For all of this writers sneering, patronising and superior tones I will respond to this article.
I actually live just a few miles from TW. I am a life long Tory voter of 40 years and have at various times been a Tory Party member. However, I am not at present and intend not to vote Tory at the next election if Johnson is in charge.
What is the point of the Tory Party at present?
It does not represent traditional conservative thought or practice and become a pastiche of the Blair government of c.2000. It is a centre left Cabinet of wealthy old money and new money immigrant social democrats.
Tax and spend, eco idiocy, trans and gay rights, anti small business and the self-employed.
They have done nothing with Brexit, no bonfire of regulations.
Those in the Red Wall will soon enough realise that the governments hysterical over reaction and over spending on the Covid pandemic has doomed the ‘levelling up’ agenda and all the monies that would have gone to them have now been thrown away postponing the date of death of those in their 80s by a couple of years.
The Tory party needs to suffer a massive shock at Election and to be thrashed and broken. Johnson has to go and the cabinet of social democrats dismissed to the back benches.
The small c social conservatives underpinned both the Old Tories and Old Labour. The Conservatives did not do well in the latest council elections, but then neither did Labour.
Blaming the results on Boris Johnson alone misses the point. Some like him for his heroic actions, some hate him for his heroic character flaws.
Perhaps you could equally argue that Kier Starmer failed to step up.
Perry de Havilland
2 years ago
The NetZero insanity will make people much poorer, making driving the preserve of the upper middle class, make energy erratic and unreliable, make holidays either hard or impossible, require heat pumps that don’t actually work well and require unhealthy hermetically sealed homes, and require *massive* state control over society to enforce.
If I wanted green I’d vote Green, but if I’m going to get green even if I vote Tory, I’ll vote Reform UK.
The Conservative Party is not in any meaningful sense a conservative party.
JR Stoker
2 years ago
I lived near Tunbridge Wells for some years. The writer’s description is most inaccurate, a cartoon sketch; after all, if was so blue it would not have gone yellow this time (as it has before).
Incidentally it is not in the middle of Kent; it is on the border with East Sussex
Geoffrey Hicking
2 years ago
While having moral standards is fine, constantly being offended by everything is for wokists. I tried being disgusted by the drop in moral standards. It was very useful, but eventually it began to consume me. How far did I have to go to be a true small-c conservative? Could any modernism at all be tolerated? Was tolerance an unacceptable attitude in and of itself?
I became a snob and was corrupted by excessive melancholia over the loss of the past. I considered just giving up on life. Why bother trying to increase attendance at my local church? Better to shake my head at how it was in decline. Why support new housing development if that was going to tear up a green field?
It got to the point where instead of trying to bring the past back (with some of the modern age integrated in), I was just waiting for the world to end.
Presenting Tunbridge Wells, Douglas Murray, Peter Hitchens, and declinists as heroes can go too far. Even Andrew Roberts began to criticise Hitchens in Standpoint Magazine when one of his declinist screeds targeted Churchill.
There are plenty of people with good moral standards. There are plenty of tasteful houses being built (see Shrewsbury). let’s have some positivity instead of constant declinism. It is not heroic, no matter how respectable it might look.
Boris is part of that. he got us Brexit, and is lauded by the Ukrainians as an ally- take that declinists! Some progress on mass migration has been made, with more to do. He may not be an angel, but his moral standards are deeper than many people realise. He too is stout and sensible, when it really matters.
It is Boris’s “just follow the money” values that are desecrating the country with the unnecessary HS2, concreting over prime agricultual land, London carbuncle building by big patrons of the party, unwillingness to deal with wokeism in our public institutions that the public sees and will vote accordingly.
Don’t be too smug that new conservatives will go the way of UKIP.
Can’t go criticising WSC in front of Roberts: that’s his whole career and income-stream Hitchens was sullying. No wonder Roberts had a hissy-fit.
Fragmentary Gadabout
2 years ago
Personally I think it’s just too difficult to hold the north and the south in a coherent electoral coallition for any length of time. A charismatic figure like Blair or Johnson might do it for a time but ultimately the priorities of these places are too great for it to hold.
To make lasting change you have to pick one, and then govern according to the values of that place, as Thatcher did with the South.
I’m afraid I don’t agree with this at all. I am a northerner who has lived in the south for half my life. I have family and friends in both regions. I don’t see any difference in the attitudes or circumstances that can be pinned on their geography. I grew up in a Lancashire constituency that voted Tory in the Maggie years and Labour in the Blair years and is now Tory again. I lived for 20 years in a London constituency that was a Labour/Tory swing seat and now I live in a southern city that has a Tory MP and a Lib Dem council. I think regional political differences are an invention of the press.
Grantham’s arguably more North than South. Methodism certainly was. Thatcher’s values were of old school Northern self-reliance and personal responsibility as much as anything: ‘Never do ‘owt for nowt less’n it be for tha’ sen.’
Grace Froggatt
2 years ago
Bubellib!!
Peter Joy
2 years ago
Some truth in this. But the disgusteds of Tunbridge Wells are, I think, long past respecting the rank and stinking BBC, National Trust and C of E. For many small c conservatives, even the monarchy is, all too literally, on its last life.
For all of this writers sneering, patronising and superior tones I will respond to this article.
I actually live just a few miles from TW. I am a life long Tory voter of 40 years and have at various times been a Tory Party member. However, I am not at present and intend not to vote Tory at the next election if Johnson is in charge.
What is the point of the Tory Party at present?
It does not represent traditional conservative thought or practice and become a pastiche of the Blair government of c.2000. It is a centre left Cabinet of wealthy old money and new money immigrant social democrats.
Tax and spend, eco idiocy, trans and gay rights, anti small business and the self-employed.
They have done nothing with Brexit, no bonfire of regulations.
Those in the Red Wall will soon enough realise that the governments hysterical over reaction and over spending on the Covid pandemic has doomed the ‘levelling up’ agenda and all the monies that would have gone to them have now been thrown away postponing the date of death of those in their 80s by a couple of years.
The Tory party needs to suffer a massive shock at Election and to be thrashed and broken. Johnson has to go and the cabinet of social democrats dismissed to the back benches.
Absolutely spot on. Where are our truly conservative MPs?
Exactly. I couldn’t have put it better.
The small c social conservatives underpinned both the Old Tories and Old Labour. The Conservatives did not do well in the latest council elections, but then neither did Labour.
Blaming the results on Boris Johnson alone misses the point. Some like him for his heroic actions, some hate him for his heroic character flaws.
Perhaps you could equally argue that Kier Starmer failed to step up.
The NetZero insanity will make people much poorer, making driving the preserve of the upper middle class, make energy erratic and unreliable, make holidays either hard or impossible, require heat pumps that don’t actually work well and require unhealthy hermetically sealed homes, and require *massive* state control over society to enforce.
If I wanted green I’d vote Green, but if I’m going to get green even if I vote Tory, I’ll vote Reform UK.
The Conservative Party is not in any meaningful sense a conservative party.
I lived near Tunbridge Wells for some years. The writer’s description is most inaccurate, a cartoon sketch; after all, if was so blue it would not have gone yellow this time (as it has before).
Incidentally it is not in the middle of Kent; it is on the border with East Sussex
While having moral standards is fine, constantly being offended by everything is for wokists. I tried being disgusted by the drop in moral standards. It was very useful, but eventually it began to consume me. How far did I have to go to be a true small-c conservative? Could any modernism at all be tolerated? Was tolerance an unacceptable attitude in and of itself?
I became a snob and was corrupted by excessive melancholia over the loss of the past. I considered just giving up on life. Why bother trying to increase attendance at my local church? Better to shake my head at how it was in decline. Why support new housing development if that was going to tear up a green field?
It got to the point where instead of trying to bring the past back (with some of the modern age integrated in), I was just waiting for the world to end.
Presenting Tunbridge Wells, Douglas Murray, Peter Hitchens, and declinists as heroes can go too far. Even Andrew Roberts began to criticise Hitchens in Standpoint Magazine when one of his declinist screeds targeted Churchill.
There are plenty of people with good moral standards. There are plenty of tasteful houses being built (see Shrewsbury). let’s have some positivity instead of constant declinism. It is not heroic, no matter how respectable it might look.
Boris is part of that. he got us Brexit, and is lauded by the Ukrainians as an ally- take that declinists! Some progress on mass migration has been made, with more to do. He may not be an angel, but his moral standards are deeper than many people realise. He too is stout and sensible, when it really matters.
It is Boris’s “just follow the money” values that are desecrating the country with the unnecessary HS2, concreting over prime agricultual land, London carbuncle building by big patrons of the party, unwillingness to deal with wokeism in our public institutions that the public sees and will vote accordingly.
Don’t be too smug that new conservatives will go the way of UKIP.
Can’t go criticising WSC in front of Roberts: that’s his whole career and income-stream Hitchens was sullying. No wonder Roberts had a hissy-fit.
Personally I think it’s just too difficult to hold the north and the south in a coherent electoral coallition for any length of time. A charismatic figure like Blair or Johnson might do it for a time but ultimately the priorities of these places are too great for it to hold.
To make lasting change you have to pick one, and then govern according to the values of that place, as Thatcher did with the South.
I’m afraid I don’t agree with this at all. I am a northerner who has lived in the south for half my life. I have family and friends in both regions. I don’t see any difference in the attitudes or circumstances that can be pinned on their geography. I grew up in a Lancashire constituency that voted Tory in the Maggie years and Labour in the Blair years and is now Tory again. I lived for 20 years in a London constituency that was a Labour/Tory swing seat and now I live in a southern city that has a Tory MP and a Lib Dem council. I think regional political differences are an invention of the press.
Grantham’s arguably more North than South. Methodism certainly was. Thatcher’s values were of old school Northern self-reliance and personal responsibility as much as anything: ‘Never do ‘owt for nowt less’n it be for tha’ sen.’
Bubellib!!
Some truth in this. But the disgusteds of Tunbridge Wells are, I think, long past respecting the rank and stinking BBC, National Trust and C of E. For many small c conservatives, even the monarchy is, all too literally, on its last life.