Rebuking Conservative Centrism

The political system is in crisis. A financial crash caused by decades of hardline neoliberalism, topped off with the breakdown of industrial communities following rapid globalization has sent the public into frenzy. Brexit, a hopeless pipedream of Eurosceptics since the seventies, came from nowhere and shattered the British political establishment. Across the pond, Trump’s shock appointment rocked the political world.

What does the Conservative Party have to combat such terrifying instability? All the ferocity of a dozing off pensioner. The Conservative Party conference was a depressing affair to watch. Minister after minister walked up to the centre stage and decided to awkwardly ignore the paralyzing division currently gripping their party, and instead seemed more interested in using anti-semitism as a stick to bash Corbyn with. With this as her context, Theresa May danced out on to her platform and finished an uneventful speech with a plea to Labour voters to vote Conservative on the grounds that they are a party for the “decent, moderate, and patriotic”.

‘Decent’. The decent party, whose sanctions on benefits have lead to an almost doubling of the suicide rate of benefit claimants. The Government of a country in which four million children now live in poverty and food banks run out of stock. ‘Moderate’. The moderate party whose own leader did not have the necessary rapport with her MP’s to sack a brazenly offensive foreign secretary, who described Muslim women wearing religious dress as looking like letter boxes in a deliberate ploy to normalise the dehumanization of an entire religion. ‘Patriotic’. A party obsessed with selling the country’s furniture to pay its rent, entrenching privatization in a world famous National Health Service and selling off rail networks not only to private shareholders but to foreign publically run rail franchises, who can inexplicably do it better than we can.

With an average supporter age of 72 and more donation money from the dead than the living it is clear that Conservatism is a dying creed, out of ideas, out of unison and soon, hopefully, out of support.