Even on their favourite battlegrounds, the Conservatives have no new ideas
The Conservatives have no new solutions or ideas for migration, crime, and pretty much everything else. They can’t even turn old ideas into good policies, writes Will Cooling
This has been the quietest British politics has been for over a decade. With previous summers dominated by Tory or Labour leadership intrigue, novel pandemics, Britain leaving the European Union or Scotland trying to leave the United Kingdom, or whether Britain would bomb Syria, you have to go all the way back to 2012 for a year where politicians could enjoy the parliamentary recess in peace and quiet.
But this is not just about Westminster finally being able to catch its breath after a decade of turbulence, this is about a government that lacks purpose after a decade of errors. You get few arguments from Conservative politicians or commentators against the idea that Britain needs a change in direction if it is to address its many problems. But after thirteen years of Tory-led governments, what you get less of is ideas to address these problems.
And by problems I don’t expect Conservatives to turn round and start sounding like liberals or socialists. There are enough things going wrong with today’s Britain that there are issues where you would expect right-wing politicians to be at the forefront of developing responses to.
A few weeks ago, ministers unconvincingly trotted out the tired old slogans about “stopping the boats” to hide that they had no new ideas about how to stop asylum seekers crossing the channel or mitigate the impact their arrival has on coastal areas. The closest thing to a new idea comes from the Home Secretary, who argues that the time is ripe to leave the European Convention of Human Rights so that we can rush hearings and be less discerning about where we deport failed applicants to.
But this is just a gimmick from those addicted to the Brexit psychodrama, hoping that such calls can act as a new rallying cry to reunite the Vote Leave coalition. It doesn’t even attempt to grapple with the reality that in this area the ECHR does little more than attempt to standardise how European countries interpret their responsibility under various United Nations treaties on refugees. That is why non-European countries such as America and Australia have remarkably similar debates about asylum seekers to our own.
Likewise, the government was happy to jump on the bandwagon in condemning Lucy Letby’s failure to appear in court for the jury’s verdict or sentencing, with the Prime Minister calling the murderer of at least seven infant children, “cowardly”. But they had no answer on whether they were satisfied that life imprisonment was the appropriate punishment for her, or whether it would be preferable that she be executed. Even those on the right who made supportive noises towards the death penalty would couch it in calls for an “honest debate” or demands that “woke elites” stopped ignoring the will of the people. What there wasn’t, was any real attempt to address the policy problem that initially led to the abolition of the death penalty and still acts as a deadweight on its support; the fear that death sentences would lead to innocent people being killed in the event of wrongful convictions.
And then you have the overall performance of the police, with surveys showing a stark loss of confidence in their ability to protect the public. But like a New Labour tribute act, all the leading members of the government could do was bark orders and ban things, with Suella Braverman demanding the police actually investigate all thefts whilst Rishi Sunak gave them yet more powers to tackle knife crime. Completely absent were any ideas about how to restructure the police or reform their working practices to strengthen their ability to maintain order.
You could keep going through a list of policy areas where the Tories should be the ones that care, should be the ones that make the running on the issues, and there’s just nothing there. Even more so than in 1996 or 1963, the party is a shell of its former self, shorn of all energy and ideas. I have never seen a party so intellectually worthless as today’s Tory Party, being utterly disinterested in developing new ideas, and incapable of refining old ideas into workable policies.
There is seemingly nothing left for them to do but to lose the next election and let Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party try to sort out the mess they’ll have left. The sooner that happens, the better it will be for everyone.