Is the Tory Party an anachronism which should be disbanded?

First topic message reminder :

“No one ever rode to power on such a husky sledge of blatant untruth as David Cameron – greenest, most family-friendly, kindest to poor and disabled children and no frontline cuts.” (Polly Toynbee)
 
As we all know, Cameron only “rode to power” in 2010 on the backs of the Liberal Democrats. Despite having so many factors in their favour, the Tories couldn’t win the election outright, and their 36% share of the votes cast was their highest score in the last four general elections. The Tories haven’t won an election outright since 1992, when John Major lied his way back into office by promising “tax cuts year on year”, before proceeding to increase taxes more than any previous government in peacetime.
 
Tories have been around for a long time. The word ‘tory’ comes from the Gaelic ‘torai’, meaning ‘outlaw’ or ‘bandit’, so little has changed there. In the 17th century, Tories supported the king against Parliament. Although the Tory William Wilberforce was a leading campaigner against slavery, his party did not support its abolition, and it was left to a Whig government to end that evil practice in 1833, the year in which Wilberforce died. But then the Tories have always been ‘the nasty party’ (though that might be an understatement). 750,000 Irish people died of a potato famine in the 1840s because the Tories said ‘the free market’ would end the famine. (While those Irish people were starving to death, many Anglo-Irish estates continued to export grain and livestock to England.)
 
The Tories have rarely supported any of the reforms – such as education for all, the vote for all, the establishment of the welfare state and the NHS, legalised abortion and homosexuality – which in time came to be generally accepted as hallmarks of a civilised society. Yet until the arrival of Thatcher, the Tories sought not only to protect the rights of the rich and powerful (as they still do), but also to ‘conserve’ the status quo, whereas nowadays their mission is to asset-strip the state in support of their cronies and financial backers.
 
Despite having little or no empathy with the vast majority of the population, the Tories were, until quite recently, accepted as the natural party of government, and they were in power for about three-quarters of the last century. With more money than other parties and a largely supportive press, they operated a brilliant propaganda machine which persuaded or duped enough people into continually voting against their best interests. As Nye Bevan put it: “How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? That's the whole art of Tory politics.”
 
However, society has changed. Although far too many people are still brainwashed by the BBC into looking up to the medieval institution of hereditary monarchy, deferment to those with grand titles, pots of money and posh accents has declined rapidly since the 1960s. Britain has become multiracial and multicultural, and the most popular national dish isn’t steak and kidney pie or fish and chips but chicken tikka masala. Britain has been in the EU (and its predecessor, the EEC) for forty years, and the development of package holidays and cheap flights has broadened people’s horizons. Enough of us have realised that the world doesn’t end at Dover, and so the flag-waving ‘Little Englander’ mentality is now mainly the preserve of the saddos who support UKIP and the EDL. And of course we no longer have an empire, which used to make such people feel superior to the ‘Johnny Foreigners’ who were subjugated and exploited.
 
The Tories have failed to keep up with these changes, and their party membership reflects as much. At one time they had about 3 million members. When Cameron became their leader in 2005, they had 270,000 members, but now they have only 130,000. (By contrast, membership of the Labour Party has increased by 31,000 since Ed Miliband became leader.) Lord Feldman is the Tory co-chairman in charge of party membership. In 2011, he launched a membership drive which saw a further drop in membership! In the real world, failure on that scale would result in the sack, but Feldman, a close friend of Cameron with an office in Downing Street, remains in his post. Many of those who are still Tory Party members work themselves into a lather over equal marriage, which again shows how out of touch they are; I can’t believe that many of the people who are struggling to keep solvent and feed and clothe their children see such an issue as important.
 
Writing for ‘Conservative Home’, Paul Goodman points out that “Tory members have undergone one significant change in the last 25 years or so.  They are, on the whole, older people.” If the Tory Party can’t attract young people, isn’t it likely to die when its remaining members do? It may be that the Tories realise they are in terminal decline and that this may be their last ever time in power. That would explain the breakneck speed with which they are dismantling what’s left of the state following all the Thatcher and Major privatisations, which were dubbed by former Tory PM Harold Macmillan as “selling off the family silver”. Tory MP Douglas Carswell is certainly in no doubt that the Tories are in serious trouble:
 
“For a generation, the Conservative Party has been fighting a long retreat. An endangered species in much of the north of England, we are all but extinct in Scotland. Towns and cities across England that within living memory returned Conservative majorities to the town halls  and MPs to Parliament are now Tory-free. In many constituencies across the country, our local party structure is almost as hollow as our approach to the economy. HMV, the music retailer, went bust. Why? It had a declining market share and costly overheads. The Conservative Party is run a bit like HMV, and if it does not change, it will go the way of HMV.”
 
When Cameron became Tory leader, we were promised an end to the ‘nasty party’ image, but once in power again, the Tories have been more toxic than ever. We have a government conducting a systematic assault upon the sick, the poor and the disabled, slashing welfare budgets and forcing people off benefits. 500,000 of us now use food banks. They make it easier to sack us, make us work longer hours for less pay, force our kids to work for nothing, raise the retirement age whilst cutting our pensions and weaken our health and safety laws. And all just so a handful of people can be immensely rich.
 
Barring a rigged general election in 2015 – and we can’t rule anything out from a party that has tried to gerrymander the constituency boundaries, end automatic voter registration and cut off the finances of the main opposition party – the Tories will be toast. No governing party since 1974 has increased its percentage of the votes cast in the subsequent election (and then it was only because a second election was held after just seven months), and so the likelihood that the Tories will improve on their 36% share last time must be remote. Then the passage of time since the Tories last won an election outright will become even longer. Far-right headbangers have a natural home waiting for them in UKIP, blatant hypocrites can always link up with the Liberal Democrats, and the remaining Tory Party members will soon be having appointments with undertakers. So isn’t it time for this nasty, corrupt assortment of out-of-touch bigots, liars and losers known as the Tory Party to call it a day and disband?
 
Sources used:-
 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/27/ed-balls-prudent-full-throttle-fury
 
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/irish_potato_famine.cfm
 
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/politics/2012/07/how-tory-membership-has-collapsed-under-cameron
 
http://conservativehome.blogs.com/thetorydiary/2013/05/by-paul-goodmanfollow-paul-on-twitter-there-are-activists-in-every-party-whose-eyes-arent-entirely-steady-in-their-sockets.html
 
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2287256/Tory-Party-run-like-HMV--way-says-Conservative-MP-Clacton-DOUGLAS-CARSWELL.html

You mean the bloody rich.

stuart torr wrote:You mean the bloody rich.

GOT IT IN ONE Stuart

Thanks Redflag.

A view from the far right across the pond, presumably that of a Tea Party ally of UKIP. Well written and quite entertaining, worth a read in my opinion.

Defection: It Is Farage's Duty to Sweep Away The Tory Corpse... He's Doing it Pretty Well

by Gerald Warner

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/09/28/Mark-Reckless-Tory-Defection

Here are a few tasters:-

“Tony Blair severely damaged the Tories but he did not destroy them. Cameron will go down in history as the arrogant, serially incompetent, belief-free buffoon who extinguished the oldest surviving political culture in Europe.”

“No party in history has worked tirelessly to divest itself of its core support. But Dave has done that. Every initiative of his has combined fatuity with offensiveness.”

“At the 2010 general election Dave could not even secure a parliamentary majority against Gordon Brown, whose popularity rating was lower than that of George III in Massachusetts in 1776, because he had already alienated so much of his natural support.”

“The Bullingdon bullies became intoxicated with arrogance and entitlement.”

“He thought it would be an impressive political coup to trash the English landscape with HS2, so that in 20 years time businessmen could reach Birmingham 20 minutes earlier.”

“The crass leadership does not even possess the urbanity and discretion of the old ruling class. Dave is the Queen’s fifth cousin, yet he could not resist bragging about how the sovereign 'purred' when he told her the outcome of the Scottish referendum. Apparently Her Majesty does not have access to television or the internet at Balmoral.”

Stirring stuff, but let nobody forget that what has befallen us within the past four years COULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED without the connivance of the yellow Quisling Liberal-Democrat Party.

Now, why couldn't a labour supporter have written such a lovely piece of polemic?

But it's her majesty that I feel most sorry for, ( like hell ) no tv or internet?

These brutal new Tories are happy playing UKIP’s game

Extracts from an article by Polly Toynbee:-

The Conservative Party or its leadership are not being reluctantly dragged rightwards. They are boldly going into the blue yonder, because that’s where their yearnings take them. Out of Europe is not just a policy, it’s a proxy for all they hate, from human rights to welfare. Outism is a romantic longing for all their little England could be, if only it were free of everything – possibly including voters.

Osborne ratcheted rightwards with undisguised glee, welfare cuts his totemic message. Brazenly he reprised “All in it together” as yet again his £3.2bn cuts divided young from old and low-paid from the wealthier with a pensions bonanza for their heirs. Hidden in here is a housing benefit cut that will cause evictions: already landlords refuse to let to tenants on housing benefit. Iain Duncan Smith’s jobcentres no longer measure people into work: their target is “off-flow” from benefits. Bully and sanction people enough and hey presto, unemployment is “abolished”.

Disingenuous – no, a downright lie – was the pledge to protect the disabled. Those put in the “work-related activity group” – over half a million disabled people judged possibly able to work some day – will suffer cuts. A third have learning disabilities, many have cancer: only 5% of this group in the work programme ever find a job.

Watching the parade of unpleasant abrasiveness – from Grayling to Pickles, Duncan Smith to Shapps – this looks like a party whose feet have left the ground, lost inside their own shrunken universe.

For the whole article:-
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/30/tories-ukip-david-cameron-europhobic-right

They are trying to do it to me at the moment Ivan, trying to reduce my monies by putting me on jobseekers allowance, instead of whatever replaced the disability living allowance.

There's simply oodles to oppose in terms of the Tory direction for the dispossessed.

One problem : there is no Parliamentary opposition in sight to even squeak a protest worth the name. Disgraceful, disappointing and disgusting...

Very true Phil, and it is effing disgusting.

Rochester Tories displaying their posters in a graveyard - how appropriate!  


https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B1q6P1kIcAApJ2b.jpg

The first, and so far only, UKIP Member of Parliament is a reformed Tory who happened to be very popular in his Clacton constituency. The same could not be said for Mr Reckless (!) who has turned his coat in Rochester. What a lark if the burghers of that constituency chose to remain Tory voters next week.

That nasty piece of work known as Rod Liddle, an associate editor of ‘The Spectator’ who sounds as if he supports UKIP these days, watched the debate between the Rochester and Strood by-election candidates on a BBC South East programme. He commented on the participants as follows:-

“Mark Reckless (UKIP) was disingenuous and evasive and possessed of all of the charisma and warmth of a caravan site on the Isle of Sheppey in late February. Kelly Tolhurst (Tory) was utterly useless on a rather epic level, unable to string a single sentence together. The Green was ineffective and fabulously loathsome, with his sideburns and white poppy and endless sanctimony – an ageing Russell Brand without even his very limited wit, humour and articulacy. The Lib Dem bloke looked like he’d been constructed out of flour and water by a class of remedial six-year-olds and made no sense at all. The best, by a million miles, was Labour’s Naushabah Khan – unruffled, articulate, competent.”

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2014/11/ive-just-seen-the-rochester-candidates-debate-poor-rochester/

If there was any justice, Naushabah Khan, who has lived her whole life in the Medway Towns and is clearly the best candidate, would win this by-election easily and give Ed Miliband some deserved respite. But she won’t win.  I don’t see how either of the alternatives could represent “a lark”. A Tory win would shore up Cameron’s position and give him and his party a boost and some momentum as we head towards the general election. A UKIP win might well see further growth in support for a dangerous party of extreme right-wing fruitcakes. But at least that would give grief to Cameron and make some more Tory MPs think they can keep their seats if they decide to jump ship to UKIP; anything which damages the Tories must be good news for Labour, at least in the immediate future.

Horrible thought - rooting for a UKIP win - just to discomfit the Tories - politics is indeed a dirty business

What a disgusting business altogether is politics.

Ivan wrote:If there was any justice, Naushabah Khan, who has lived her whole life in the Medway Towns and is clearly the best candidate, would win this by-election easily and give Ed Miliband some deserved respite. But she won’t win.  I don’t see how either of the alternatives could represent “a lark”. A Tory win would shore up Cameron’s position and give him and his party a boost and some momentum as we head towards the general election. A UKIP win might well see further growth in support for a dangerous party of extreme right-wing fruitcakes. But at least that would give grief to Cameron and make some more Tory MPs think they can keep their seats if they decide to jump ship to UKIP; anything which damages the Tories must be good news for Labour, at least in the immediate future.

IVAN Nothing would please me more if the Labour candidate Naushabah Khan won the by-election in Rochester & Stroud it would also burst the balloon of Farage & Cameron (oh to be a fly on the wall if that happens)    Just let us hope the people of Rochester & Stroud wake up to the Tory & Ukip nastiness.

A fly on the wall at number ten Redflag if that happened, a few swear words to say the least ffffffffff ahahahagh

That is another place I would love to be a fly on the wall stuart, think of all the scandals you would hear about the mind boggles.

Old song springs to mind Redflag "wouldn't it be loverly"

stuart torr wrote:Old song springs to mind Redflag "wouldn't it be loverly"

Would'nt it be great to be able to listen to all the Tory LIES before they started spouting them stuart

Wouldn't it just, now what shall we say to the press today about old Ed.

Ivan wrote:
If there was any justice, Naushabah Khan, who has lived her whole life in the Medway Towns and is clearly the best candidate, would win this by-election easily and give Ed Miliband some deserved respite. But she won’t win.  I don’t see how either of the alternatives could represent “a lark”. A Tory win would shore up Cameron’s position and give him and his party a boost and some momentum as we head towards the general election. A UKIP win might well see further growth in support for a dangerous party of extreme right-wing fruitcakes. But at least that would give grief to Cameron and make some more Tory MPs think they can keep their seats if they decide to jump ship to UKIP; anything which damages the Tories must be good news for Labour, at least in the immediate future.

These are indeed interesting times for the politically orientated, and a Tory win at Rochester would certainly hearten Cameron Tories, but they don't actually think that they can beat Labour head-to-head, as is obvious from the strength of their vituperation against Ed Miliband. I see the real danger as coming from a UKIP victory because they have a real chance of capturing a novelty vote which might drive Labour off-course if the public just want a change, whatever the cost.

And it seems to me the odious Farage is a living embodiment of the principle that there's no such thing as bad publicity - the more UKIP are criticised, the more currency they seem to get in the public consciousness

Farage, who originally joined the Tory Party because he was inspired by the manic depressive paedophile Keith Joseph, now has "admiration for Iain Duncan Smith". Doesn't that, to use a well-worn cliché, "say it all"?  

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/11/nigel-farage-i-m-not-right-or-left-i-m-radical

Yes it does

It seems no matter what is said about UKIP good or bad works as good publicity for them as it is publicity that they normally would not get, is that how you see it?

stuart torr wrote:Wouldn't it just, now what shall we say to the press today about old Ed.

Anything they want to smear a good & honest man stuart, if the people of the UK are stupid enough to vote the Tories back into power heaven help them cause I would say "Hell Slap it into You" you where thick enough to believe them even knowing they have told Blatant LIES since 2010.

Seconded Redflag.

Monday 9 February was the date of the annual Tory Ugly Bug Ball, where you could pay £15,000 for a table, listen to speeches by Cameron and Lord Feldman, and bid for the privilege of eating a roast chicken dinner with Michael Gove. One git with considerably more money than sense stumped up a £210,000 donation to the Tories for a bronze scale model (less than 20cm tall) of the statue of Thatcher that stands outside the House of Commons.

More details of the event are here:-
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/generalelection/conservatives-silent-auction-this-is-what-tory-donors-bid-for-at-the-partys-fundraiser--and-what-everyone-else-has-to-say-about-it-10035522.html

The catalogue containing the 50 items which were auctioned to raise money for the Tories can be seen here:-
http://www.buzzfeed.com/sirajdatoo/conservatives-black-and-white-fundraiser-feb-2015

“The Conservatives are the workers’ party.” (Grant Shapps)  

Ivan never in the creation of CRAWS SHIT is the Tory party the party of the working man/women & NEVER WILL BE there love of money would get in the way.

The Tories are the zombie party: with an ageing, falling membership, still they stagger on to victory

From an article by Stephen Bush:-

In the case of political parties, their loudest and angriest supporters are mostly found on the internet. The exception is the Conservative Party. Britain’s table-topping team might have its first majority in 18 years and is widely expected in Westminster to remain in power for another decade. But it doesn’t have any fans. The party’s conference, like Labour’s, will be full to bursting. But where the Labour shindig is chock-full of members, trade unionists and hangers-on from the charitable sector, the Tory gathering is a more corporate affair: at the fringes I attended last year, lobbyists outnumbered members by 4 to 1.

All this made the 2015 election win the triumph of a husk. A party with a membership in long-term and perhaps irreversible decline, which in many seats had no activists at all, delivered crushing defeats to its opponents. The Tories have become the zombies of British politics: still moving though dead from the neck down. And not only moving, but thriving.

Yet there are threats. The European referendum will cause endless trouble for their whips over the coming years. And the party has a majority of only 12 in the Commons. The bigger threat to Tory hegemony is the spending cuts to come, and the still vulnerable state of the economy. Yet the public is still convinced that the cuts are the result of “the mess” left by Labour, however unfair that charge may be. If a second crisis strikes, it could be the Tories who feel the benefit, if they can convince voters that the poor state of the finances is still the result of New Labour excess rather than Cameroon failure. For Labour, the Tory zombie remains frustratingly lively.

For the whole article:-
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2015/10/tories-are-zombie-party-ageing-falling-membership-still-they-stagger-victory

If, or perhaps when, the Tories self-destruct over Europe who will benefit?

The manifesto of a Labour/ScotNat/Green/DUP/Plaid/LibDem parliamentary alliance will look like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle.

Thing about the Tory party is, they don't need to rely on their members - they have the media in their back pockets and they are supported by the 1%

Sadly, I have to agree with boatlady. It would be nice to see them consigned to the dustbin of history (not for recycling). But a chap I know thinks that after the end of the world there will still be cockroaches and the Conservative Party. One and the same, some might say.

Going by the title of this thread boatlady the Tory party needs to be done away with for good so it never appears again in the UK that way the people would safe.

The only possible way to get rid of the Tories is to STOP reading papers - stop everyone reading the papers or listening to the news on the BBC - then maybe their vile hold on the consciousness of voters will begin to recede

You forgot to mention Sky news boatlady, but the only thing that will consign the Tories to the bloody DUSTBIN for good is for the people of the UK to rise up against the NASTY Party and all there cuts & Vileness.

I am daily drawn to the inescapable conclusion that we on this forum really should be a good deal more respectful to our betters ( as pictured above ).

But, once I have sobered up, things become clearer...

I am glad you managed to get your head sorted out PH.