Britain’s loony right have lost the plot

That is the only conclusion to draw from a recent screed in the Sunday Telegraph in which he says that we in Britain are living in a  “socialist dystopia”. This is a laughable idea, yet it it not really funny because it is being echoed by many others on the right, including quite a few candidates to be the next leader of the Tory Party.

A great deal of this kind of stuff is made up of frankly absurd attacks on a government that is not even three months old. The government is in hock to its “union bosses”, is introducing a “French-style labour market”, is dominated by the far left, is going to massively increase immigration, is responsible for all the deaths in the Channel because it has abandoned the mad and illegal Rwandan scheme, is raising taxes for the hell of it, trying to reverse and betray Brexit, is soft on crime, and is limiting the free speech of rioters calling for mass murder.

But leaving that rubbish aside, there is a more frightening aspect of this continual tsunami of Tory tripe. Because the underlying and quite openly expressed view of the right now is that the last 14 years of the Conservative government were nothing less than a socialist betrayal.

In a sense you can see where Heffer and his ilk are coming from. They wanted low taxes and less immigration and far less regulation, and they got more, a lot more, of all three. They hoped Brexit would lead to sunlit uplands and wanted to force trickle-down economics on the nation. One is a running sore, the other was such a disaster the chancellor and PM were both out of office and it was all reversed before that famous lettuce turned brown.

But unfortunately, they cannot see that it was because they were wrong. Like every attempt at communism, their vision must have failed because it was just not done quite right, it was not pure enough, it was betrayed.

The Tory years started with  David Cameronforming an alliance with the Liberal Democrats, who quite amazingly decided to go along with austerity and quite rightly got the blame for the ensuing disaster. But this was not a reaction to the credit crunch.

Cameron and George Osborne were always going to be small government conservatives; they said as much, they are Thatcher’s children and they thought it must work. They did believe, they did try, they were not socialists.

And they were totally wrong because the result was an appallingly damaging attack on the ability of the state to do things.

The armed forces were emasculated, and now we are told the country’s defences are totally inadequate and Labour must find the money to put this right. But it was the Tories who told us we could not afford higher defence spending and that they could do more with less, everywhere, all the time.

The police lost 20,000 experienced and highly trained officers, and the courts almost ground to a halt. Now Heffer is screaming that something must be done “as criminals run amok”. Who spent 14 years getting us in this mess, you might ask?

The NHS was also hit – the response to Covid was bad because we did not have enough doctors, nurses or beds, and the preparations for pandemics and the stockpiles necessary were run down to save money. Thousands died unnecessarily, and now the Telegraph is warning us that the country’s health is getting worse for the first time in 50 years, and something must be done.

Underlying all these problems is the simple fact that productivity, growth and earnings in the UK have been in the doldrums for the last 14 years. The Tories thought that slashing state spending would free up growth in other sectors of the economy, but it did nothing of the sort.

What those 14 years have proved instead is that without a well-functioning, well-funded state sector – one that has the capacity and bandwidth to deal with problems, push through reforms, invest, and support people – growth dies.

Why do we have so many unqualified unemployed people if the education department is doing its job? Why so few apprentices if the system is well funded? Why are retailers spending fortunes on their own security if there are enough police? Why are so many people off work sick if the NHS has enough resources? Why is our infrastructure so bad if we invest enough? All these things and many more hit growth.

But the right wing of the Tory Party has learned nothing, all it sees is higher taxes and therefore this must be a “socialist dystopia”. The simple reason is that taxes are higher after all those cuts because growth has been so bad that the government has had to take a larger slice of a smaller cake, and still the structure and capacity of the state are near collapse.

Losing 4% of the economy to Brexit just added more fuel to the fire, but it is one problem that no one has the courage to mention. It is a permanent drain on the state, more red tape, more checks, less trade, less foreign investment, less growth, less government income.

But the Tory Party’s response, trumpeted by Heffer and all the rest, is that the experiment was betrayed, and socialism has won, in fact they seem to seriously think that Cameron, May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak were all Guardian-reading, commie traitors. Therefore the battle must be renewed, but this time with more ruthless and truer believers in the cause.

Thus the candidates for the leadership of the Tory Party try to position themselves as such, and they all read the papers to see which way the wind is blowing. If there were any old-style One Nation Tories left the zeitgeist might be different, but they are long gone. 

To win, the next Tory leader needs to pander to the membership and they are far to the right of even the parliamentary party. Hence we have the increasingly ridiculous claims that there is no need for tax rises, the winter fuel allowance is sacrosanct, and a sharp increase in defence spending of 25% can be afforded by further cuts to other departments yet again. That there is more fat to cut and that only they, the true Thatcherites, can reverse the socialism which they apparently unfortunately oversaw, by mistake, when in the cabinet for all those years.

Do any of them really believe this stuff? Well yes, I think many of them do. They really think Donald Trump would be good for the UK and our security, that Truss was not given enough time and was betrayed by the woke blob. The kindest thing we can say about these people is that they are swivel-eyed loons. 

They have always wanted to destroy the NHS, force down wages and abolish benefits, and they really think a smaller state means higher growth, despite all the evidence to the contrary. They crave a return to Victorian attitudes. More deference, more poverty for most and obscene wealth for winners like them.

We had 14 years of trying to outdo Thatcherism, driven by the fools who worshipped her every move and idea, all trying to prove to mummy that they were her true heirs and worthy of her. They have wrecked the country, the government, the state and the economy in their efforts. 

Brexit has turned to dust in their hands, but they have just replaced it with more false idols – that austerity was not tried properly, that trickle-down economics is common sense, that benefits make us lazy, and immigration is bad for the economy. They have been wrong about almost everything, but they are doubling down.

All the while the cheerleaders of the right are egging them on: the useless Lord Hannan and Lord Frost, the absurd Janet Daley, Charles Moore, the discredited Tufton Street mob, the liar Boris Johnson. And yes, my old school chum Simon Heffer.

The right is swinging dangerously away from the centre. It wants us all to think it is only rejecting far left policies, but it is already on the edge of sensible political discourse and accelerating out of sight.

Heffer and his mates will continue to blow hot air in its sails as it disappears over the horizon. While Labour and the Lib Dems occupy and reinforce the centre ground, and try to rebuild the country.