Tories abandon the ‘Red Wall’
Posted by admin978 on November 14, 2023 · Leave a Comment
This week’s government reshuffle is far more important than the usual parliamentary manoeuvres. In effect it signals the end of the Conservative Party’s attempt to rebrand itself as the voice of White workers.
After British voters backed Brexit in 2016, the governing party’s first reaction was to abandon its experiment with extreme social liberalism. Under Prime Minister David Cameron (Tory leader from 2005-2016) and his right-hand man George Osborne, the Tories combined economic austerity with an unprecedented and overt friendliness towards racial and sexual minorities. They sought in effect to become the natural home of black transsexual stockbrokers, and they were surprised when in the Brexit referendum, White working class voters refused to follow their lead.
This was scrapped by Cameron’s replacement in 2016, Theresa May, who was instinctively a traditional Tory Anglican, though with much of the woolly-mindedness that this implies.
Mrs May had opposed Brexit, and she tried unsuccessfully to implement a Brexit-lite, thus losing support on both sides of the argument. Moreover, as her staff soon discovered, she had a deep-rooted personal detestation for the louche style of the Cameron-Osborne regime. She loathed their history of drug-taking, their arrogant sense of public-school entitlement, and their contempt for ordinary people.
Mrs May’s tragedy was that while many of her instincts were “right-wing”, she also had many of the hang-ups of her generation: she sought to be both traditionally English and genuinely “anti-racist”. And needless to say she is utterly devoted to Zionism (in stark contrast to an earlier generation of traditional Tories, even in the “moderate” faction, such as Lord Carrington and Sir Ian Gilmour).
These contradictions eventually destroyed Mrs May’s government, and it was under her successor Boris Johnson that the Cameron approach was utterly scrapped. Instead of economic austerity, Johnson promised that Brexit would bring a totally new Conservative policy of “levelling-up”, i.e. investment in those impoverished areas of the North and Midlands that had swung the referendum in his favour.
And combined with this policy reversal, Johnson and his allies made noises (at least) indicating a new social conservatism, especially as regards immigration and related issues such as crime and housing.
In December 2019 this transformation of the Tories into a quasi-nationalist party produced a landslide election victory. Johnson’s party made historic inroads into previously safe Labour constituencies, breaking down what journalists had dubbed the “Red Wall”.
Most importantly, where Mrs May had equivocated, Johnson delivered what seemed to most voters to be an acceptable form of Brexit (with the tragic exception of a weak and treacherous policy on the Northern Ireland border question).
Even after the various scandals that destroyed Johnson’s government, he seems to have maintained a level of popularity in these “Red Wall” areas that has eluded his successors. In 2002 the Tories lurched towards a very different “right-wing” approach on economics, adopting American-style policies that would have had a disastrous effect on working-class voters, during the short-lived Truss premiership.
And then they opted for a Prime Minister straight out of the Goldman Sachs training manual. Rishi Sunak, the son of Indian immigrants who is married to the daughter of one of India’s wealthiest men, tried unconvincingly to be the voice of both multiracial plutocrats and indigenous proletarians. He has been an electoral failure since his first day in office.
As nemesis approached (with a General Election due by January 2025 at the absolute latest) Sunak attempted the “dog whistle” politics of “culture wars” – weird though this always seemed, when three of the four most senior posts in his government have been held by non-Whites.
One of those weird non-White “nationalists” was the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, who provoked the current crisis by taking an extreme line against pro-Palestinian demonstrators. So extreme, in fact, that it brought the Home Secretary into conflict with the Metropolitan Police.
No doubt part of Braverman’s motive for picking this fight is that (though herself the daughter of ethnic Indian immigrants) she is married to a Jewish businessman. But another motive is surely that Braverman is seeking to put herself in pole position as the “right wing” candidate for the Conservative Party leadership, after Sunak’s inevitable defeat in about a year’s time.
And how did Sunak respond to this challenge? On Monday morning he sacked Braverman, and after moving James Cleverly (another son of immigrants, in his case Africans) to the Home Office, made the extraordinary decision to bring back former Prime Minister David Cameron as Foreign Secretary.
Cameron left active politics in 2016 immediately following his defeat over Brexit. Like Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, he has returned after a seven-year absence.
This lurch into the past represents the Conservative Party’s abandonment of Johnson’s “Red Wall” strategy. Sunak’s Tories will now be openly focused on retaining their traditional affluent supporters, and regaining those who deserted them over Brexit. That will inevitably mean scrapping even a pretence of sharing the concerns of the White working-class.
A couple of careerist “right-wingers” (Esther McVey and Dame Andrea Leadsom) have returned to the lower ranks of government, in a token effort by Sunak to appease the “right”.
But the truth is that this is a recapture of the Tory Party by the Goldman Sachs brigade – the people with whom Sunak has always been most at home.
For real British nationalists, this begins a period of historic opportunity. As regular H&D readers will know, our movement is in a shambolic state. The British Democrats are the only electorally-focused representatives of traditional British nationalism, and they only function in a few areas of the country.
During the coming weeks and months, H&D will examine the strategies that British nationalists and our European counterparts are adopting in response to the present crisis.
