14 years of Tory rule

Some shattered conclusions from a broken brain

Photo by Luis Villasmil on Unsplash

I've woken up in a hotel room with a hangover and without coffee. It is very early here. There is nowhere to get it. I am in pain, very bad pain inside of the skull. Terrible nightmare. The worst of all outcomes, suddenly horrifyingly real. Someone will surely die by my hand today, some young child or a tiny animal. This surely cannot stand. There must be some form of recompense for this suffering.

Alright, so politics, God help me. I originally intended for this to be a thoughtful piece looking back on the previous 14 years of Tory rule, but there is now a danger that it is simply a violent, savage screed of catatonic despair. I make no promises. I make no promises that this newsletter even ends or is ever sent. 

I initially thought I'd have, like, 14 thoughts? One for each year. But now I think I'll maybe dribble something out of me, then try to come up with new new thoughts when I'm back in England. I dunno. Don't count on it. Don't count on anything. Nothing really matters. Everything is void and lifeless, a cry for meaning in a cold and distant universe. There is nothing to cling to. All is pain.

Competence is a moral issue

The first and most important lesson of the past few years is obviously the fact that competence is a moral issue, rather than simply a practical one.

It is the mechanism that allows you to act in the world, to impose yourself on it. There can therefore be no meaningful morality without competence. Without it, we cannot secure the good. We can only wish for it. And that wish will be forlorn, deprived as it is of the measures by which it could be asserted.

The clearest example of this came during the Afghan evacuation. There was no party political distinction on this issue. It did not fall into a culture war crevice. Everyone agreed that those who helped Britain had to be protected - journalists, women's rights activists, judges, interpreters. 

The trouble was that the government had no basic competence. It did not have the organisational proficiency to deliver on its stated aims. So Afghans were encouraged to send emails documenting their case which were simply never read. The tiny haphazard team of civil servants who did read some of them were not equipped with the specialist skills required to assess them. They did not even have a rudimentary understanding of Afghanistan's ethnolinguistic groups. The men in charge - Dominic Rabb and Boris Johnson - did not have the kinds of minds which could handle the matter. So people were betrayed. They were left to the barbarism of the Taliban. They died. And all that is most admirable about this country and what it represents died with them, in the dust of Afghanistan.

This was by far the most shameful episode of the last 14 years of Tory government, but it is replicated in one form or another across the policy landscape: health, criminal justice, transport, you name it. The same process with the same outcome: incompetence followed by failure followed by national shame.

Electioneering is not governance

How did we get to this point? There are two pathways, which are interlinked. The first is about a form of government which functions exclusively on the basis of electoral calculation.

There's no point being sentimental about this. All governments are engaged in a background electoral assessment. Tony Blair had his constant polling and focus group data coming in from Philip Gould. Margaret Thatcher liked to present herself as an avowed ideological warrior, but she was actually fairly cautious and pragmatic. 

And yet something fundamentally altered under the present Conservative government, which contributed to the breakdown of competence as a desired characteristic. It began not with Brexit, but with George Osborne's dual role as chancellor and election coordinator. The economic business of government was refracted through electoral calculations - not just at election time, but on a day-to-day basis. 

It's telling that once this approach was adopted, the language instantly morphed into one of division. For years, Osborne compared strivers with scroungers. Indeed, this was the primary narrative of the government. "Where is the fairness," he would ask, "for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next-door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits."

After Brexit the topic changed but the approach remained. Governance was not about the national interest. It was about creating and exploiting electoral dividing lines. The vote on the EU provided a clearly delineated demographic wedge, which Johnson in particular thought he could calcify into a realigned political culture. Everything that came after followed the same approach: Rwanda, the ECHR, trans rights, statues, national service, civil service reform, England flags on sports shorts, even National Trust reports. It was all the same shite: a man in an office somewhere, trying to draw lines through a populace to his mathematical advantage.

This is a core reason for the breakdown in competence. It is because competence simply isn't what you are trying to achieve. You are trying to achieve electoral victory on the basis of voter-identification, division and gut-instinct political propositions. It's not that the Conservatives failed at being competent. It's that it ceased to even feature in their requirements. It was as pertinent to them as a fax machine is to us.

 Grievance politics erodes our capacity for reason 

The other road that led to the competence collapse was grievance politics. This is the language the Tory party has used since Brexit. It's a type of language which has always been preferred by populists. It's a natural by-product of their worldview.

It starts with splitting the world into a binary of good and evil. No, that's not quite right. It starts with being an imbecile, because only an imbecile would confuse political reality with the plot of a Star Wars movie. Under populism, the People represent good and the Elite represents bad. Anyone can be inserted or removed from either group as needs be, for whatever argument you're trying to make. So refugees are often tacitly placed in the Elite column, while secretaries of state are placed in the People column. This really is so stupid it's incredible that it happens at all, but the human mind's capacity for failure is without limit. Needless to say, this type of thinking is ultimately derived from religious thought.

Anyone who signs up to this binary quickly degenerates into grievance politics. Something bad happens - a financial crash, say, or a military defeat, or simple underperformance of public services - and you have to explain it. It can't be your fault because you represent the People and the People are all good. So you say the Elite is conspiring against the People. Soon enough, these conspiracy theories will multiply. You can see them now. What is the Blob? What is the Establishment? What is this nonsense about 15-minute cities, or Starmer's non-existent role in the Jimmy Saville affair, or Braverman's flirtation with the Great replacement Theory, or Tory MPs' enthusiasm for Cultural Marxism? They're the germ of conspiracy thinking let loose, corrupting everything it touches. The politics of grievance and paranoia. The mind collapsing in on itself. The basic capacity to process reality crumbling away.

The old Conservative party, for all of its flaws, did not engage in this type of politics. Nor did the Conservative party of George Osborne or David Cameron. The moment of change was Brexit.

Brexit is the point of corruption: the moment the alien organism absorbed the host body. It is ground zero for the dysfunction that followed. We can ignore it all we like, but nothing about what is currently happening is comprehensible without reference to it. It is the inflection point, at which a mainstream centre-right party became a populist party. Once that happened grievance politics and conspiracy theory had to become its dominant manner of thinking.

This has been a parable

That's what the last 14 years are, ultimately - a moral tale, with a clear instruction to it. All the way through this story, Tory ministers thought they'd come up with this magnificent new wheeze. Wow, look at that. Look how you can fool people. This is how the most successful political party in Western civilisation is so successful - it adapts. And now they'd found this marvellous shiny toy still in the packaging, a populist world view that could be grafted onto a set of electoral divisions with an efficient vote distribution.

And for a while it works. But then of course it doesn't, because without competence you can't act on the world. So then all the normal day-to-day political things people want simply cannot be delivered. They want a doctor's appointment, but they can't have one. They want the police to come when there's a burglary, or for trains to take them comfortably and affordably from point A to point B. But they can't have those things either. 

If they could, the Tories would happily give them these things. They'd love to fix them. But they can't, because grievance politics and electoral strategy deprived them of the capacity to do so. That is a political failure and a practical failure. But it is primarily a moral failure. It means that people who could have survived their condition will not do so, that people are left afraid and alone when they've been the victim of a crime, that the mere process of commuting is made punishing and demeaning. 

The moral case for competence: that's what the Conservatives are discovering right now. It's what they've been discovering over the course of the last five weeks. And, with any luck, it's what they will discover good and hard next Thursday. 

Now I’m off to get a cup of coffee. And woe betide any child or small animal that stands in my way.