In this election all of the parties have set out their stall apart from the Tory party. The petulant child at a dinner party, the Tories have added absolutely nothing to this election other than becoming the symbol of tired and corrupt liberal politics caught up in its own drama. The difference between the Tories and voters is so stark that the Tories know it and want to drag others to their level. The Tories have been the worst form of British politics, which is saying something as the Labour Party betray the cynical side.
Throughout this election here at the TDL Times we refuse to call the Tories the Conservative Party. They are not conservative and to call them that is like calling a rabid wolf a puppy; calling it something doesn’t make it so. The Tories have governed like Social Democrats and they can’t agree on any important matters of political identity since David Cameron’s time. Their leaders have been liberals, Boris Johnson was not a conservative despite winning a ‘conservative’ majority in 2019. Rishi Sunak was a massive fan of Tony Blair back in the day and their potential leaders like Rory Stewart have since declared they are voting Labour. The ‘conservatives’ have all gone quiet or are engaging in the toxic tactics that make them a truly nasty party.
Firstly, they have been deceptive. Tory literature in the form of flyers barely mentions the Conservative Party at all. The logo is often missing. Rishi Sunak is nowhere to be seen. Even Nigel Farage appeared on one or two in a way that tries to make the Tory candidate look good. They have been deceiving people by their language, dismissing anything other than them as the alternative to the Labour Party. “They’re our votes” was a phrase used far too many times by all wings of the Tory party as if they “owned their voters”. They have been deceptive in terms of their outrage against Labour. “They’ll put up your taxes!” They scream, whilst having put up taxes to record levels since the 1940s, and would have raised taxes more anyway even if they somehow won. Their messages are so inauthentic. “We will lower immigration”. Heard that one in the last 4 elections. Lies. “We’ll push back on woke” yet in the last 14 years they sat on their hands as the toxic anti-western culture swept through the schools and institutions. The Tories could promise to cure cancer and no one would be listening. The deception and the hope people would forget the last 14 years just didn’t work.
So, the message isn’t working? Let’s let loose the dogs of the media on our opponents. The Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Financial Times (before abandoning them for Labour), the BBC, ITV, all they could muster must go for the competitors. The messages were long and relentless from newspaper editorials labelling Labour as the next circle of hell and Reform as racists. There was no let up, no positive message, no desire to come to terms with the faults of the past. There was only doubling down in the columns in the newspapers in an attempt to drown out the voices of the people and of genuine discussion with messages in the mainstream media of doom and fear from the friends with pens and access to newspaper printers. The kinds of things you could read in the newspapers would be the things that the Soviet newspaper controllers of PRAVDA would have been proud of. Propaganda of the highest order.
People aren’t paying attention? Let’s get the next message out from the Tories. Let’s smear the Reform party (and by proxy Reform voters who used to vote for the Tories). Let’s tear them a new one. Let’s go for the Russia hoax. Let’s say that Russia has fuelled the Reform campaign with no shred of evidence. Let’s accuse Russia of making bots to flood social media with fake accounts endorsing Reform with no evidence. Let’s get deputy leader Oliver Dowden to declare an interview fully about the threat of Russia’s robots making the Reform Party look good. It was incredible. No evidence, nothing.
Well, if that doesn’t work let’s make sure we have our back-up plan; racism. Let’s accuse Reform and its voters of being racists. Never mind that more ethnic minorities support Reform more than the Liberal Democrats. Never mind Reform’s diverse list of candidates (we hate having to mention this, it should be a given and not a brag). Never mind their manifesto mentioning absolutely nothing about race whatsoever. Let’s get them. Let’s make sure there is a manufactured story about racism in an undercover filming of an actor with no ties to the party other than him wearing a Reform rosette. Let’s then make sure we have plants in the party to resign as Reform candidates minutes before the nominations closed (7 minutes before to be exact) and let’s have some resign days before the election and endorse the Tory candidate all edging widespread ‘racism and sexism’. It is just too difficult to watch or pay attention to. It was deceptive and deceitful and an absolute tactic from Conservative Central Office.
If none of this works. If everything they’ve thrown at the parties doesn’t seem to stick and a historic defeat looks too obvious, then we have one more card. Let’s wheel out Boris Johnson. Wow. Is that it? Is that all you have left? A man stabbed so badly in the back by the current Tory leader is your savour? A man who locked down the country over and over again, whilst breaking the rules himself whilst opening the door further to mass immigration whilst removing the law forcing companies to advertise jobs in Britain BEFORE advertising abroad, that’s your last card? The man who put the peddle down on net-zero and sat idly by as monuments, the cenotaph and Churchill’s statue were defaced by a Marxist mob of students, that’s your final card? The Tories wheeled out a man so ragged, so not wanting to be there, so not wanting to even touch Rishi Sunak let alone embrace him. Why? What was the point?
Therein lies the crux of tha matter. What was the point of the Tories in the last 6 weeks? What did they achieve? They tried to undermine democracy by trying to artificially remove a viable and legitimate alternative. They tried desperately to discredit a party that they ape in all but name in the form of the Labour Party. They made small sums of money on insider betting of the general election. They engaged in election interference on a scale that would make dictators in banana republics proud. They engaged in fear campaigns that would make you think that Stalin himself was in charge of Labour and Adolf Hitler was in charge of Reform. They engaged in nothing for the cause of conservatism because they frankly are not conservative.
So what are they now? At best a regional group of centrist politicians who don’t want to be run by the trade unions happy to live in the leafy countryside whilst agreeing with the Labour Party about everything but the Labour Party’s most whacky social policies. They will be found in the shires of England or in the commuter towns around big cities with perhaps a sea-side constituency too. They’ll sit on their hands and whistle as the next parliament drives a stake through the heart of the British constitution, lodged half way already by the Blair years. They’ll double-down on centrism and continue to market themselves as some sort of party on the right when in actuality they have more in common with Blairism than they do with Thatcherism.
What will their legacy be on the basis of this election? They will resemble a grey cake left out in the rain; rather sad to look at and hoping someone will just sweep it away when the weather gets a bit better. They will have presided over the worst political campaign in history, achieving a result worse than all forecasters predicted at the beginning of the campaign and having made a mockery of democracy by attempting to discredit everyone that wasn’t wearing a blue rosette, and even then they hate each other.
If Reform UK get this right they could very well replace the Tories as an electoral force. They’d have done so already if the electoral system allowed it but our system requires at least 2 elections for there to be an actual replacement (it took the 1918 and 1922 elections for Labour to replace the Liberals). The Tories will cling on to relevance through their remaining MPs but if Reform get this right then there will be defections on the dwindling rump of MPs on the right of the party and all that will be left will be dozens of Tory MPs on borrowed time as the Lib Dems or Blairite Labour wing lick their lips, perhaps even enticing some to their side too (funny no one mentions possible Tory defections to Labour after this election - they were doing it beforehand!). The Tories know this possibility and have done all they can to stop this. But if the Reform Party poll anything above 15%, or even closer to 20%, and get at least 8 MPs into Westminster then that’l be it for the Tories.
We predicted yesterday the Tories would hold onto around 140 seats but we predicted they would come third in the popular vote (we know, what the hell is that about). The Tories are currently predicted a percentage way too high by some pollsters simply because Tory voters are predicted to come out to vote come what may as well as the Tory party having a good local campaign. Their national campaign is so bad that they will lose the marginals most likely and have to rely on not losing TOO much in their previously safe seats, of which the Tories have a considerable amount. There will be tactical voting that forms the majority of Tory support much like the Lib Dems (which will be existential in the next parliament, but more on that later). They won’t be wiped out but they will have the heart of conservatism ripped out of them and they will not be able to get it back; not unless their next leader is a hard-hitting CONSERVATIVE.
We must not forget the cynical Labour Party who have done nothing for this election as well. They have’s provided a serious alternative, they are just THE alternative due to the quirks of this electoral system. They will most likely get exactly the same amount of votes as they did in 2017 and yet somehow declare that this shows that they have some kind of mandate to do anything they want. They do, as is the way of parliamentary politics, but they will call this a victory that is almost biblical (we will make our very different prediction to that for the next parliament tomorrow). They have placed the word “Change” as their slogan, though this is as deceptive as the Tories claiming they are conservatives. There will be no change outside of constitutional change. Economic and social policy will remain but it will just be more overt.
When you go out to vote tomorrow think more of what you are voting FOR, not against. We implore you not to vote for one party or another, we just ask that you vote for something in a positive way rather than in a negative way. Politicians genuinely don’t care about negative voting, they will spin it to be a vote for them to be the next coming of Blair (we were going to say Jesus but Blair thought himself a god anyway…still does). What have the Tories or Labour genuinely done to get your vote in a positive way? Maybe there is something! Great! Just be sure it is positive, not negative, because negative politics (imported from America) cannot and should never win in polite and grown-up society. For toxicity to thrive negative politics must win the day. Don’t let that happen.
It’s in the blood. Be positive.
This article first appeared on the TDL Times. For more information, articles and more please visit www.thetdltimes.com.
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