For the British Right, the newspapers that claim to represent their views appear to have lost sight of what exactly is at stake on July 4th. Like the increasingly gormless Conservative Party, the erstwhile Tory press keeps dismissing Labour’s radical agenda by instead suggesting its leader, Sir Keir Starmer, simply wants “power for power’s sake.”
Iain Martin, who has held the lofty title of columnist for The Times for the past seven years, made this quite clear in his latest article, on June 5th, arguing that the most important reason “Faragists” are angry with the Conservatives is because they didn’t give Nigel Farage a peerage for his role in bringing about Brexit. Not their bowing down to the ‘woke’ and net zero agendas; not their failure to desexualise the educational curriculum for children; not their softness on crime; not their inability to—or lack of interest in—properly see Brexit through; not their oversight of increasingly two-tiered policing; not their totally shambolic (mis)management of public services and, of course, the army—to name just a few let-downs. You get the picture.
Oh, and then there’s immigration: the issue which Farage says is at the heart of this election. On this, Martin notes that “Faragists” are merely annoyed—though not as peeved as they are about Farage’s lack of a peerage, remember!—that the Tories’ “relaxed immigration rules post-Brexit and let in too many people.” You’d struggle to think up a more ludicrous understatement. Even if the rules weren’t relaxed post-Brexit, voters—not just these so-called “Faragists”—would still be fuming about the numbers. Recent population changes are now light years away from the target ‘in the tens of thousands’ promised by former Tory prime minister (now foreign secretary) David Cameron all those years ago. In fact, new polling last week suggested that about half of Britons want most legal migration to be frozen altogether.
On the claim that Reform UK supporters dislike the Tories simply because they’ve failed to properly recognise Farage’s impact on British politics, conservative journalist Steven Edginton said: “I can’t think of anyone who has ever said this. Tory open-borders, Net Zero, woke policies seem a little more relevant to most!”
Writer Hector Drummond then jibed that Martin’s claims were “bordering on Financial Times-level[s of] detachment from reality.”
Online commentators have also spent the past week poking fun at a resurfaced 2021 article in the Right(ish) Spectator magazine which claimed that “immigration is no longer a political problem.” The fact its author, then-Spectator political editor James Forsyth, soon after became political secretary of his “close friend” Prime Minister Rishi Sunak might go some way to explaining why the Tories and Tory press seem asleep at the wheel as more than 2.4 million people were let into the country over the past two years alone.
And that’s just legal migration. Even illegal migration, which involves far smaller (though still significant) numbers of individuals, “almost blows the roof off focus group venues,” according to pollster James Johnson.
Yet Martin insists that the “vast bulk of the electorate” is “moderate and in the middle,” parroting Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s comments in The Guardian (no less) that “the evidence of Britain is that elections are always won from the centre ground.” How’s that working out for you, Hunt?
But even if most of the electorate is “in the middle” (of what, exactly?), that would invite the question: why does the establishment Right continue to ignore Labour’s radical agenda? Sunak’s claim that Starmer “doesn’t have any convictions, he doesn’t have any principles” helps to create the impression that Labour is moderate. And The Daily Telegraph seems to have fallen into the same trap, saying in its official endorsement of the Tories that Labour “has no plan for Britain”—a point echoed by Spectator editor Fraser Nelson, who dismisses Starmer as “moderate, even quite dull” Unfortunately, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage may have fallen into the same trap, saying the Tories and Labour “don’t believe in anything. They’re doing it for their careers and you can see it a complete mile off.”
What about Labour’s plan to give votes to children; to make it easier to change gender; to go full-throttle on Net Zero; to introduce identity cards; to push Britain closer again to the European Union? Or, as Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens put it, to be “an active, dogmatic movement with developed plans for economy, constitution, press regulation, education [and] cultural revolution.”
These concerns—like almost everything else—appear to have gone over the heads of the official representatives of the British Right. They will come to regret this.
Britain’s Tory Papers and Pundits Totally Out of Touch Ahead of Election
Photo: Peter Lawrence on Unsplash
For the British Right, the newspapers that claim to represent their views appear to have lost sight of what exactly is at stake on July 4th. Like the increasingly gormless Conservative Party, the erstwhile Tory press keeps dismissing Labour’s radical agenda by instead suggesting its leader, Sir Keir Starmer, simply wants “power for power’s sake.”
Iain Martin, who has held the lofty title of columnist for The Times for the past seven years, made this quite clear in his latest article, on June 5th, arguing that the most important reason “Faragists” are angry with the Conservatives is because they didn’t give Nigel Farage a peerage for his role in bringing about Brexit. Not their bowing down to the ‘woke’ and net zero agendas; not their failure to desexualise the educational curriculum for children; not their softness on crime; not their inability to—or lack of interest in—properly see Brexit through; not their oversight of increasingly two-tiered policing; not their totally shambolic (mis)management of public services and, of course, the army—to name just a few let-downs. You get the picture.
Oh, and then there’s immigration: the issue which Farage says is at the heart of this election. On this, Martin notes that “Faragists” are merely annoyed—though not as peeved as they are about Farage’s lack of a peerage, remember!—that the Tories’ “relaxed immigration rules post-Brexit and let in too many people.” You’d struggle to think up a more ludicrous understatement. Even if the rules weren’t relaxed post-Brexit, voters—not just these so-called “Faragists”—would still be fuming about the numbers. Recent population changes are now light years away from the target ‘in the tens of thousands’ promised by former Tory prime minister (now foreign secretary) David Cameron all those years ago. In fact, new polling last week suggested that about half of Britons want most legal migration to be frozen altogether.
On the claim that Reform UK supporters dislike the Tories simply because they’ve failed to properly recognise Farage’s impact on British politics, conservative journalist Steven Edginton said: “I can’t think of anyone who has ever said this. Tory open-borders, Net Zero, woke policies seem a little more relevant to most!”
Writer Hector Drummond then jibed that Martin’s claims were “bordering on Financial Times-level[s of] detachment from reality.”
Online commentators have also spent the past week poking fun at a resurfaced 2021 article in the Right(ish) Spectator magazine which claimed that “immigration is no longer a political problem.” The fact its author, then-Spectator political editor James Forsyth, soon after became political secretary of his “close friend” Prime Minister Rishi Sunak might go some way to explaining why the Tories and Tory press seem asleep at the wheel as more than 2.4 million people were let into the country over the past two years alone.
And that’s just legal migration. Even illegal migration, which involves far smaller (though still significant) numbers of individuals, “almost blows the roof off focus group venues,” according to pollster James Johnson.
Yet Martin insists that the “vast bulk of the electorate” is “moderate and in the middle,” parroting Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s comments in The Guardian (no less) that “the evidence of Britain is that elections are always won from the centre ground.” How’s that working out for you, Hunt?
But even if most of the electorate is “in the middle” (of what, exactly?), that would invite the question: why does the establishment Right continue to ignore Labour’s radical agenda? Sunak’s claim that Starmer “doesn’t have any convictions, he doesn’t have any principles” helps to create the impression that Labour is moderate. And The Daily Telegraph seems to have fallen into the same trap, saying in its official endorsement of the Tories that Labour “has no plan for Britain”—a point echoed by Spectator editor Fraser Nelson, who dismisses Starmer as “moderate, even quite dull” Unfortunately, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage may have fallen into the same trap, saying the Tories and Labour “don’t believe in anything. They’re doing it for their careers and you can see it a complete mile off.”
What about Labour’s plan to give votes to children; to make it easier to change gender; to go full-throttle on Net Zero; to introduce identity cards; to push Britain closer again to the European Union? Or, as Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens put it, to be “an active, dogmatic movement with developed plans for economy, constitution, press regulation, education [and] cultural revolution.”
These concerns—like almost everything else—appear to have gone over the heads of the official representatives of the British Right. They will come to regret this.
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