The annual conference of Britain’s Conservative party, which commands a slender but welcome parliamentary majority after the May elections, wrapped up on Wednesday in Manchester. If last year’s conference was an exercise in nerves and jitters, this year’s was a display of confidence — coupled with quiet grumbles from within the party, and shouts of rage from outside of it.
The confidence and the rage stemmed from the same source: Jeremy Corbyn, the new leader of the Labour party. Corbyn, in case you’ve not heard, is a bearded parody of everything that made the Labour party unelectable in the 1980s, mixed with a toxic dose of post-9/11 self-hating cultural relativism. Hamas are his “friends”; Britain’s nuclear deterrent is his enemy; he won’t sing the national anthem, and please don’t ask what he thinks about the U.S. or Israel.
Even by the standards of the unreformed British Left, this is strong stuff. So it’s not surprising that, as the Tories gathered in Manchester, 60,000 screaming Corbyn supporters filled the city streets. The mob comprised a lot of union members, quite a few of Corbyn’s Stop the War Coalition buddies (who see no contradiction in a man of the Left admiring Saddam Hussein), and far too many unwashed socialists. Last year, the protesters were a motley and unimpressive crew; this year, though still motley, they filled the streets, fueled by their unexpected election defeat.
RELATED: Meet Jeremy Corbyn, the New Loony-Left Socialist Leader of Britain’s Labour Party
Corbyn likes to pose as a man who wants to bring a new, softer, more sweater-friendly style to Parliament. It’s just his bad luck, you see, that he keeps on sharing the stage with Holocaust deniers, and that his supporters like to spit on people and throw eggs. When I left the conference zone late Sunday to attend a party in an off-site hotel, a friendly policeman caught me within about ten feet to remind me to take off my conference pass. “There could be trouble otherwise,” he muttered unhappily. He was right, though when a bearded protester cornered me in a coffee shop and told me quite forcefully that “we don’t like your type round here,” I was able to slip away without much difficulty. I did appreciate one protester’s sign: “The only good Tory is a lavatory.” Oratory is dead, apparently.
Conservatives are inclined to believe that the next election, not to be held until 2020, is in the bag, and that they’re likely to be in power until late into the 2020s.
Faced with all of this, the Conservatives are inclined to believe that the next election, not to be held until 2020, is in the bag, and that they’re likely to be in power until late into the 2020s. That takes justifiable confidence a good deal too far, but right now it’s hard to see how Labour can climb back into relevance, especially as Prime Minister David Cameron is doing the conventionally correct thing by tacking even more strongly to the center — or center-left — of British politics. His closing speech on Wednesday drove the point home: gay rights, prison reform, and an “all-out assault on poverty” are all on the Tory agenda now.
There are only a few slight hitches in this plan to remake both the Tory party and Britain as a center-left nation. The first is the upcoming referendum on Britain’s EU membership. Cameron must bitterly rue the day when, to assuage discontent within the party and ward off the threat of UKIP, he promised to let the people have their say, for the Europeans are being awkward: Only Wednesday, France’s Francois Hollande told Britain to back a further massive expansion of EU powers or get out, which is precisely the choice Cameron does not want to have to face. Without the referendum, his opponents in the Conservative party would have few options: Labour is running round biting people, and UKIP has drifted to the left and is more of a hindrance than a help in fighting the referendum. But as it is, the referendum, no matter how Cameron seeks to finesse it, runs a real risk of splitting the party.
#share#But it’s not simply Europe that worries the Conservative party’s activists. They like winning just fine, of course, and they relish the sight of Corbyn making a fool of himself. But Cameron’s strategy rests not just on continuing his so-called modernization project within the Conservative party, a project that has now become a permanent revolution. It rests on doing nothing very dramatic to confront any of Britain’s underlying problems. From the decayed state of its armed forces to its enormous long-term indebtedness, to its vaporous foreign policy, to the EU itself, the approach of the government is now all too obvious: do as little as you can.
RELATED: With Jeremy Corbyn’s Rise, the Lower Depths of British Socialism Are Suddenly Mainstream
The Cameron strategy, in short, is to follow the Blair playbook: put yourself in the center, triangulate carefully, rely on your opposition to make a fool of itself, and coast to victory. Not for nothing is Cameron’s favorite prime minister Harold Macmillan, a center-left Tory who never much liked the Tory party, wanted Britain to get into Europe, and benefited enormously from the factionalism and extremism of Labour in his early years in office in the late 1950s. The problem with Cameron’s approach, though, is illustrated by Macmillan’s fate: When Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell died suddenly in early 1963 and was replaced by the younger Harold Wilson, Macmillan, already under fire for appearing to lack the spirit of the go-go 1960s, all of a sudden seemed like an old man out of his time.
Cameron’s not likely to run into precisely that problem, if only because he’s not old and he’s promised to make way for a new Tory leader before the next election. But Macmillan’s problem was that governing parties don’t make all the weather: Other forces matter too. By leaving the big problems to take care of themselves, the Tories risk being confronted by the charge that they used their now-impending dominance to do nothing in particular. It is hard to say which of Britain’s bills will come due first, and, the world being what it is, it’s likely to be one that no one expects. In Manchester this week, the music was playing. But at some point, the music will stop, and when it does, the approach of playing it safe will, quite suddenly, stop looking safe.