No. 112 - Call me Old Fashioned. Oh… and Happy New Year!

Dear James,

Call me old fashioned, but I want to offer you my sincere congratulations for your win last month and to wish you and your family a happy new year. Chivalry, you see, is still alive and well in our land despite the violence done to it during the last three years. Based on the values of truth, charity, honour and kindness, chivalry requires those in power to honour truth and show mercy to the less fortunate. Unfortunately, there was not much of that on display during the recent election. 

On December 12th, through your party’s relentless scapegoating of the hapless Mr Corbyn, you converted, with the help of the first-past-the-post voting system, a minority of votes (47%) into a 124 seat majority in Boris’s Brexit vote on December 18th. So now your party is back, red in tooth and claw and our nation is about to be subjected to a massive economic experiment that may change many things but will not change the underlying problems of our country. John Stuart Mill’s ‘stupid party’ has returned. Hold on tight for the low and dishonest decade to come?

Initially, of course, you will get a bounce. There will be a recovery of inward investment, the pound will go up slightly, the North will be somewhat rewarded for its renouncement of Labour and many people will be relieved that our political deadlock is over. But look around you James. Our Union of over three hundred years is already cracked along the Scottish border and down the Irish Sea. The damage was done when Boris broke his long proclaimed principle of the union with Northern Ireland. He won because he changed your party into a Farage Mark 2 party. The Economist published an article recently entitled, ‘The Tories are the World’s Most Successful Party’. It listed a series of characteristics that have made this possible. Amongst these is the Tory willingness to sacrifice any principle in the pursuit of power. Peel did it when he abandoned the landed gentry for the interests of the mercantile classes. Disraeli and Lord Salisbury did it when they acceded to greater democracy to extend their party’s power. And Mrs Thatcher did it when she broke your Party’s control of the City with her Big Bang in 1986. The principles broken this time however, are retrogressive. They are our divorce from the largest free-trade area in the world and the cracking open of the bonds that have bound the kingdom together for three hundred years. In return your party is offering the return of a putative sovereignty. The financial cost of this according to Professor Portes of the UK in a Changing Europe is a loss of 6% of GDP over 10 years if Boris gets his deal with the EU and a loss of 8-9% of GDP if we leave with no deal on WTO terms. That’s some way to start the ‘renewal of our nation’. But hey ho, at least we will have our sovereignty back! 

Boris talks of uniting the nation. He has committed to solving the problems of the ’left behinds’ of the North and Midlands. Yet one of Boris’s first announcements is that he will spend the New Year with his girlfriend on the island of Mustique in the Caribbean, that haunt of the rich and powerful. He has also refused to visit the recently flooded regions of the north. Boris has clearly learned much from Mr Trump. Honour, sympathy and shame are far removed from this man’s mental furniture. 

Let me be frank. Many people in your constituency and our nation are shocked and desperate about their future.  Your victory was based upon a violation of the above truths to the extent the election became the most dishonest since the second world war. Lies were the order of the day. Your leader prevaricated, refused to submit himself to proper scrutiny, avoided difficult questions by hiding in a fridge, and making every kind of false promise under the sun to engage the left behind people of the North and Midlands. It worked. As John Stuart Mill said with reference to his ‘stupid party’ jibe, ‘ … there is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power.”

If you study Tory history James, you will see that all your previous breaks with the past have been merely the Tory Party catching up with the present – the growth of the merchant class, the burgeoning of democracy, the end of the old school tie in the City. While I sincerely hope that I am wrong, this time the abandoning of principle looks different. It may address the problem of the North, but it is based upon a retreat into English Nationalism which is, by definition narrow, inward looking and, eventually, self-defeating.

But there is some good news James. I, for one, shall continue to write to you and ask you the questions that any independently minded constituent should be asking you. In the spirit of true chivalry, I concede to youyour recent victory. What I do not concede to you is our nation’s ultimate future.

Happy New Year! 

Kind regards, 

BH - Your Concerned Constituent