Why we should wish Sunak to cling on in Downing Street until general election day
It is now in the national interest for the Tories to lose much more badly than they did in the landslide defeat of 1997 and their current leader seems well capable of that
FOR ALL of us who believe robust border protection and tough immigration controls are now foundational issues for British society, the immediate political future looks bleak.
The Conservative Party has shown over the course of the past half-decade, during which time it has had a large parliamentary majority, that it is unwilling to take the measures needed to deter illegal immigrants from abusing our asylum system and gatecrashing our country.
It has also shown itself to be a pro-mass immigration party. In fact the situation is worse than that. It has shown itself ready to lie, lie and lie again in order to drive up legal immigration to horrendously socially corrosive levels. It has brought in literally millions of people who do not share basic British civic values and are, as a collective, certain to be a net drain on the public finances too.
Meanwhile, the Labour Party and other left-wing entities such as the Liberal Democrats, the SNP, the Green Party and Plaid Cymru are ideologically committed to lax immigration control and further expanding the asylum racket.
So on the day after the next general election, there is going to be a government that will carry on along the reckless mass migration route which lies behind most of the worst pathologies in UK society: the loss of neighbourliness, the degeneration of shared public spaces, wage compression in working class jobs, pressure on public services capacity, acute housing shortages, the lack of productivity growth, the relentless Woke onslaught against white British families, the rampant over-taxation of middle-earners and a rising tide of anti-Semitism to name but a few.
So those of us who believe the country needs saving should be focused on how a genuinely socially and culturally conservative movement can take power in the election of 2028 or 2029. This is not to say that the next four or five years are a total write-off. Just by creating such an entity that surges in the polls during the next parliament we could place the existing establishment parties under immense and growing pressure to change their own approaches. Our traction could start to bite down against politics-as-normal as soon as 2025.
It seems as certain as anything can be in politics that the Tories are heading out of power this year. So the key question for us is not whether they will lose, but how should we want them to lose in order to open up space for a new patriotic politics of social stability? We have four basic options.
Should we hope for a moderate scale defeat giving them the chance to return to power after one term of Labour? Should we hope for a 1997 style landslide defeat which serves as a kick in the pants that can force fresh thinking? Should we hope for something like Labour’s epic defeat in 1931, when it was crushed down to just 52 seats? Or should we hope for a Canada 1993 wipeout?
Those internal Tory voices pressing for yet another leadership change are hoping for option one. The idea is that a new frontman or, more likely, frontwoman can alter the mood music, show a bit more right-wing ankle, campaign better than Sunak and keep the Tories above 200 seats and the Labour majority below about 80.
In my view, such an outcome would be a disaster for our project. It would lock in place most of the “One Nation” (in reality No Nation) MPs who serve as a block on the kind of radical policies on migration that we seek, such as breaking free of the ECHR and having an approach close to or at Net Zero on legal immigration. The failed Blairite paradigm would be extended without end: One or two terms of Starmer to be followed by a new Cameronian “socially progressive” Tory PM.
So what about a 1997-style landslide Labour win that screws the Tories down to about 160 seats? Another disaster for us, in my view. Most psephologists reckon a Tory defeat of this magnitude would tilt the parliamentary party further in the One Nation direction, especially given that the Red Wall Tory MPs, who tend to be more robust, would all have fallen by the wayside. Given the array of first order problems facing the country and the fact that Labour policies will not solve them, one can expect a Starmer administration to become quite unpopular very quickly.
So a Tory party dominated by southern commuter belt centrists that is still the official opposition could expect to rebound in the polls a long way inside the first half of the parliament. No doubt it would talk a good game on the migration crisis and seek to elevate minor differences of approach with Labour into big public talking points. But our chance to create a dominant and authentic new right-of-centre force would be gone. The prospect would then be two terms of Labour to be followed by the handing of the centrist baton back to the Tories in about 2033.
Now let us suppose that the current opinion polls (which show the Tories averaging 23 per cent and Labour on 45 per cent) are in fact replicated by real votes on general election day. This would give us a result in the ball park of Labour’s 1931 near wipeout. About 50 to 60 Tory MPs would be left. Perhaps the Lib Dems would even be the official opposition. In my view, this would be much more helpful to our project on one proviso: we would need the Reform Party to have won at least a handful of seats so that the long Tory monopoly over the right-of-centre was seen to be properly in jeopardy.
Under such a scenario, were Nigel Farage himself to have stood and won in Clacton,
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