The tory death spiral

It is very hard to see what the tories think they are trying to do. They face an opposition which, while not particularly progressive, is a lot more progressive than they are. This opposition is also much more popular than they are. So what are they doing? They’re proposing policies which are even more extreme than the ones they’ve already enacted. Why?

One answer which I half believe is that the current tory party is made up of people who, while not quite fascists, are very close to being so. They’re just proposing the policies that you would expect such people to propose. Perhaps.

Another plausible answer is that they’re just very stupid people who really don’t understand that their policies are going to make them less popular with most people. Well, after 14 years of driving all the smart people away there’s something to be said for this: the current batch of tory MPs are very much the bottom of the barrel.

Well, here’s another idea. They know they face a heavy electoral defeat, but they would like not to face obliteration. And the way they think they might be obliterated is if the reform party carve off the swivel-eyed elderly loony vote. The result would be that reform might win a few seats, but the tories would lose more, mostly to labour: that’s how first-past-the-post works. That would leave the tories with a potentially tiny number of MPs and labour with a huge majority. Coming back from that would take decades probably.

If this is right then the tories aren’t fighting labour at all: they know they’ve lost that battle. Instead, they’re fighting reform. That’s why the policies they are proposing are so hateful: they want to appeal to people who might otherwise vote for reform: to people who believe hateful things.

But this policy seems to be itself suicidal: if they fight off reform then, well, they’ve done so by proposing lots of hateful policies. They will have won by becoming reform. How do they come back from that to appeal to an electorate which overwhelmingly does not support such policies? Perhaps they haven’t worked that out yet: they’re just trying to stem the bleeding, becoming electable can wait for another time.

Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.

– Nietzsche, ‘Jenseits von Gut und Böse’

The tories are fighting monsters of their own creation, and they have become, in their turn, monsters.