I’m not a member of the Conservative Party. Nor have I ever been a member. Nor am I considering becoming a member of the Conservative Party in the near future. Yet I do not consider being called a Tory an insult in any way shape or form. I have many friends and associates who are or have been Tories. Most of them are reasonable people and several of them I even agree with on most issues a great deal of the time. I just don’t happen to think the Conservative Party is the vehicle for bettering society that they do, that’s all.
Many on the Left think that calling someone a Tory is a grave insult – perhaps the worst one imaginable. They cannot see that for most people there is nothing insulting whatsoever about being called a Tory. For instance, if someone calls me a Tory online (which has happened a fair bit), it is exactly as if they had called me a Pakistani or a woman. I see nothing wrong in the slightest with happening to be either of those things, it is just that I am demonstrably not either of them. In other words, someone calling me a Pakistani, a woman or a Tory is simply odd given it is just obviously untrue.
Why is any of this important? Because the idea that most of the population of Britain not only would never think of voting for the Conservatives but would take being accused of doing so as a grave insult, has infected the Left to the point of threatening its continued existence. Take Angela Eagle’s answer when asked why she would beat Theresa May in a general election. “Because she’s a Tory”. To many on the Left, this has become a self-evident principle, the transparent evil of the Conservatives. The only thing is, enough voters to give the Tories a majority in 2015 clearly didn’t abide by this sentiment and there is no evidence that this is any less true in 2016.
Unless politicians and activists who are left of centre can begin to empathise with people who vote Tory – particularly ones who voted Labour or for another Left party in the past – they can never get back to winning power again. This does not mean that they need to become Tories or agree with why people vote Tory. In fact, it would be rather better if they did not. But they need to understand the mentality of why some people see the Conservatives as more attractive than Labour at present.
When I think back to ten years ago, I can recall all the times Labour supporting friends and colleagues would insist that I should not only vote Labour but indeed join the Labour Party. That there was nothing ideologically stopping me; that I was, even if I didn’t know it, one of them. Flash forward to today and what you’ll find are those same Labour members who tried to convince me I was one of the tribe being called Tories by other Labour members and told they aren’t welcome at CLP meetings anymore. Which do you think is a more effective recruiting tool? Being told you belong or being told you are a Tory and you should get lost? Even though I will reiterate that there is nothing intrinsically insulting about being called a Tory, I know which one I’d pick if it were down to me.
I think your dislike of the Left is still affecting your judgment.
Of course, in one sense there’s nothing wrong in being a Tory, in the sense that “people of goodwill” can be Tories (much as Aneurin Bevan would disagree). But if one has strong political convictions that are incompatible with Toryism, such as Socialism or – I should have thought – Liberalism, then being called a Tory is certainly a criticism and probably an insult. And surely that’s the way the accusation is usually deployed – not against card-carrying members of the Conservative party, but against those for whom it would be a betrayal of their principles to embrace Toryism.
As for Angela Eagle’s observation that Theresa May was a Tory, was it an insult? Wasn’t it just a statement of the opinion that the Tories wouldn’t win the next election?
As for Angela Eagle’s observation that Theresa May was a Tory, was it an insult? Wasn’t it just a statement of the opinion that the Tories wouldn’t win the next election?
The clip is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxGg7DuPaAs
So, Eagle was asked why she thought she could beat Theresa May, specifically. Basically she is being invited to say how her strategy for beating a May-led Tory party would differ from her strategy for beating a Gove-led Tory party, or a Johnson-led one or a Leadsom-led one.
And her answer, and the dismissive tone in which it was delivered, really does seem to convey that she thinks that it doesn’t matter who is leader of the Conservative Party, but that they will lose simply because they are Tories. That the reason the Conservatives won in 2015 was that people, when they went to the voting booth, didn’t realise that by putting an ‘X’ next to the name of the Conservative candidate, they were voting for a Tory. That all she would have had to do, had she become Leader of the Opposition, would have been to spend the next however-long until the election pointing out to people that Theresa May is a Tory, until enough of them realise that in fact Theresa May, leader of the Conservative Party, is a Tory, that they realise they couldn’t possibly vote for her or her party.
Labour in the 2010-2015 parliament gave every sign of appearing to think that they would win the next election by default — that the country clearly hadn’t meant to give the Conservative party most seats, that it had all been a big mistake caused by a desire to give Gordon Brown a kicking that had got out of hand, that clearly no right-thinking person actually wanted a Tory government, and so at the next election the natural order would be restored and they would be returned to government. They didn’t need to persuade the country to vote Labour, because they simply couldn’t understand why anyone would vote Conservative.
(Apparently, when Miliband changed the Labour leadership competition rules, he and everyone around him thought that the first try-out for the new system would be to choose a mayoral candidate — the idea that they might lose the general election and therefore need a new leader first simply didn’t occur to them!)
That strategy, ‘remind people the Tories are Tories’, failing in 2015 — turns out people actually wanted the Tories in charge. And so, bizarrely, the Labour party seems to have decided to respond to the failure of that strategy by doubling down on it.
It’s as if Lord Raglan had reacted to the destruction of the Light Brigade by immediately sending the entire rest of his army straight into the Valley of Death.
And her answer, and the dismissive tone in which it was delivered, really does seem to convey that she thinks that it doesn’t matter who is leader of the Conservative Party, but that they will lose simply because they are Tories.
Thanks for confirming my understanding.
Yes, absolutely. It makes perfect sense when applied to Labour MPs who default to Conservative-lite rather than Labour values, which is how it’s, mostly, used.
A good thought experiment is to consider what it would be like if a vocal contingent of the Conservative party membership spent every waking moment either planning their trip to the next Liam Fox rally, or online screaming at Theresa May supporters for being Cameronite socialists who should just fuck off and join the Labours.
Sounds ridiculous and pathetic, doesn’t it?
“A good thought experiment is to consider what it would be like if a vocal contingent of the Conservative party membership spent every waking moment either planning their trip to the next Liam Fox rally, or online screaming at Theresa May supporters for being Cameronite socialists who should just fuck off and join the Labours.”
Theresa May supported British membership of the EU, but there’s no doubt she is a right-wing, authoritarian Conservative. To suggest those positions are incompatible is to muddle up two quite separate issues.
Perhaps, but I wasn’t really talking about the EU. The fact is, compared to some of the other options, May was seen as the most centrist, moderate candidate of those available. You can debate how true that is, but she’s certainly not viewed as being on the extreme right of the party. Being seen as moderate and centrist in the Labour party gets you called a Tory and threatened with deselection.