The moral collapse of the Tory party

The government’s plan to detain and deport every individual who arrives in Britain on a cross-channel boat was always going to be contentious. The current assessment is that 40,000 people each year arrive on the beaches of the south coast.

When Suella Braverman, the home secretary, was asked on the Today programme where she was going to send those 40,000 people, she had no answer. Rwanda will take some, she said. Perhaps a few hundred. What would happen to the remaining 39,000? Where would they go? Braverman couldn’t say.

Practical issues remain – and also quite a few moral ones. If a person has risked their life to reach your island and your first instinct is to turn them round and send them away, then some people might regard that as uncaring. Others might even think it nasty. Gary Lineker, the BBC presenter, is one of those people. “There is no huge influx,” Lineker wrote on Twitter. “We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries.”

“This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s, and I’m out of order?”

This triggered a paranoid frenzy among the government’s supporters. “BBC urged to sack Lineker,” said the Telegraph’s front-page headline. The home secretary called his comments, “Unhelpful,” adding that, “I also think we are on the side of the British people here.” A troll-call of right wing commentators and culture war enthusiasts – Nigel Farage, Lee Anderson, Richard Tice – all criticised Lineker for daring to speak.

To pause and step back for a moment, isn’t it a little odd that Britain’s immigration policy has devolved into an argument between the hard right and a football pundit? A healthy, confident political culture isn’t meant to look like this. Nor is it meant to speak in such shrill, insulting terms: “Once again this taxpayer-funded virtue-signalling out-of-touch multi-millionaire ex-footballer pipes up to show how totally out of touch he is with the rest of the British public.” Those are the words of the deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, Lee Anderson.

The irony in all this is that the government’s immigration plan is meant to be unpleasant. That’s the whole point. Only by being unpleasant can it discourage people from crossing the channel – that’s the logic of deterrence. To say that the government’s plan is unpleasant is simply to point out its most fundamental characteristic.

However, as a BBC employee, Lineker is “taxpayer-funded”, and as far as Anderson and also Farage are concerned, this should bar him from all political debate. But really, the “taxpayer-funded” argument is entirely disingenuous. After all, Lee Anderson himself is an MP and therefore “taxpayer-funded”, but that has not stopped him accepting a job at GB News, the culture war television station. Jacob Rees Mogg, another sitting Conservative MP and also “taxpayer-funded”, also has a job on the same channel.

The “taxpayer-funded” argument is really an excuse to attack someone associated with the BBC, an organisation that this government openly detests. And because he is employed by the BBC, according to Braverman and Anderson, that means that Lineker is somehow out of touch, that he doesn’t represent the views of the majority. Well – if that’s the case, you might ask, what’s the problem? An irrelevant, out of touch person making irrelevant, out-of-touch comments? So what?

The wave of paranoid touchiness over a single tweet shows that, really, the opposite is true – they know very well that Lineker isn’t out of touch. Alarmingly, from the government’s perspective, he speaks to a vast cross-section of British society, one far wider than this government’s narrow and shrinking base. The latest YouGov polls show the Tory party on 25 points, Labour on 47.

We are in the end-phase of a political cycle. The Conservative Party has been in charge since 2010, and its policies, political outlook and moral character are in a state of collapse. Brexit destroyed the old Tory party. Once Johnson had chucked out the moderates, what remained was an extremist rump, incapable of government, whose main traffic was in nasty, culture-war grievance-mongering.

And now, the government’s main policy is based on the idea of calling, “a halt to all further immigration, the deportation of all illegal immigrants, a halt to the ‘asylum’ swindle.”

Lineker, along with millions of other people, feels deeply uneasy at this uncaring, politically cynical new policy. He is right to be alarmed at this government’s slide towards extremism. Some readers may object to his allusion to 1930s Germany. But consider this – the quote in the paragraph above is taken from the BNP’s 2010 general election manifesto. A policy that was until recently associated with street-brawling skinheads is now considered part of the Conservative mainstream.

That more than anything shows how politically degraded this government has become, and how right Lineker is to object.