Tories Show GOP How Not to Do It

For American patriots, this July 4 was pretty good. It’s not just that the Media Democratic complex was melting down over the discovery that their lies about Joe Biden’s condition are no longer capable of being uttered with a straight face—and now they must pretend they just didn’t know. This has, admittedly, been delicious. But there were a great many positive signs that America’s tattered flag may yet have some life in it.

This writer was in a suburb of Portland, Oregon, for our Independence Day. Yes, I know all about the insanity of Portland proper. But though it was a hot day for the Pacific Northwest, the 4^th of July Family Festival we attended in Happy Valley was filled with people wearing patriotic gear and enjoying patriotic songs. When our national anthem was sung, many people far across the park from the bandstand paused, stood, and faced the flag with hands over hearts.

Americans aren’t done just yet, I think. 

But if these good vibes are to last, we will need to have a better outcome to our elections than the British did across the pond on the same day we celebrated our independence from the Mother Country. After fourteen years of controlling the government, the Conservative Party, or Tories, were massacred in the Parliamentary elections. Labour, which is as bad as the Democrats are here, won a total of 411 seats, while the Tories won 131. The smaller and not-as-left Liberal Democrats won 71 seats, while various other leftish parties such as the SNP (Scottish National Party) and Greens won seats here and there.    

What happened to the Tories? The short answer is that, to channel Barry Goldwater, they offered an echo, not a choice. They were not really defeated by the Labour Party, which only captured about 35% of the votes; they were defeated by themselves. As British polling expert Sir John Curtice explained, “the party’s share of the vote is the lowest won by a post-war single party government.” It was lower than any of Tony Blair’s three victories and five percent lower than Jeremy Corbyn’s 2017 Labour victory. While Labour gained 17 points in Scotland (at the expense of the SNP), its percentage of the vote in Wales dropped four percent and gained only a half-percent in England.

Where did those Tory votes go? Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party gained a mere five seats, including Farage himself, but they played a decisive role in knocking out a lot of Conservative parliamentary candidates—including the fairly conservative sitting member Jacob Rees-Mogg. Because of fairly strategic voting on the left, the Liberal Democrats gained 60 seats. Curtice explains that “support for Reform rose more sharply, by 16 points, in seats that the Conservatives were defending—twice as much as in seats Labour were defending.”  

The most optimistic of predictions had Reform winning fewer than twenty seats. Why would so many people vote for Reform and against Conservatives? Especially when the former had no chance of getting close? The short answer is that the Tories’ notion of conservatism in 2024 matched their own countryman G. K. Chesterton’s gibe from 1924: “The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition.”

Indeed, as John O’Sullivan observed in a review of a book on British politics by British political scientist Matthew Goodwin, “since 2010 the two major parties have found agreement on the progressive side of such issues as zeroing out greenhouse gases (Net Zero), the COVID lockdown, and (for some) Brexit.” “That alone,” O’Sullivan added, months before the elections, “explains the Tories’ internal collapse and the unusual phenomenon of a mass movement of hitherto Tory voters expressing disgust toward their old party and a wish for its defeat and even disappearance.”

Former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron might be said to bear special blame for this growing disgust and wishes for destruction among the Tory constituency. His embrace, however lukewarm, of the climate change lobby, his spearheading the push for so-called same-sex marriage, and his opposition to Brexit all signaled that the Conservatives had left behind their constituency. His Conservative successors followed in his not-so-conservative path.

While Republicans in the United States are not in the same position as the ruling Tories were, our elections will be shaped by some of the same forces that went into Britain’s elections. O’Sullivan’s review includes four changes to British life described by Goodwin that are shaping the political future in ways that are somewhat unpredictable but must be addressed: “an economic policy of ‘hyper-globalization’ that has deindustrialized Britain and left working-class voters behind other prospering classes; mass immigration that has changed the country deeply without a democratic mandate; the U.K.’s participation in the process of European integration that has made government more remote from the electorate; and the rise of a ‘new, more insular, careerist and homogenous political class in Westminster.’”

Three out of the four are directly applicable to American political life. Hyper-globalization and industrial decline, mass immigration without a democratic mandate, and an insular, careerist laptop class are exactly what we suffer from on this side of the pond. And though Americans are not part of European integration, our own Byzantine administrative state certainly makes American government more remote. The acknowledgment that Joe Biden actually has been suffering from decline brings to the fore the reality that our supposedly elected figures don’t really hold the reins of government in the way they ought.

There is no equivalent of the Reform Party to spoil the fortunes of the GOP; disaffected conservatives will more likely stay home. But a successful November for Republicans will depend on a party that understands that they have to stay close to their own voters and to the Americans who might well vote for them. The Tories showed the GOP how not to do it. Now, Republicans must show they understand how our economy affects working-class people, how mass immigration (especially illegal immigration) makes us insecure and at odds with each other, and how the government cannot simply reflect the insular beliefs of nor be responsible only to the laptop class.

Those star-spangled festival goers around the country are not all Republicans. Nor are they all Democrats. Many of them have, if the flags and bumper stickers are any indication, decided to vote for Donald Trump. A lot of them are likely waiting to see if there is anybody else to vote for. Emphasizing how destructive Bidenomics and the radical social policies being pushed by this administration are might well depress the Democratic votes. But conservatives here need to give Americans a reason to think a vote for us is a vote for a “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X @davidpdeavel.