2015 is when it really went off the rails. The biggest mistake at that point was turning austerity into a political mission rather than an economic one. They did the same with privatisation years before.
Since 2015 we have had six Prime Ministers in ten years. Prior to 2015 we had six Prime Minsters in forty years. This political instability reflected the instability in the country as a whole where we junked a broad political consensus on our industrial and foreign policy and lurched from a rebranded 1970’s Labour lite protectionist industrial policy - a ‘high wage economy’ as Johnson called it, to a far right low tax, minimal state and threadbare safety net for everyone. Basically, an ‘I’m all right Jack and fuck anyone who isn’t’ society. It lasted 45 days.
At this point the Tories were politically and intellectually dead. They were neither the party of business nor the party of the people. There was no intellectual coherence or even any idea of what the stood for. Sunak was left to tend the shop, made little attempt to govern and any hard decisions like overcrowding in our prisons and potential collapse of the justice system were booted into the next Parliament for a new Government to deal with. All they had was unworkable gimmicks and rhetoric. They even allowed our Union to be divided into separate economic jurisdictions - something May said was unthinkable for a Tory Government. Until Johnson threw our Union under the bus and held a funeral for the ‘Conservative and Unionist Party’.
What is their future? A change in leadership most certainly, but they also need a new identity. The far right is occupied by Reform whose obsession is immigration, but would also like to gut the State, health care and safety nets and make the rich even richer as the the GOP/Trump are doing now. For that they need marks and you are the mark. You have to con the people first before you can rob them. The beauty of marks is they can’t imagine they are marks until reality bites as it is currently doing especially in rural Republican communities in the US.
Starmer/Labour are pitching tent in the centre with a side helping of social conservatism (which has always been a feature of Labour and for which I have a strong distaste). This will push younger voters especially women towards more left leaning parties. Everyone talks about men drifting right, but the drift of women leftwards is just as pronounced if not more so.
So wither the Tories? Their right side is occupied, Labour are making a play for the centre, and they torched their reputation for competence. They need an identity, otherwise what is the point of them?
