The Last Tory Government?

A stonking majority, the authority to get things done, a message to Brussels that they can no longer use back-channels to undermine the British government’s negotiating position. Seats in Conservative hands that have never before welcomed a blue rosette – all is rosy, surely?

However, the seeds of destruction are there.  The two major factors which won a Conservative majority were Jeremy Corbyn and Brexit, in that order. By the next election in four and a half years’ time, both of those factors will be gone. Unless the government and the new cohort of blue-team MPs can prove their value to the man on the street, or the woman in the hospital bed, then that swathe of northern seats will start turn scarlet again.

The red wall fell, and when the BBC ventured into those unfamiliar areas they found many new Conservative voters, but not a great deal of enthusiasm: the vote was anti-Corbyn and for good reason: Corbyn promises nothing that works and he is a declared enemy of everything British, but the honest working man (and even the dishonest one) is a patriot first.

The idea that Labour is for the working man is a hard one to eradicate.  They talk a good fight. They can never achieve what they claim they can, but the identity is embedded, that they represent the working class and the Tories the upper classes, and that is a strong draw.

Away from the northern towns and the gritty estates, the enthusiasm for Corbyn’s Labour went beyond class-based identity prejudice and filled a number of fashionable-thinking middle-class, muddle-class people who should have known better and who have more to lose. Much of London remains a Labour stronghold – and patriotism is rarely considered a virtue in those circles, nor sense and logic when it comes to it. In those circles a different approach is needed.

It is difficult for Conservatives to understand the mindset that accepts Socialism as an attractive prospect or which warms to Corbyn – it is bizarre. Why should a teacher break off an English class to harangue her pupils about how they will all be failures because public schools exist, or a history teacher claim that one of the vilest of Nazi thugs was all right really because he enjoyed debauching teenage boys in his authority: two examples reaching my ears only this week – that is incomprehensible to the Conservative mind. That mindset though must be understood if any inroad is to be made into it.

This needs deeper examination, and longer articles, but the myths, the oversimplifications, the unreasoned prejudices (and we all have those) must not remain unchallenged, for if ever there is to be another Conservative victory like yesterday’s, with no Brexit and no Corbyn, the Conservatives must break the internal ‘red walls’ of the mind.

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Author: LittleHobb

Solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short