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The fading of the Tories
Someone sent me an article, “Tory party faces meltdown as its grassroots troops desert or die,” by Andrew Pierce (no link, but it seems to come from The Spectator). Pierce says that the Conservative Party organisation “is in danger of collapsing in large swathes of the country, with many constituency associations verging on the brink of extinction …” He speaks of the “collapse in grassroots support, after three consecutive general election defeats … ” He informs us that forty years ago, the party was “one of the biggest mass political movements in the world, with three million members. Today the figure is closer to 280,000, with the majority of members in receipt of their old age pensions…. Today, a significant number of associations have fallen below the size required to function effectively. Like the divisions of a battle weary army, they exist on paper but not in practice …” The article repeats the same depressing statistics over and over with no analysis. Nevertheless, the situation it describes is gripping, and makes us ask—though the author himself doesn’t bother doing so—what is the cause of the Tory melting-away. I would suggest, unsurprisingly, that it is the fact that the party doesn’t stand for much of anything. In particular, it doesn’t stand for nationhood, for Britain. The crucial moment came when the party ejected Mrs. Thatcher over her opposition to the EU. The conservatives have been dead ever since then. They try in the most pathetic way to pretend they’re not dead, like that sniveling Michael Howard’s wimpy campaigning for immigration reform in the last election—but the show of life and force is painfully unconvincing and unbelievable. It’s hard to believe that there aren’t some genuine conservatives/traditionalists in the party who are capable of speaking and acting like men. But where are they? I don’t see any. The reason for this disappearance of real leaders is simple, though hard to grasp. How can people have a politics or stand for anything, if they don’t have a concrete existence as a people? Before you can speak, you must be. But the British, and the conservatives in particular, have already given up so much of their national and individual being—to the EU, to the Muslims and blacks, to their centralized leftist nanny state, and to their soft feminized culture, that they no longer have a self that can speak and act. As their country moves deeper into Eloihood and dhimmitude, they have nothing to say about it except for a little whining from time to time. This is what liberalism does to people, it turns them into virtual non-people, the living dead. It’s horrible—as horrible as any curse in a horror story.
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