The Tories Had to Be Smashed

The writer is in Australia.

There’s a reason that the highest rated Sky Australia TV show is the Sunday morning Outsiders show, hosted by Rowan Dean, the fearless editor of the Speccie Australia. In part that’s because the prism through which that show tries to understand the world is a very powerful one. In today’s democracies there are the technocratic insiders. These people like to think of themselves as the “expert class”. In rough and ready terms this is the bureaucracy. This is the tertiary professoriate and Vice-Chancellors. This is the corporate top end of town. This is the NGO sector, including most of the churches. This is the lawyerly caste and judiciary with its love of undemocratic international law. This is the managerial class. And most definitely this is the legacy press or mainstream journalist caste. These are the people – and obviously I speak in general terms as there are nonconformists, iconoclasts, dissidents and mavericks in all groups – who believe that the expert class (a.k.a. themselves) generally makes better decisions than mere plebs (a.k.a. your average voters). Hence their commitment to democratic decision-making is thin, paper thin. The more of society’s calls that can be passed over to quangos, tribunals, unelected judges, supranational bodies, public health supremos, the WHO and various UN bodies, economic insiders, bureaucrats and the administrative state generally the better they like it. These are the insiders. The anywhere people.

By contrast, the outsiders are those who do not share the worldview of this insiders’ caste. These outsiders do not buy the economic claims made on behalf of mass immigration. They know they lose out when there’s cheap money, money printing, asset inflation, imported cheap labour and the rest. They want assimilation not the cultural relativist platitudes – the trite slogans that don’t stand up to any sort of examination – that undergird the West’s genuflecting at the altar of a now-discredited multiculturalism. They value patriotism and think their country one of the best ever to have existed, not some egregiously wicked outlier that requires near daily absolution in the form of virtue-signalling acknowledgements of country and de facto racist constitutional amendments. They despise the whole DEI industry and Net Zero idiocy, and not just because both are productivity and merit killers. They can tell you who is a man and who is a woman. As outsiders with heterodox views beyond the so-called Overton window, free speech is far more important to them than to insiders whose views are never likely to be silenced. (Why worry overly much about protecting free speech as an insider where your views align overwhelmingly with those of the mainstream media, the HR departments, the inner-city coffee shop crowd and are not regularly dubbed as racist or far-Right simply for being a millimetre different to the prevailing zeitgeist – albeit they were bog standard opinions a mere 30 years ago?)

And that brings me to the British, French and American elections. All of them are at least partially comprehensible through this lens of insiders versus outsiders. The fact is that in general terms, rich people and insiders no longer vote Right. They vote Left. Fifty or 60 years ago it was different. Not today. So any purportedly conservative party such as Britain’s Tories that goes to multiple elections since 2010 promising each time sharply to cut immigration and to fight the good fight against the woke barbarians, against the democracy-enervating lawyerly caste, against the identity politics brigade, against the Left-wing media, against the big spending, high taxing state, and after each election actually makes things worse on each front has to expect its core voters ultimately to revolt and simply to stop trusting anything it promises. So it was last week when Britain’s Conservative Government was deservedly smashed. (For what it is worth this is yet another Right-of-centre lockdownista Government to lose. Good! Lockdown thuggery, fear-mongering policies, crushing small businesses and genuflecting to a public health clerisy that got near on everything wrong is way, way worse coming from conservative governments who all should be voted out for this alone.)

This is not to say the slaughter of the Tories in Britain was an endorsement of the Labour party. It clearly was not. Keir Starmer’s Labour party won nearly two-thirds of the seats (411 out of 650) with just 33.8% of the vote – the lowest of any majority winner since 1919. That’s lower than Jeremy Corbyn got losing in 2017 and only one percentage point more (and half a million votes less) than Corbyn got losing again in 2019 (yet it’s 200 seats more). The voter turnout was also appallingly low, just under 60% of eligible voters. Meanwhile Nigel Farage’s Reform party did what it set out to do, namely to crush a supposedly conservative party that had governed down the line as a Tony Blair-type social democrat outfit with wokery in its DNA. Reform came from near on nothing to scoop up over 14% of the vote (to the Tories’ 23%). So together the two outpolled Labour comfortably. And recall that in 2019 Boris and the Tories took 43.6% of the vote.

In my view this was necessary. The tired refrain of “we’re at least a smidgeon better than Labour” is just a recipe for a conservative Government that does nothing for conservatives and moves ever Leftward. Query: Name anything that 14 years of a Tory Government delivered for conservatives? If you get past one-and-half items then you and I have different definitions of “conservative”. At some point that sort of fecklessness and taking your core voters for mugs simply has to be punished and punished severely. The voters did that to Team Cameron/May/Johnson/Truss/Sunak. Yes, the next five years will be awful. But at least there is hope for improvement going forward. The Tony Abbott type line “we can work from inside to get the party back on track” has been shown by experience to be an empty promise. You just encourage the wets and Lefties who have taken over the party – a good few of whom are laughably trying to run the line that the British Tories had become too Right wing.

So congratulations to Mr. Farage and Reform, who were the second biggest winners in this election despite getting only five seats (the Lib Dems getting 72 seats on 600,000 fewer votes because their votes are all concentrated in chardonnay-sipping Teal type areas). I am prepared to bet the Tories now pick a far more conservative leader to try to woo back the over one-third of their base who deserted them.

Readers can apply the same template to the French election. It is outsiders abandoning established political parties. And in the U.S. as well. Donald Trump is despised by the great and the good because he actually advances and tries to implement policies for outsiders. Despite his immense wealth he is a consummate outsider. This threatens the establishment class. It causes the journalist class to become Pravda-like in its willingness to do anything to defend Joe Biden and the side of politics it personally prefers. Luckily after the pandemic nobody much amongst outsiders pays any attention to what the legacy media think or want. The most important election this year, or any year in decades, is the U.S. one in three and a half months. And things are looking better and better for the Don. Fingers crossed.

James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article first appeared in Spectator Australia.