An Orrful dilemma
on hating your own voters
One of the strangest things about the National Conservative movement is how much the leaders hate their own potential voters. If you look only at the Christian Conservative aspect, as represented by Danny Kruger, Miriam Cates, and so on, their assault on bureaucratic market liberalism has two major aims. They want to replace the Welfare state – in fact the whole modern state – with something explicitly Christian and, they imagine, much more effective. This is basically the Welby / Carey model of evangelical effectiveness: if only power is concentrated in the hands of the right leaders, then God will see to it that we prosper. There’s no reason to suppose it would work out any better in government than it did for the Church of England.
That’s because it just doesn’t scale. What works at a parish level does not and cannot work at a higher level of organisation. This applies whether or not God is brought into your plans. At the same time, the fact that it does work at a local level means that there will always be a reservoir of support among small businessmen and other people who see it working where they operate. That’s the foundation of a lot of the gut support for Reform and what used to be the Conservative Party.
But if you’re a National Conservative, the class whose economic interests you wish to support are also to a very large extent the people you want to deport on racist grounds. Sorry, on grounds of “Community cohesion”. The vast majority of immigrants are not in fact scroungers but enthusiastic capitalists and they would cheerfully vote for a slimmed down state – but they won’t vote for a party which wants to expel them for the colour of their skin.
The same reasoning applies with double force to the social policy aims of the Nat Cons. They want to renationalise the sexual market and to ensure that it works to the benefit of society rather than as the present anarchy. They want more babies, but only in more families. They also believe that both men and women would be happier under the neotraditional dispensation, because that’s what God made them for but when the common people are too blinded by selfish lusts to see this truth the state must show them the error of their ways. This is another idea that has a natural constituency in its social conservative form. Even the progressives who would denounce it as crypto-fascist are either themselves committed to the state’s imposing a particular (and very different) sexual morality through schools, the tax system and so on, or unusually committed to those children that they do have. Many of course manage both.
But the social conservative vote in this country is overwhelmingly religious, and therefore overwhelmingly non white.
At this point the Christian portion of the Orrful coalition splits off from the straightforwardly racist. The Christians would be happy to deport only the Muslims. Some of them I suspect believe that this is the only way England can survive. But the racists would deport all Christians who are not white, too. To that extent “Muslim” really is just a code word for “Brown”. This is certainly how the Home Office sees it, as appeared when attempts were made to let in Christian refugees from Syria because they were being persecuted by Muslims in the big refugee camps.
Perhaps the African immigrant Christians here would also be happy to deport all the Muslims, but they are not going to part of a Reform coalition because they too would face deportation.
And that is the second prong of the Orrful dilemma. When you come up with a program that makes enemies of most of your natural voters you really need to think again. It seems to me that there is an opening here for political parties willing to work with non-white social conservatives, and once upon a time the Conservatives might have been one of them. But they are bent on suicide.