The U.K.’s Conservative Party wiped out two-thirds of its elected legislators because it betrays its voters, a rising star Member of Parliament told U.S. conservatives on Monday.
“We published lots of [conservative] policy documents and we did precisely nothing,” MP Suella Braverman told the National Conservative conference on July 8. “What we particularly didn’t do was mention immigration … [especially] we didn’t want to talk about the role of out-of-control population growth.”
Braverman, who is now a candidate to replace the defeated leader of the U.K.’s Conservative Party, Rishi Sunak, warned her friendly audience of American conservatives not to fall for the excuse that the “deep state” blocks conservative reforms.
The political failures, she said, are often engineered by duplicitous politicians who quietly support the liberal establishment even as they loudly promise conservative policies:
The key thing to understand for us in the U.K. — and I suspect you in many countries as well — [is that] many conservatives comfort themselves with the claim that things like this [policy failure] happen because of “The Blob” [The U.K.s’ term for the Deep State]. That’s a mysterious, implacable entity in the administrative state which is stopping politicians from doing the things they claim to do when trying to get your vote.
This is garbage, by the way, and the Tory [Conservative Party] failure to implement [immigration reform] shows you why.
The reason it didn’t happen was because [conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak] didn’t want it to happen. It was a choice by the politicians not to do it. It wasn’t because it was impossible. And it certainly wasn’t because he bravely tried it yet nobly failed to get it done. It was because although he publicly claimed time after time that he wanted to do it, but he simply didn’t. He set up his his face against doing it and accomplished that goal [of blocking reform].
The moral here is that we conservatives have got to stop searching for phantoms to explain our own [naive] failures: We’ve got to start looking at the politicians carefully, those politicians [who] never meant their big talk in the first place.
Top U.K. conservatives also successfully hid their support and sympathy for the transgender agenda behind public opposition, she added:
I was told that I would be on the wrong side of history [by opposing] that particular radical idea. Now I don’t say this to boast or to curry favor but to start to confess my failure. I couldn’t even get out the [“progress”] flag of that horrible [transgender] political campaign I disagreed with taken down from the roof of the government department I was supposed to be in charge of.
Now again … you’d be tempted to say that was the Blob. But it wasn’t. It was all the Tory politicians.
My question about why is this [flag was flying] would go to 10 Downing Street, to the Prime Minister’s Office, and that’s where the answer failed to come from because far, far too many Tory politicians agreed and still will agree that “The progress flag must flown to be kind, to be inclusive. It shows how liberal and progressive we are.” And that’s what many conservatives want us to be. What the progress flag says to me, it says to me one monstrous thing — that I was a member of a government that presided over the [surgical] mutilation of our children in our hospitals and from our schools.
Us Tories right through our smoking ruin of the general election campaign claimed, we claimed powerfully, that we were doing something about trans fanatics when in fact, what we did was let it happen …
I had colleagues who supported it in the Conservative Party, who were fully signed up to this project, and who saw people like me who opposed it, who wanted to stand up for the safety and security of our children, as not simply the villain – but somehow as the “people who were losing the Party votes with our hateful words.”
The elite betrayal of mainstream conservative priorities caused the public to abandon the Conservative Party, especially after Nigel Farage offered a conservative voice with his Reform Party, she said:
Why did we suffer the worst election results in our 300-year history? Because of what we’ve done, because of what we have left undone in the last two years. Because of our records, which are clear-eyed British public sees all too clearly … This was justified punishment by the public because we didn’t deliver on our promises. And it gets worse yet.
We now face a credible [political] threat, a credible rival for our right-wing voters. This with our [first past the post] electoral system will shred our votes, massively reducing the number of conservative and reform MPs who are elected … This is not just a defeat for my party. It’s a moment of existential crisis from which we may not recover.
Yet Conservative Party members are still sneering at conservative voters, she said:
Our problem is us … My party governed as liberals and we were defeated as liberals … [Yet] for some of my colleagues, it’s [Farage’s] Reform voters who are to blame… “How dare they not vote for us? Don’t they they know we have a God-given right to their support — it doesn’t matter what we do with it.”
The screaming entitlement goes hand in hand with toxic condescension. I have MP colleagues who believe it’s racist to have voted for Reform … [Who say] “We should be glad that we no longer have their tainting support.”
“I’ll say something profoundly British now: The Tory Party is never going to recover unless it learns some basic manners: We’re entitled to not one vote save the ones we earn by keeping our promises,” she said, adding:
[Farage’s] Reform [Party] is not going to magically disappear unless we do something about the concerns of their voters. I want to stress that they are [Farage’s] voters now because we have driven them to Reform … [and that] support is overwhelmingly due to how repulsive our record has been …
But we haven’t even started to respect them [or] seriously address why they no longer vote for us. We satisfy ourselves by insulting them, denigrating the [Reform] Party, trying to throw mud. [That] makes us feel better. But the reality is, we’re pushing more and more of our own people away.
The message is being echoed by some other conservatives, according to the BBC:
Former cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg… offered a similar solution, arguing the “Conservative family”, including Reform UK, had won 11m votes combined at last week’s poll.
He added that the result was an “alarm bell against the arrogance of presumption that we thought we had a divine right to rule and a divine right to certain voters”.
“We didn’t. We thought our core vote had nowhere else to go. They did.
“And we cannot just assume that the pendulum will swing back to us or that all the Reform voters will suddenly repent. We need to win them over one way or another.”
Going forward, Braverman said, “we must be unashamedly the champions of family.”
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