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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The Conservative Party is pursuing profoundly un-conservative policies. So I’ve left it.
I have today resigned my membership of the Conservative Party after 24 years. While that’s a moment of some sadness for me, it’s of trivial importance on any wider scale. What isn’t trivially important is the set of changes which the Party’s undergone in the last few years and especially the last few weeks because these will have an immense impact on the country, one way or another, and are changes that no true conservative party would be advocating.
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I'm under no illusions that this could be some time off, though, and that we first will suffer a crushing defeat.
Enjoy your liberation.
By win I mean still not have a majority but more seats than the other parties
IMHO, now that the budget deficit has been brought below 2% of GDP, there is good reason to spend in key areas. I was certainly shocked to learn that the number of cases being prosecuted has fallen by half, as a result of cuts to the justice budget. That's a real dereliction of duty on the part of the government.
Your dilemma starts with the profoundly unpragmatic (and, to me, unConservative) fixation with delivering "the referendum result" No previous British government in history has chained itself so foolishly, and all our problems start with this preposterously unBritish obsession.
True: today';s Tory party has made things worse by allowing an extremist cabal to define what that result was. But there is reasonable evidence the population has moved on from its views in June 2016 - and by refusing to accept a referendum rerun (or a clear restatement of the fundamental British constitutional rule that: Parliament decides, not a glorified opinion poll), you've painted yourself into an impossible position.
No sensible party will court you as long as you remain wedded to a - frankly - pig-headed and unBritish obsession with trying to tell Britain what it was thinking on one day three years ago. That's how America misrules itself.
I could have hung around to wait for a Labour split and gone with the sane wing. I am still receiving well argued missives as to why I should resume work and put the crazies to the sword. I just don't want to any more.
Query - when you leave the Tory party do you leave leave? I cut up my Labour membership card, said "I quit" on social media and cancelled my direct debit. Yet I am still a member under rules which do not allow any member to leave other than by means of exclusion. Non-payment of subs for 6 months is automatic exclusion, so unless I get expelled in the meantime (such as declaring for or joining the Tories) I remain a member until early 2020...
How very 2019.
https://labourlist.org/2019/08/the-derbyshire-dam-collapse-shows-we-need-to-transform-our-water-industry/
Unfortunately for him, the dam is owned nad maintained by the Canal and River Trust, a charity that replaced the old British Waterways.
https://canalrivertrust.org.uk/
It seems a bit harsh to rant against the evils of the privatised water companies, shareholders and profit-taking, when the problem occurred in an NGO charity. Whilst it can be argued that the CWT should be getting more funding, that's a rather different issue.
And sadly, Labourlist don't allow comments to point this out.
The Conservative party is mutating, like the Tommyknockers of Stephen King’s novel. The old one is not coming back.
The Conservatives are facing a perfect storm.
Best wishes - I imagine you are feeling something of an empty sadness this morning. But you have to be true to yourself and your principles. If you could not be that inside the Conservative party anymore, you had no real choice but to go.
Could the last sensible Tory to leave the party turn the lights out?
He is (like Richard Nabavi) a core loyal Conservative and this is a very serious loss.
When you fundamentally disagree with the central policy aim of the government and most of its other major policies then it is no longer the party for you.
Like David, I also resigned my membership yesterday, No Deal was already my red line but the Cummings plan on the front of yesterday’s Times was the tipping point. I could live with Brexit but not No Deal. If I wanted to ruin the economy I would have joined the Labour Party.
The other thing that brought it to head was the realisation that if and when Boris crashes and burns the party isn’t going to come to its senses but go for someone even more horrific, like Priti Patel, Steve Baker, or our Corbyn, Andrew Bridgen as next leader.
I joined the party in the 90s my philosophy hasn’t changed but the party has, that we are about to willingly deliver economic damage whilst the same people who back in 2016 said No Deal was Project Fear now say it’ll be fine means I can wash my hands of the looming tempest.
For many Conservatives, leaving the EU is like restoring the monarchy in 1660.
I hope the party can return to a place where people like you are part of the process. But at the moment, the party is as bereft of leadership as Corbyn's Labour.
Best,
@dounreay262
I'm not a Conservative member, but will be sticking with them at the next General Election if the alternative is Corbyn.
I'm hugely unimpressed with them for backing Boris Johnson, however, and with the PM for his blustering nonsense and endless spending pledges. He's got a job to do, which is sorting out leaving the EU. I think he's going to cock it up, as one might expect from a known incompetent, but we'll see.
I’d expect them to do very well in the South and stockbroker belt, and to fall back markedly at subsequent elections.
However, you can never leave the Labour Party. I am still getting all my CLP literature, messages from the Great Leader, stuff from the regional organisation, and so on, and I resigned and stop paying subs well over a year ago.
Unfortunately, some of the areas requiring most additional public spending priority yield the fewest electoral dividends.
They aren’t many votes in increasing justice, foreign affairs or defence spending. There probably are in policing numbers, the NHS and social care.
On the flip side, increased social welfare payments and reverses to benefit cuts probably won’t help Labour very much either.
Sad to see DH and TSE quit, Rochdale Pioneers too. The main parties are hollowing out.
Will be funny if the last poster on here still an active member of either major party is The Jezziah...
That changed in the late 1950s when establishment Conservatives suffered a catastrophic loss of confidence of the back of it, accompanied with decolonisation accelerating every year, and became inevitable in the 1960s when those underlying attitudes and desire to retain world power status met someone (a new Tory party leader) who was just as ideological about Europe as Jean Monnet.
If we hadn’t joined then I doubt we would have done so in the 1980s, and certainly not after 1985. We probably would have instead negotiated a closer associate status.
If ever there was a time to resign it was during Mays disaster of a regime - crap policies, crap negotiations and crap management.
You've all been frog boiled into seeing getting a grip after a clusterfudge as something mind bendingly radical. It isn’t.
See my post at 6:50.
The risk for the Conservatives is that they are losing a cohort of members with valuable experience of the practical means by which elections are fought and won: canvassing, turning the vote out, etc. Do the entryists from UKIP have those skills?
In the end Herdson may still end up personally voting for Johnson's party. There aren't many obvious centre-right alternatives. I'd suggest that his exit from the party will cost them some votes, though, from voters he might otherwise have persuaded.
Edit: Apologies to TSE. I just saw a post from him saying he has resigned too ! Are Remainers leaving the Tories in droves ? Or, only activists ?
I wonder whether Cummings, even with Bozo’s backing, is going to reach a point where his egg-breaking no surrender strategy becomes too much even for the current bunch of Tory MPs?
Taking control of a referendum campaign, a transient entity staffed by relatively few people, is a lot easier than getting the whole of government - a large number of elected politicians backed by countless advisers and civil servants, and usually responsive to all manner of pressure from the public, electors, media, the law, vested interests and opinion leaders - to pursue a path of scorched earth or burning bridges, or whatever analogy we might choose. There could easily become a point where he has generated so much counter-action that Bozo has to tell him to stop.
These posts firm up my own decision not to vote Conservative under Boris.
Remoaners, and I am going to use the remoaner term here for yourself being unhappy with a very mild form of leave are just as responsible as Farage, Boris and Banks for pushing this country to the brink of a potentially economy trashing No Deal Exit. Like all those Labour MPs who refused to vote for the WA through their ridiculous tribalism this position is contemptible.
Shame. Hope you come back soon.
A party based on how Thatcher governed.
Pro-EC, fiscally responsible, pro business, socially liberal (section 28 apart), helping plebs do well out of their lives, radical reform of public services.
And, FWIW, I don’t agree it was Norway. It was much closer to what Alastair Meeks described as a managed Hard Brexit, with political independence and freedom of action in services, digital, financial regulation and immigration, but staying part of the single market for goods with very close customs alignment on that.
The argument that a week of Boris - who has implemented nothing is awful and 3 years of May was fine is laughable.
Reminds me of a joke -
How do you know someone is a vegan ?
Don’t worry they will have already told you.
It's not a surprise that the party under Corbyn lacks the administrative competence to implement that.
I wasn't a fan of the direction of the EU pre 2016, nor was I impressed by Cameron's constant pretence that reform was always just around the corner. I had voted Leave, but now remain underwhelmed by Boris Johnson and The ERG, their arguments for Brexit verge on fiscal and economic incontinence backed by political incoherence.
If Cameron had been a more cunning politician he would have put in a turnout clause, with a % vote floor for the Referendum. He didn't and his role in this shambles cannot be overlooked.
Even if the UK was to Remain, more attention would be needed to address the concerns of those who voted Leave. I'm far from convinced that Jo Swinson is able to do this, even if she retains her seat at a General Election. The LDs have to ask what are they other than a pro EU group at Westminster.
As I have repeatedly said, Johnson and Corbyn - two cheeks of the same arse.
HMQ launches operation Gough Whitlam.
Devastating critique of the Party from a conservative point of view. The Lib Dems are the clear conservative option these days, curiously, including keeping the United Kingdom intact.
Sadly I think it will take a while but we’re on course to put Corbyn in Number 10 and/or ensure we rejoin the EU and the Euro by the 2020s by the approach of Boris and the No Dealers.
Hardly a sound evidence based approach.
All water under the bridge now. The loonies are now in charge.
If people quit after even a budget, a manifesto or even a bill being passed then fair enough.
Quitting on personality and newspaper talk after a week after 3 years of dire government and shouting about how awful it all is - the logic is well a bit thin.
So either (a) Corbyn is so stupid he doesn't know how to count or (b) he was opposed to the WA because he genuinely wants to leave with no deal.
I may be being unfair, of course. It may be both.
No.
The Telegraph are worried that Ken Clarke will replace “the People’s Boris” (yes, that is really their headline)
The execution of Brexit has been appalling
Politicians on all sides have been self centred and destructive
But sometimes when you can’t go back you only have to worry about the best way to move forward. (Paul Coelho)
I’m upset and shocked too but we don’t need to snipe at him. He’ll feel awful as it is.
No. There is a time for everything, and all political parties run their course, eventually.
Yet all those self righteous MPs interviewed at the Commons telling the news what a great job they had done by voting against the WA. Their actions have led to no deal pure and simple. I hold Yvette Cooper most liable. She thought she was being so clever. The look on her face when Boris was at the Dispatch Box telling her that he would definitely leave on the 31/10/2019 come what may told a story. The WA, though not perfect, was always going to be the best that we would get from the EU. Parliament should have resoundingly voted for it.
Slice of powdered egg and turnip pie, anyone?