Sunday 15 January 2017

Right Thinking

The key to understanding Theresa May is that she joined the Conservative Party before Margaret Thatcher became Leader, and she did not enter Parliament until the General Election that made Tony Blair Prime Minister.

It is not, therefore, a surprise that she should support workers' representatives on boards, or restrictions on foreign takeovers, or an infrastructure-based Industrial Strategy.

Or an approach to pay disparities that invites Jeremy Corbyn's wage cap proposal that turns out to enjoy majority support both in general and among Conservative supporters.

She certainly has no intention of reintroducing charges to enter museums and art galleries.

A Tristram Hunt Government, like a David Miliband Government, would have been a nightmare of what Thatcherism would have been without the churchiness and the noblesse oblige of the Tories.

As would Government by most Labour MPs today, who are well to the right of the very churchy Tory Prime Minister.

May's relative popularity is trumpeted with the utmost loudness by people who despise everything for which she stands.

The Internet rants on endlessly about the popular yearning for a Leader, party or movement to the right of whoever was leading the Conservatives at the given time.

But, unlike what has turned out to have been the highly popular yearning for a Leader, party or movement to the left of whoever had been leading Labour since 1995, there is absolutely no evidence that any equivalent right-wing feeling exists in actual fact.

The Right could not even get a candidate onto the ballot paper for Leader of the Conservative Party, and its proposed candidate was in any case at once preposterous and rather sinister.

The DUP is about to experience very significant losses to the UUP.

And UKIP has gone down from two MPs to one, if that.

It is falling apart, with Arron Banks using both a Question Time appearance and a Sputnik interview last week to position himself well to its left economically, up to and including the public ownership of the utilities and even of the banking sector.

Watch that space.

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