FRIDAY SPECIAL – 20-01-22. While the Brits Wait on Sue Gray to Deliver a Noose for Boris the Tory Party is Falling Apart at the Seams

Edited from an original article at UnHerd: Hat Tip Matthew Goodwin

BREAKING NEWS today it is rumoured that some MPs are being threatened with withdrawal of their constituency’s funding if they do not support Boris in the PartyGate fiasco.  This is just another example of the dirty tricks at the heart of our government – it’s all coming out slowly as the chaos rolls on: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/boris-johnson-news-live-no-10-accused-of-blackmail-against-rebels-as-mp-says-defection-e2-80-98calmed-nerves-e2-80-99/ar-AASXr5H See the link below for a list of some leading characters in this ‘Carry on Politics’ farce.

IT’S ALL happening in British politics this week with Boris at the despatch box on Wednesday explaining he is waiting for the inscrutable Sue Gray (yes, her again; aren’t we all!) to deliver a report, thus there will be no discussion as he recovered with his usual bluster and managed fairly well at PM’s Question Time yesterday.

If Sue Gray’s ubiquitous name has been mentioned once in the media it has been repeated ad nauseam as some kind of ‘magic potion’ to cure a fatal malady that has infected the great British Establishment resulting in civil servants yipping it up with gay abandon.  Nobody told me that booze would banish the virus but then, we’re not told anything by our illustrious rulers that makes very much sense these days.

Over to you Matthew:

Voters across the ‘Red Wall’ should know that one quarter of their electricity bills is now spent on green subsidies; that Channel crossings are out of control; that immigration has not yet been brought back down and that under BoJo the country is now ruled by a ‘metropolitan Tory chumocracy’, totally detached from the rest of the country, fearlessly partying whilst the plebs are (and the queen to boot) isolated and social distanced to save the NHS and keep everyone safe because ‘we are all in this together’ – yeah, right!

The stoic Northerners, (Red Wallers), were the very people who gave BoJo his massive majority at the election in 2019 but are now abandoning him in the polls. They were expecting a call to return to low taxes; to push back against this ‘woke nonsense’; to reform the BBC and restore freedom of speech which is being attacked with ‘cancel culture’

One person who would approve is Lord Frost, who this week used his first intervention since resigning from government to urge BoJo to become a ‘true Tory’ or risk imminent defeat.

He pointed to many of the same issues that are being targeted by the Alternative Right:  sharp tax rises; an obsession with Net Zero; the failure to make the most out of Brexit; the policing of other people’s opinions by those who Frost calls “woke warriors” – people who appear determined to revise, if not repudiate, British history, identity and culture.

To what extent is there room for such a revolt? Almost a decade ago, in ‘Revolt on the Right’, Robert Ford and I warned that the Conservative Party was vulnerable to a rebellion on its Right flank among specific groups of voters who both main parties had lost sight of: working-class, non-graduate, culturally conservative, older Britons.

Yet far from resolving this underlying tension, in many ways Brexit and Boris Johnson now appear to be breathing new life into it. There was always an open question as to whether Johnson would be able to hold support from the cultural conservatives who flocked to Farage (now on GBNews TV) and Brexit. And now, at the halfway point of his premiership, we are getting the answer.

Johnson is increasingly adrift from his core supporters on not just one but many issues, so much so that it is not hard to see how Farage’s Reform Party, which is already attracting around 11% of the Leave vote, could soon morph into a far more formidable force in British politics. While they might not have any upcoming European elections, which Farage used to demonstrate his electoral credibility, they do have the fact that Boris Johnson is currently haemorrhaging Leave voters.

In the polls, the picture facing the Conservative Party today is even worse than it was before Christmas, when it first became clear that Leavers were starting to abandon the party in droves. While Labour has cemented their lead, the Conservatives have now not held a lead outside the margin of error since the first week of November. And at the heart of this are the very voters who Reform and Farage now have within their sights. And the Tory party is well-known to be unforgiving when a leader loses the support of the electorate.

The share of Leave voters who plan to vote Conservative at the next election is continuing to slide, from 72% last June to 62% in October, 60% in November and 58% this month. Today, remarkably, fewer than half the Leavers think that Johnson, who actually delivered Brexit, would make the best Prime Minister.

Nor are these the only signs which point to potential inroads for Reform. Amid an escalating cost of living crisis, higher inflation and looming tax rises, a tide of disillusionment is now sweeping through an already fragmenting Conservative electorate.

One survey last week put the Conservatives sixteen points behind Labour across more than fifty seats which Johnson won in 2019. Another suggests almost 80% of ‘Red Wallers’ say Johnson ‘does not understand their pain’. And another finds that while only 26% of British voters have heard of ‘levelling-up’, almost three-quarters of people across the north do not know what it means or have never heard of it at all.

It will take more than a delayed levelling-up white paper to solve this. Johnson has simply failed to sell his core policies to his core voters. Pollsters might point to the fact that large numbers of voters say we should tackle climate change as evidence for the suggestion they will put up with costly climate change policies. But they miss a key point. For many conservatives this is simply not a salient issue. They just do not see it as a pressing priority in the way inflation, welfare, fighting crime or curbing immigration is.

Meanwhile, when it comes to Brexit, only half of Johnson’s core voters think it is going well. When it comes to immigrants crossing the English Channel, not even one in ten think the government is doing a good job. And when it comes to levelling-up, only 8% think it will lead to more money being spent on their local area.

It is a similar story for other areas which are attracting the wrath of prominent Eurosceptics such as Jacob Rees-Mogg, including taxes. For the first time since Boris Johnson took power, today the share of Conservatives who think the Government is taxing too much and spending too much on public services has eclipsed the share who think it has got the balance right.

And when it comes to ‘cancel culture’, while most conservatives think the Government should prioritise the protection of free speech, nearly two-thirds also feel they are now living in a country where they have to stop themselves from expressing their real views because of their fears about what will happen if they do.

These things matter. Many people in Britain do feel, strongly, that ancient and hard-won freedoms are under threat from an alliance of Big Tech, radical progressives and the cancel culture apparatchiks. The Left might dismiss all this as ‘culture war politics’, but it could easily become as potent for the radical Right today as Brexit was to an earlier generation.

We simply now live in a country where voters have become far more used to switching their political loyalties from one election to the next, where the Conservative Party’s leadership is no longer aligned with its new electorate; where the vote for Brexit has shown voters the kind of change they can bring about against the massed forces of Globalists like Tony Blair and where culture remains just as important as economics. It might be tempting to argue that the revolt on the Right is over but only a fool would believe it.

But what is not being said in public, anywhere that I can see, is the implication of PartyGate hidden in plain sight.  It seems that those ‘in the know’ were fearless enough to disregard the rules and party at length, like Hancock and other miscreants; here’s a list of some of them. https://www.standard.co.uk/insider/who-partygate-downing-street-party-lockdown-covid-carrie-johnson-cummings-b976254.html   After all, they too have families and vulnerable grandparents – were they not concerned about them – it’s seems not?  Matthew’s original article is here: https://unherd.com/2022/01/will-boris-survive-a-revolt-on-the-right

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Author: Austrian Peter

Peter J. Underwood is a retired international accountant and qualified humanistic counsellor living in Bruton, UK, with his wife, Yvonne. He pursued a career as an entrepreneur and business consultant, having founded several successful businesses in the UK and South Africa His latest Substack blog describes the African concept of Ubuntu - a system of localised community support using a gift economy model. View all posts by Austrian Peter