there’s only so much Rachel Sylvester they care to read. And just like all those ‘lost’ Tory voters, the chances are they won’t defect to rival brands, but they’ll simply sit on their hands until there’s a home for them to return to. For who among us really finds any of this to be a hugely convincing take on reality? Or at least, reality as refracted through conference:There have been two Conservative parties on display in Bournemouth . . . The first wears leopard-print kitten heels, describes itself as conservatives.com and opens its arms to the voters in a welcoming embrace. The second prefers metaphorical bovver boots, defines itself as Britain plc and scowls that it is proud to be seen as the ‘nasty party’.
Troglodyte scum, that latter lot. Thank goodness we have CCO to display some leadership: ‘as part of the attempt to present a more modern face to the world, Conservative Central Office had banned the Union flags that are traditionally waved at the end of the leader's speech’. Now that’s what we call Conservatism. Brave too. Happily the leader’s performance at this flag-free gala was such that he can now be pronounced, holy of holies, a ‘moderniser’. Lucky them. He’s still, as far as his new-found friends are concerned, no good (Miss Sylvester thinks that his ‘delivery was flat — and I have my doubts about whether the country wants a “quiet man” as its Prime Minister’) but never mind, he’ll do. Mind you, they’re not the first to think that.
Actual policies are thin on the ground, but Portilloites, and their new Labour fellow travellers like Rachel Sylvester, have always been very good at reading into their passive heroes all sorts of imaginative things. In Mr Duncan Smith’s speech, Miss Sylvester was able to read some distance between the lines and discover that the party’s going to get in touch with the real world by, ‘supporting the repeal of Section 28, backing equal rights for unmarried couples and ensuring that more women and ethnic minority candidates are chosen to represent his party at the next election’. Which, naturally, is an enormously surprising and far-sighted thing to think, and golly, won’t the votes just tumble into the ballot box when we offer this up at the next election.
However, although
[T]he ghosts will howl, [the] Tory leader should ignore them. Until he deals with these questions, they will continue to be sticks with which his critics can beat him. It is in any case illogical for a party that has as its theme that it ‘trusts the people’ to support the state's right to intervene in individuals' private lives when it opposes government meddling in the public sphere.
All in all, this was one of those rare occasions when those sublime words at the end of an article, ‘Alice Thomson is away’, failed to induce their normal carefree delight. We’ll come on to what a party that ‘trusts’ people should do to demonstrate that (though oddly enough we’ll be suggesting that, trusting its own members would be a convincing starting off point), but do you wonder who these ‘critics’ are? Who exactly are the folk who’ll keep ‘beating’ the poor old leader until he changes the party just so? It wouldn’t, perchance, be the people who want to change the party, would it? If so, that’s not a terribly nice way of proceeding — threatening a fellow unless he does what you want, it’s just not cricket. Beyond the predictable musings of its resident Labour supporting columnist — and we’re sorry to be partisan [‘partinasty’?] here, but this is not friendly advice the party’s in receipt of — the paper’s conference-verdict leader also elicited ‘trusting the people’ as a signal theme in the Leader’s speech. Accordingly, we need to consider very carefully whether this is now a party that can be trusted, and in turns, exhibits trust in others.
Give it up, it’s not worth it
We can perhaps all agree that letting the idea loose that Lord Tebbit might be ‘taken care of’ has not been anyone’s finest hour. Let’s further grant that it would have been really rather impressively hard if the Chairman’s hissing at her distinguished predecessor had been backed up by any sort of substance. It still would have been rotten and senseless and unproductive, but few could have argued that it was anything other than macho. Tragically this episode showed the ‘May touch’ in all its glaring inadequacy: hot air allied to disastrous consequences. There could have been a fair volume of nasty headlines and unfortunate press coverage avoided this last week if only Mrs May had not taken us down this silly road in the first place.
Yet as ever, the real ‘Tebbit problem’ has more to do with the fact that Iain Duncan Smith succeeded him in Chingford. Which is to say, the Chingford Conservative Association were able to select who they thought was the best man to replace Norman Tebbit in 1991, and now that right, that duty, is to be taken away from so many of their peers. This, the effort to rig candidate selection, is going to keep on causing grief, and the grief is going to get ever more intense, until its disrupts the entire basis of this leadership. By far the most sensible thing, on all accounts, that could be done is that, to paraphrase Mr Portillo, this aspect of ‘the project’ should be dropped.
Why it is still necessary to rehearse these arguments — against rigging — should be a matter of consternation and amazement, if the real objective behind the project were not so transparently obvious. But let’s do it one more time.
There is no evidence that having ethnically, socially or sexually balanced slates of parliamentary candidates has any electoral benefit whatsoever. If there was, rest assured it would have triumphantly been adduced by now. Further, even if it did somehow ‘work’, we ought to be vehemently opposed in principle anyway. There are all sorts of undesirable, Lansleyesque ways we could garner votes, and rightly we abhor those repugnant to Tory tradition and conventional bourgeois morality. Were it the case that we could get black people to vote for the party by the expedient of giving them black people to vote for, because they will only vote for black people, this would be so outrageously wrong that we should have nothing to do with it. Thank God, as the decades long example of white Labour MPs harvesting ‘black’ votes displays, this is not the case.
Point by point the patronising racism (or sexism or sexualism, as the case may be) of the Modernisers is as filthy as anything the New Left can contrive. Take the fundamental argument — unsupported, as we have said, by a single ‘fact’ in the way of psephological evidence — that overtly underlies the call, the determination, to rig candidate selection: you will no longer be allowed, or trusted, to select whichever individual you consider to be the best candidate for your constituency because we now are supposed to care for outcomes more than processes. What matters is that we should have the requisite number of gay and black and female candidates to wave around. And those we want for their own sake? Of course not. We are held by the leadership, and those who think for it, to want this as an outcome because a bunch of pasty-white, middle class London resident men purport to think that working class black women can only vote for female black oiks, and etcetera. The moral nullity of this policy is surely obvious to all.
Conceivably we need to continue to take this project seriously at the surface level at which it claims attention for itself. Therefore we will apply our minds to the practicalities of this terrible scheme ever being effectively implemented. One problem immediately apparent is, what shall we do with all those living, breathing members of parliament unfortunate enough to belong to ‘over-represented’ groups? Will we allow steady and relentless attrition to wash them away over the next few decades? Surely not, as that’s no way, under the dictates of this vile theory, to win elections in the here and now. So that’s bad news for the Jews. See how offensive this is all going to be in gory practice?
ERO has no idea what the figure is for the number of Jewish MPs in the Parliamentary Party, and nor do we want to have to live in a world where we need to know in order that we might work out the right quota, but what are the odds that by the lights of the Portilloites we have ‘too many’? Heavens above, you’d have to have a sneaking suspicion that we’ve come in ‘over-quota’ on Roman Catholics too. Sadly, unlike North Sea fishermen, we won’t be able to merely toss the unwanted surplus back into the briny deep — that, however, we will have to somehow do this is an inevitable consequence. For if you’re going to increase, by means of rigged, outcome-obsessed candidate-selection processes, the percentages of certain favoured groups, axiomatically this will entail diminishing those of groups already in the House. Fun, isn’t it, thinking on the sort of mind that could be set to a task like this?
What this is really all about
Such figures as we have to hand show that, beyond ‘profiling’, there has been no effective rigging undertaken thus far. Equally, Tory held seats have yet to select. That this project, if it is being seriously contemplated, will be conducted in an historically redolent cack-handed fashion is meet. That should not in any way lessen our opposition, and nor, across the constituency associations, will it. In terms of party management, this is the single most foolish, suicidal even, policy that could be adopted. It really won’t do the incumbent any good at all, and you’d have to wonder at the nature of the advice offered up in its favour. At the most basic level, profiling, the central bit of rigging publicly erected thus far, is so witlessly done that the first legal action can’t be far off. Given the inane basis on which individuals have been ‘profiled’, positively or negatively, who can seriously doubt what the outcome is going to be? This in itself perfectly encapsulates both the Portilloite’s core problem, and the wider problem they are thereby foisting on the party as a whole: the quality of the ‘willing helpers’ is so abysmally low that whatever the paper merits of their schemes, they are always going to fall down at the implementation stage.
However low-grade bureaucratic bungling is in this instance only a metaphor for what the Modernisers have got so especially, viciously wrong, and that’s their contempt for the very thing they are attempting to pervert — the Parliamentary Tory Party. A central tenet of the Modernist credo is that what determines electoral advantage is how ‘commentators’ and ‘pundits’ and sundry other unparliamentary wire-pullers are spun. In other words, who actual candidates are, and what they amount to as men, is very much a trivial, third or fourth order affair. The real fighting is done in, among and by the press. To illustrate the endlessly unsatisfactory nature of this analysis it is only necessary to ask, if you can explain past electoral performance (though only ever after the result), account then for future electoral performance, and show what the ‘iron laws’ are that will determine its outcome. Invariably a species of ‘Western Communist defending Eastern Communism circa 1974’ response is the reply: ‘it would work, we (the press) would be able to deliver as promised, if only the system were allowed to work properly’. Don’t blame us, the Tory commentariat say, we would win you elections if only boring old real life didn’t intrude.
Given that no one really has the slightest idea why people vote as they do — ERO encourages all its readers to biff on the nose anyone who tries to present you with models explaining how ‘rational’ voters are — what remains inescapably important, both in terms of process and outcome is the fact that we enjoy a parliamentary system of government. Good candidates do make a difference. Duff MPs are a dire problem. The idea that we should be contemplating selecting anyone other than the best person on offer (what rigging selection has to mean) while Owen Paterson still lives and breathes and sits in the Commons is incredible.
Naturally there’s a reason why people are making a concerted effort to rig candidate selection, and it’s got next to nothing to do with pious, out of character mewling about some vague desire to see more black, female or rouged faces on the Tory benches. No, the reasoning’s low, familiar and contemptible. To see what it is we have only to go on the journey of discovery that is, ‘the favoured candidate’.
So there you are, you’ve applied for, oh, Hornchurch, and failed, but someone friendly in CCO thinks that your faces fits the quota. Your bright-eyed chum in Smith Sq sagely observes, ‘the thing is, 80% of all public schoolboys in central London under 5ft 7” are voting Labour, and we need urgently to redress this balance. That’s why we need you — because [see Cchange pamphlets passim] as previously discussed, people only vote for their own’. Well thanks, you mumble, and then you’re taken care of accordingly.
To draw an overblown parallel at random, it’s just like Hitler’s Germany — this all is only ever going to happen if enough people can be found who have no sense of shame. This scheme will work solely if those who benefit from it are sufficiently lacking in self-respect to sign up for it in the first place. And what will we have then? A party made up of stooges utterly dependent on faceless backroom creatures — a party so whipped at every level that this beaten cur might even select, well, it might even select Gibb mi. There’s a thought to turn your hair white.
We at ERO have, obviously, the perfect solution to all our candidate selections woes, and that’s to abolish the list and allow for a gay free-for-all. Once an Association has selected whoever they want, then some aspect of the party — whether a committee of the National Convention, or the Board, or whatever, it really doesn’t matter, all they have to be is pompous and London-based — should have to individually ratify these names as official party candidates. The glory of this system is that the centre can shoot down ninnies, but there will be a big incentive not to, given the fuss that would inevitably occur if a name is rejected, and as important, it also means that it can’t impose its favoured sons. There, an easy-peasy solution. Make it so.
— ERO’s editorial comment
ERO, October 14, 2002 04:48 PM