No Tory MP is progressive. This should not be a controversial statement.
Although I doubt I can tweet anything these days without some political faction or other exploding in paroxysms of rage (a picture of my cat playing with his stick would set someone off), a quick response to a latest controversy. Following Amber Rudd’s resignation — on a technicality of not telling the truth about deportation targets, rather than stripping Britons of healthcare, kicking them out of their homes, and deporting them out of their country — I responded thus: “There is no such thing as a progressive Tory. A Tory is a Tory. This how every Tory behaves.”
The typical response from “centrist” or “Blairite” Twitter, or whatever you want to call it, was this is infantile nonsense, what a child he is, that I’d said all Tories were evil or baby eaters or serial killers or something along those lines. Stating that no Tory MP is progressive isn’t an insult, it’s just a statement of fact.
Let’s take prominent so-called Tory ‘moderates’, such as Anna Soubry, Ken Clarke and Sarah Wollaston. Every single one has supported the bedroom tax, one of the most vicious government policies of our time, which forced disproportionately disabled people to pay money they did not have if they were deemed to have a ‘spare room’ in social housing unless they relocated (small problem: the government’s failure to build council housing meant the large majority couldn’t downsize even if they wanted to).
Every single Tory ‘moderate’ has backed policies which have inflicted monstrous misery on disabled people, as well as the real-terms cuts to in-work benefits in a country where most people in poverty are in work, alongside other cuts to social security. Every single Tory ‘moderate’ has backed devastating and continuing cuts to public services, the hiking of the regressive Value Added Tax, the abolition of secure council house tenancies, the privatisation of the NHS and Royal Mail, the slashing of taxes on the rich and big businesses, and attacks on trade union rights in a country which already are most restrictive in the Western world.
This is not surprising. This is after all the Conservative Party. Ever since Thatcherism transformed the party and abandoned its resignation to the post-war consensus, it has had a distinct ideological mission, and all of these policies flow from that.
Take Ken Clarke: as that notorious leftie, the Mail on Sunday columnist Dan Hodges once wrote, he was the longstanding mouthpiece for Big Tobacco who introduced “the worst of the Thatcherite cuts” to the NHS, the employment minister “when the dole queues soared above 3 million” and “the minister for inner cities as an entire generation became ghettoised.”
Again, no Tory MP is progressive. Those who suggest otherwise tend to point to the anti-Brexit position of certain Tory MPs: that is, the mainstream position of Britain’s right-wing party until relatively recently. For some, seeking to return to the status quo of 2015 — when David Cameron and George Osborne were hammering low-paid workers and disabled people and enacting massive cuts and privatisation but backing EU membership— can somehow make you progressive. Supporting policies which devastate public services, cause an epic housing crisis, hammer the working poor and disabled people, but wanting a closer relationship with a nearby trading bloc does not, no, make you progressive.
The other qualification for being a ‘progressive’ Tory MP’ seems to be ‘not being homophobic’, which is a bar so ludicrous that it’s not actually worth engaging with.
Oh: and that doesn’t mean writing off Tory voters, no. I doubt I’d spend a good chunk of my life travelling around Tory constituencies and boroughs talking to recent Tory voters as part of Momentum’s Unseat campaign if that was the case. Tory voters tend not to be ideological and on many economic issues in particular have strikingly different views to Tory Parliamentarians.
To go full circle: Amber Rudd was one of the supposed heroes of the ‘progressive’ Tory MPs. She shared responsibility for one of the worst domestic scandals in recent times, one which has ruined lives.
So again, to repeat: there is no such thing as a progressive Tory MP.
