship issue of EU membership. But who will now believe any Sunak promises about immigration control?
By sacking Suella and promoting the likes of Keegan, he has shown his true colours to the electorate. On the foundational issue of the day he has advertised himself as being,
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to State O’ The Nation to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.