4th October 2022
The governing party of the United Kingdom is currently imploding in my home city of Birmingham:
This Tory conference is so amazingly messy I still can't believe it's real. Ministers going completely rogue, MPs barely here but still throwing shade left, right & centre, Tory members downing champagne while half laughing/half crying "we're all f***ed". It's WILD
— Noa Hoffman (@hoffman_noa) October 4, 2022
It makes one think of this:
"-Who's the commanding officer here, soldier?
-Ain't you?"
Apocalypse Now (1979) Dir. Francis Ford Coppola pic.twitter.com/xdzoLqelxs— Samuel J. May (@sjmay92) December 2, 2019
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There is a certain irony-of-sorts in Birmingham being the venue for this implosion, for two reasons.
First, the modern Conservative party is largely the product of the politics of Birmingham.
Before 1885, the Conservative party had been more-or-less out of office for fifty years.
Peel came and went, and Disraeli had just come and gone.
And then: there was the Irish Home Rule crisis, and the Birmingham politician Joseph Chamberlain and his “Liberal Unionist” supporters crossed the house to sit with the Conservatives, thereby creating the Conservative and Unionist Party.
And it was this combined party that went on to dominate British politics.
(As indeed did the house of Chamberlain, providing a notable foreign secretary and then a prime minister between the wars – both while sitting as Birmingham Conservative and Unionist MPs.)
Until 1945 Labour politicians complained of the Birmingham problem in that this heavily industrialised city kept returning Conservative and Unionist MPs.
And as late as 1992, half the city’s MPs were still Conservative, including the car industry constituencies of Northfield, Yardley and Selly Oak.
And now it looks as if the city is hosting the party’s disintegration.
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Second, Birmingham was where Theresa May gave that speech – after the Brexit referendum.
The necessary implication of her speech was that the United Kingdom was not only to depart the European Union, but that it would also leave the single market and customs union.
These were the famous red lines, which meant that the United Kingdom – or at least Great Britain, if not Northern Ireland – was locked into a Brexit that would mean being outside the European Free Trade Area.
This was not a necessary interpretation of the referendum result – other interpretations were possible.
But it was that interpretation which has since shaped the course of our politics generally, and of the Conservative party in particular.
And it started in Birmingham.
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A few days ago, a visiting Conservative activist was rude on social media about Birmingham:
In some ways our correspondent is correct.
Birmingham is where the Conservatives are dumping policies such as the abolition of the 45 pence tax rate.
Birmingham is where the Conservatives are dumping any sense of collective responsibility and any reputation for governmental competence.
Birmingham, it seems, is where the Conservative party as a serious political force will itself be dumped.
Birmingham is a dump.
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I’ve been waiting for you to write a blog about that tweet.
And you’ve set it in an excellent context.
It’s all very strange really. It started with me agreeing with things that John Major and Ken Clarke said a few months back. And a few days ago it all got a bit mad when I found myself agreeing with Michael Gove. But today I agreed with Nadine Dorries. The universe has gone wrong.
Seconded! I was indeed shocked to find myself agreeing with Ms Dorries.
Ah but is it not possible to agree with what they say about each other whilst holding an independent opinion about them collectively?
I have always agreed with the BBC’s criticism of Murdoch and his criticism of the BBC, the first because his empire is a blight, the second because it represents an opportunity to respond and strengthen an independent broadcaster.
In 1991, my first Summer job, over from N Ireland, prior to doing my LSF in York, was with the then Martineau Johnson, in St. Philips Square (I think). You never forget your first suited job, for some reason. I stayed out in Aston Uni Halls, for peanuts. I thought Birmingham was cool and the people were lovely – down-to-earth, and up for a good time.
I too did work experience at Martineau Johnson!
The law firm founded in 1828 by Arthur Ryland, where Thomas Martineau was articled, and became a partner in 1851 (later mayor, and knighted). The firm survived as Ryland Martineau until the merger with Johnson & Co in 1987. Now Shakespeare Martineau.
An important non-Conformist family, the Martineaus. Thomas Martineau and Joseph Chamberlain married two of the Kendrick sisters.
And the irony is that the Lunatick society / modern industrial inductive science began in the Black Country.
I do appreciate that the C&U Party is disintegrating. The party of that name may cease to play a significant part in the politics of the (dis)United Kingdom. And perhaps the Union itself will be gone before long.
But, the hard-right / neo-liberal / Hayekian ecology of academics, think tanks, consultants and backers with deep pockets .. that ain’t going anywhere. All we’re seeing is that the political skills which are required to get a party elected have ceased to be tied to the political skills of elected MPs.
UKIP was a small, extremist bunch of people with limited connectivity to reality, but that didn’t stop it delivering Brexit.
The (dis)UK parliament is now dominated by parties which really only aspire to represent English opinion. The right in England is now a super-saturated solution of barely articulated impulses, omniphobic, cornered, angry. It has no conception of democratic tradition. It is supremely manipulable by propagandists who have more powerful tools at their disposal than ever existed before.
Allow the scenario of an independent Scotland, a united Ireland, and Plaid rising fast in Wales. When the rUK has gone, what sort of polity is left in England? An angry, impoverished and feral polity. That the C&U Party is history will be irrelevant. It will regenerate like a Toxic Doctor, and likely cast off the notion entirely that the party’s decision-making process should reflect the views of morally and intellectually self-reliant parliamentarians. England is in for a Schmittian ‘strong leader’ untrammelled by democratic artifice.
So, yes, the C&U Party is disintegrating. But God help us when a populist successor party gets its act together.
The one thing I take from the reporting on this conference is that none of the elected members seem to give two hoots for the nation they serve.
If you look really hard you might find one or two of them willing to give one hoot for party members who voted for them, but that is about as good as it gets.
They are nothing but arrogant grifters, caring for little except the sweet little Directorships they’ll pick up if they stay in power or get a ministerial posting.
Sad to say, I think that applies to MPs across the party lines.
“The one thing I take from the reporting on this conference is that none of the elected members seem to give two hoots for the nation they serve.”
Is they really only dawning on you now, Mr. Sproggit?
It has been manifestly obvious to me since Thatcher that the Tories have only their own-self interest on their to-do lists.
Or at any rate, that their concern for the majority of the electorate is subservient to their complete disinterest in the damage they cause to those least able to cope with it, in furtherance of their perverse social experiments.
I think if you look back over my posts you’ll realise I have held this opinion for longer than I’ve been a visitor here.
At risk of repeating previous comments:
They believe the nation works for the C&U party; most certainly not the other way around.
With a bit of luck after their current implosion in Birmingham they will be more-or-less out of power for another fifty years. It would be poetic justice if the Conservative Party as we know it disintegrates where it was reborn.
It’s hard enough to predict the next 5 minutes, never mind 50 years.
I think it is terminal. After the current run of failures, the only way is up and there is nobody left untainted or still in the party to deliver that.
Peaky Blunders.
Perfect
Last Friday I predicted that Truss would be gone by next Monday, 10 October. Right now I give her up to the end of October. What we are observing is a political party with a death wish, driven by a perhaps subconscious desire to dump the current mess on another party. It’s similar to the Major government of the 1990s, only much worse, because Major and some of his government had a reasonable amount of competence.
I don’t think that this has anything to do with Birmingham, much as I like one of my childhood homes. It could have happened in Blackpool, Bournemouth or Brighton.
Why couldn’t the mess of last couple of. weeks happen in Ireland paywalled piece by former Irish AG. Michael McDowell. Well worth reading
https://twitter.com/IrishTimesOpEd/status/1577522737123561477?t=ue-DJXn07PWPCiWK2RVAlg&s=19
“They came from Birmingham, which is not a place to promise much, you know, Mr. Weston. One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound:”.
Jane Austen’s Emma expresses the southern view of Oop North and I suppose the Tories only went there to save on travel costs. Otherwise an English gentleperson would never venture further north than the Cotswolds, their greatest ambition being a Georgian Rectory with a gate and a drive.
As it is the financial circle cannot be squared. KK can only reverse tax cuts (more tax), cut public spending and fiddle the statistics. Ms Truss may bring in more foreign workers – but no Polish plumbers and will never allow more concrete over the shires.
So the economy will not advance one iota but it might look like it for just long enough to dump the whole problem on Starmer but with a very small majority. He will last one term then noses back in the trough, absolutely bona. Birmingham in October 2023 will be rather more bland I feel.
But very specifically not Jane Austen’s own view. She gives that view to the odious, trashy, snobbish Mrs Elton!
And Elizabeth Bennett’s is more than happy to go and live even further north than Birmingham, in Derbyshire with Mr Darcy!
Never speak (or headline) ill of your home city, Mr Green, even in jest. Else Mr Street may banish you to…somewhere.
Not “to Coventry”? Aghhh