The state of the Tories

The Times reports on the deserved implosion of a Tory election campaign slogan of scarcely credible disrepute:

MICHAEL HOWARD shifted the Conservative campaign away from Iraq and Tony Blair’s character yesterday as the latest Populus poll suggested that his “liar” attack on the Prime Minister had backfired.... The posters [for this campaign] — saying “If he’s prepared to lie to take us to war, he’s prepared to lie to win an election” — were unveiled on Tuesday. They never appeared on billboards and just featured on 12 advertising vans for three days.

Thus have the Conservatives adopted - and on no principled grounds, withdrawn - an electoral pitch indistinguishable from - no, literally the same as - that of the Respect 'Coalition', an electoral front for the totalitarian Socialist Workers' Party. Not even the Liberal Democrats, whose position on the Iraq War (proclaiming support for British troops while refraining from wishing them victory on the battlefield) was cynical and whose every consequent prediction (the supposedly inevitable refugee crisis; the blow to Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations) has been refuted, have descended to these levels of personal abuse. The same Times report notes the reaction of a principled former Conservative:

There was evidence last night of Conservative discontent over Mr Howard’s campaign. Stephen Yorke, who was John Major’s deputy political secretary, said he had resigned from the Tory party in disgust.

Mr Yorke said: “I’ve been a member for 20 years but when I watched Michael Howard trying to exploit the war for political advantage this week, I decided that I’d had enough.”

He now plans to vote Labour in the marginal seat of Battersea. “I think Tony Blair has shown enormous political courage over Iraq and we have a lot to thank him for. I also believe the Government was right on student fees.”

Mr Yorke's views are mine exactly. I would add to the charge sheet a Tory campaign on immigration and asylum that, despite the efforts of civilised and urbane Tories to convince me otherwise, I find unprincipled and populist. When I started this site a couple of years ago I had intended to use it in part to urge the case for tactical voting to defeat the Liberal Democrats. The intellectual and moral decline of the Tories even since the fecklessness and foreign-policy vacillation of John Major's Government makes that impossible to countenance. I wish to see the Tories' electoral strategy firmly rebuffed and a third term for Tony Blair with a substantial majority. Even the new Tory candidates I respect appear ready, if decently embarrassed, to follow their leader. Times columnist Michael Gove, who is standing in a safe Tory seat, is inteviewed in the paper today:

So, when [Gove] sees those Conservative posters denouncing Mr Blair as a liar over Iraq, does he feel the glow of pride or the prick of shame? “Neither. The poster makes the point that Blair harmed the case for war by massaging it.” Did he lie? “He damaged trust in government.” But did he lie? “He gilded the lily.”

This is getting nowhere.

Gove is more independent-minded and direct than that. (He is also better-read. The correct quotation from Shakespeare's King John is not "to gild the lily" - something that is impossible to do - but "To gild refined gold, to paint the lily.... Is wasteful and ridiculous excess".) In short, while there are individual Conservatives whose election I would welcome, including Gove's, I can see no case for widespread tactical voting in this election. The proper course is to vote Labour; there is in addition a strong case for all democratic voters, and not only those of us on the Left, to wish to see a Labour victory over the pro-fascist Respect 'Coalition' in two East London seats.

The one caveat I have to my overall conclusion about the election is the quality of new Labour candidates. The Times published a disturbing survey last Tuesday showing that:

THE majority of Labour’s potential new MPs dare not talk about the war in Iraq, with just one in 12 of them prepared to back Tony Blair’s decision to send in British troops, a Times survey has shown. Mr Blair has described the 48 new candidates defending seats in which a Labour MP is stepping down as even more new Labour than himself, but only four of them would publicly support his decision to go to war. Two of the four said they had grave reservations. More than a quarter of the new candidates in Labour seats said that they were against the war and half simply refused to discuss their views on Mr Blair’s most controversial decision.

Mr Blair's "most controversial decision" it doubtless was, but it was far more than that. Contrary to the Liberal Democrats' depiction of the Iraq War as the "biggest foreign policy error" since the Suez crisis, it was the most strategically far-sighted and noble act of British foreign policy since the founding of Nato. Labour came to office promising to conduct foreign policy "with an ethical dimension"; the overthrow of clerical barbarism in Afghanistan and Baathist totalitarianism in Iraq shows that this was no idle boast. I want to see the maximum representation in the new Parliament of liberal-democratic internationalists who will support the promotion of global democracy and an interventionist stance against autocracies and failed states. The feebleness of Labour's new candidates on these axiomatic liberal principles augurs badly.

My local Labour candidate, one of the respondents in The Times survey, is making an issue of being ready to vote against her own party in further exercises of military force. Why she sought the Labour nomination in the first place when she publicly opposes the policies of the Labour Government is not for me to speculate upon, but it does put those of us who support the revolutionary cause in a tricky position. As it happens, the Tory candidate, Nicholas Boles, is one of the few in his party who it is reasonable to assume would extend consistent and principled support to Tony Blair's foreign policies (he is a patron of the Henry Jackson Society, which I wrote about here, and I am seeking further information on him). There may be other cases, but this is the only one I have come across where, in a marginal seat, a supporter of progressive policies would have good cause to welcome the election of a Conservative candidate.