THE BIG READ: The next election is shaping up to be a battle over the future of Conservatism
Rishi Sunak has foolishly taken decisions that define him as part of a "One Nation" gang of liberal Tories who lack broad political appeal. The potential for an epoch-making result continues to grow.
THERE are 106 MPs said to belong to the One Nation group of centrist Conservative parliamentarians.
I am unable to find a comprehensive list which identifies them all. But looking at the group’s social media feeds, they appear to include some surprising names such as Matt Warman (Boston & Skegness) and Jo Gideon (Stoke-on-Trent Central), who represent two of the most socially conservative and migration-sceptic constituencies in the country.
A defining trait of the group is that its members do not wish to pull the UK out of the thicket of international treaties that have hindered us from deterring and/or removing illegal immigrants, such as the European Convention on Human Rights.
Were we to assume that all 106 of these MPs would vote against any Tory government policy to take the UK beyond the reach of the ECHR in immigration and asylum matters then it would follow that such a government would need a majority of well north of 200 to be confident of implementing such a measure.
One Nationers also include many Tory MPs, such as Caroline Nokes for example, who support the notion that trans-identifying people must be classified in every important regard according to their gender of choice, a proposition that can be boiled down to Penny Mordaunt’s famous despatch box renunciation of basic biological science: “Trans women are women.”
Overall their shared characteristics include being relaxed about mass immigration, not at all keen on engaging in what they see as an unnecessary and divisive “culture war” (AKA resisting the identitarian Left), generally in favour of alternatives to custody in the criminal justice system, gung-ho for reaching Net Zero on the most demanding possible timetable and strongly supportive of high foreign aid spending as a key instrument of British “soft power”.
Their presence in such numbers on the Tory benches in Parliament – even after the Brexit shake-out of pro-establishment centrists presided over by Boris Johnson – is a key reason why so many habitual Conservative voters are now hoping for the party to suffer an epoch-making defeat in the general election next year.
If one assumes that a majority of more than 200 is beyond the reach of the Tories – and I think that would be a pretty fair assessment in the current political circumstances – then it follows that any Tory administration after 2024 will continue to be a prisoner of the One Nation caucus. They, after all, are the wing of the party that can count on MPs from other parties to team up with them in support of their underpinning beliefs.
Actual social and cultural conservatives on the Tory benches might be able to pull in a handful of DUP MPs behind some of their core policies, but basically that’s it: Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Green, SDLP and Plaid Cymru parliamentarians are always going to side with the Tory Wets on big social issues.
So even if the ultra-longshot happens and we get another Tory administration in the next Parliament, we can be sure it will continue to stumble along the general path of progressivism and wokery that has been laid out across the public realm and the corporate sector too in recent decades.
This is why the idea of smashing the Conservatives down as close as possible to a Canadian-style wipeout is gaining so much traction on the Right. Those of us who believe immigration control now to be a foundational issue for British society also tend to believe – with the backing of much poll evidence – that there is potential majority support for that proposition.
After the frankly lunatic net legal immigration figures of the last two years, we no longer fear that Keir Starmer and Labour would preside over anything significantly more excessive. So eliminating Tory One Nation MPs through the somewhat brutal device of eliminating nearly every Tory MP is starting to seem very attractive.
The thinking is that at the subsequent election, the very large socially conservative electorate would send a genuinely conservative political offering roaring back into contention for power. This could be a remodelled Tory party with a full slate of conservative-minded candidates under a Kemi Badenoch or Suella Braverman leadership. Or it could be a merged Reform Party/National Conservative entity aiming to replace the official Conservative Party as the main centre-right offer.
Either of these offerings would at last secure a parliamentary party ready to implement the significant reorientation of Britain we yearn to see around low migration, pro-family, strong law and order, levelling-up, anti-ID politics and pro-small business policies.
We have reached a stage where the Peter Hitchens assessment dating back to 2003 that the Tory party in its current iteration is “useless” as a vehicle for implementing conservative values has become the prevailing orthodoxy in socially conservative circles.
So when Rishi Sunak bangs on about the possibility of Nigel Farage joining his “broad church” party, it is no cause for celebration or comfort but rather provokes hollow laughter. He should be so lucky. With any luck Farage will return from his fame-enhancing and very successful spell in the celebrity jungle far from ready to fold his political cards in the interest of Sunak’s “liberal Conservative” gang.
The opportunity to clear electoral space ready for a 2028/9 challenge for power by an actually Conservative entity amounts to the kind of game-changing enterprise that has always appealed to him. He ran one such enterprise over many years in UKIP and
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