A huge thank you to James Stuart who submitted this Artcile to Unity News Network (UNN) on the 12th of November 2019, it was approved for publication by Carl D. Pearson, Editor-in-Chief of UNN on the same day.
Please NOTE: This is an opinion piece and not the opinion of the editorial team at Unity News Network (UNN). We are a forum for free speech and ideas and are always open to publishing different ways of thinking from others.
The news that the Brexit Party cabal has decided not to contest 317 Conservative-held seats in December’s poll should not be received with any amount of surprise. Nigel Farage, an ex-Tory who, in elections previous, decided that he valued his career as a troublemaker of the far right more than uniting the sources of conservatism, has apparently changed calculation. Accordingly, with the leader of the Brexit party now in open collusion with an increasingly right-wing Tory party, there is some hope among the left that Farage’s capitulation to the Tories will hurt his efforts to siphon Labour voters away from their historical political allegiances and toward the Trumpian vision of Britain that both Farage and Johnson embody with varying degrees of panache and anti-European amorousness.
Labour voters in the North of England and large parts of London know that now, more so than in previous iterations of the Tory party, the Conservatives are their class enemy. The abject disdainfulness of the attitude of Tory frontbenchers to the victims of the Grenfell fire should be evidence enough of their unfitness for office. The twenty-first century has to live alongside it the twentieth, complete with an ahistorical acceptance of contumacy, disdain for outsiders and contempt for the poor. Such is the physiology of the Conservative Party.
The 2016 referendum did not, we should note here, change working-class attitudes towards the Tories in any significant way. In 2017 Labour achieved their biggest rise in vote share since the landslide of 1945. This fact should not be underplayed or ignored. Other factors though, it must be admitted, were at play in 2017 that make Labour’s task that much more cumbersome this time around. Theresa May, one commentator remarked in the aftermath of that election, did not lose because she was a woman, but because of the women, she was. Which is to say, shy, withdrawn, not terribly good at taking advice outside of a small coterie of advisors and generally unable to grasp the enormity of the Brexit problem and the unwillingness of her MPs to consent to anything but the most damaging form of Brexit imaginable. Anti-thematically to his predecessor, Johnson does not lack energy or charisma, and his abilities both as a campaigner and a canny user of ‘alternative facts’ make Johnson a far more potent threat than May was ever going to be.
The dilemma faced by the left is thus: is Brexit worth voting Tory? Millions of leave voters are already giving thought to this quandary. Fourteen years of austerity may indeed swing some voters back to the Labour fold. However, as Peter Hitchens observed of the Conservative Party after their 2015 election victory “I simply underestimated the influence of lies and money”. Farage, therefore, in his association with the Tories, will force millions of Labour voters to confront the question. Which is more important? Leaving the European Union or ending austerity? For many, the choice will not be an easy one.
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