The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Brokonomics. Now, last week we had the election and it was a bit of a watershed

00:00:06.940 election. The Tories didn't do desperately well, although not quite as badly as we had hoped.

00:00:12.800 So I thought it's probably time to do the obituary of the Conservative Party. Now for that I thought

00:00:18.580 who do I know who really knows their history of the Conservative Party? And it has to be

00:00:23.480 Apostolic Majesty. Apostolic Majesty, thank you so much for joining us.

00:00:26.600 Hello, Dan. It's wonderful to be invited on and it's actually going to be quite a cheery

00:00:32.740 stream, even though some of you may have been disappointed by the election results. I'm

00:00:36.380 actually very happy with what ultimately transpired. So that's interesting. A lot of us were

00:00:41.900 disappointed, but you've obviously come away with a bit of reflection and you've got to rose your

00:00:48.560 outlook. Why is that? Well, if you consider essentially what needed to be achieved for

00:00:54.560 zero seats. A positive zero seats result would have been anything, if we're going to take

00:01:01.500 academic agents' mantra for this, anything under 100 seats. And a very good night would have been

00:01:09.480 anything under 50 seats. But you have to remember that the Conservative Party has never received fewer

00:01:15.860 than 150 seats. And the chances of turning majorities, which in some cases were 60% or 70%

00:01:24.800 and flipping them, were very, very unlikely. You also have to consider that there are people who

00:01:30.200 have habitually voted Conservative their entire life and has been proven in the election,

00:01:35.940 will do so regardless of whatever insane and detrimental policies the Conservatives put out.

00:01:42.080 So the only way that zero seats could have been achieved is essentially two things happening.

00:01:49.260 One is if reform was better organised and had more money behind it. And two is if Labour ran a much

00:01:56.800 more effective campaign with a more charismatic leader. And I'm looking at this in the long term and

00:02:02.620 conceiving of a time where Labour can also get zero seats.

00:02:08.620 And if you look at the margins and the fact that Labour only received a third of the vote

00:02:16.560 and has got two thirds of seats, it's actually very easy in the next election to flip that.

00:02:22.880 So ultimately what has happened is yes, the Conservatives won 25 seats, more than many of us

00:02:28.360 would have hoped. But everything has been set up now for the next election where essentially anything

00:02:33.680 can happen. And indeed reform has broken through. And as we're going to talk about regarding the

00:02:39.100 obituary of the Conservatives, what the Conservatives have been able to achieve over the last 200 years

00:02:44.420 is preventing any right-wing opposition breaking through into Parliament.

00:02:49.100 So in terms of how disastrous the election result was for the Conservatives, people point to 1906.

00:02:56.400 The Conservatives actually didn't do too badly in 1906. They did very badly in terms of seats,

00:03:00.920 but their vote more or less held up. They received over 40% of the vote. And four years later,

00:03:06.920 they were able to recover most of their losses. And they were in government again, not very long

00:03:11.560 after. But if you look at the Conservatives now, their vote has completely collapsed. They lost half

00:03:16.720 of the votes they received last time. The Conservatives have never received fewer than 30% of the vote.

00:03:23.100 So not just in terms of seats, but in terms of vote share. And in terms of a right-wing opposition

00:03:28.700 party breaking through, this never happened with the National Front. This never happened with the

00:03:32.520 BNP. All of this is really unprecedented. And what it's setting up isn't necessarily for the

00:03:39.200 quick firing squad death that many of us anticipated. Instead, a death by 1,000 cuts, which will no doubt

00:03:45.920 occur over the next five years.

00:03:48.480 Does Labour's position look more brittle to you than the mainstream media is suggesting?

00:03:53.200 Oh, absolutely. Obviously, the fact that Labour has basically eschewed the

00:04:00.760 Corbynite support means that many people on the left are frustrated with the Blairite direction that

00:04:06.400 Labour's essentially taking. As we've seen in the last couple of days, Labour is obviously going to

00:04:11.900 be continuing on in the neocon vein of the Conservatives, which is pro-Israel and pro-Ukraine.

00:04:18.260 And many lefties aren't necessarily happy with that, especially when it comes to Israel.

00:04:24.060 And as many MPs compared to reform, Labour MPs lost to Muslim independent candidates and indeed

00:04:35.340 to Jeremy Corbyn. And if you look at the vote share, Labour received fewer votes this time round,

00:04:41.140 having won an absolute landslide, compared to how many votes they received when Jeremy Corbyn

00:04:46.020 lost the previous election. So no one is enthusiastic about the Labour government.

00:04:52.100 Labour has only come through via inertia and essentially had just a competent Conservative

00:04:59.380 Prime Minister been in power with a mediocre track record. I think Labour would have been defeated in

00:05:05.480 this election. It's only as a result of the palpable feeling of betrayal committed by the Conservative

00:05:12.260 Party, that Labour has simply squeaked into power and is effectively squatting in government at the

00:05:17.880 moment. There has never been a situation in the history of this country where a result has been

00:05:22.560 so lopsided. If anything, you can look at this and say this is the return of the Rotten Borough,

00:05:27.440 effectively, all of these Labour candidates squatting around with barely any public support.

00:05:32.820 So there's a couple of things I want to pick up on there. I very much want to pick up on your

00:05:37.640 200-year comments about the Conservatives blocking the emergence of a real right-wing party. But I have

00:05:42.680 to pick up on the latter point you made there about a competent Conservative Prime Minister. Just out of

00:05:48.500 interest, when was the last Conservative competent Prime Minister?

00:05:51.940 I mean, I'm using sort of competent very sort of broadly. Competent in this sense would simply mean

00:06:00.800 someone who doesn't allow for in excess of half a million immigrants per year, someone who doesn't

00:06:06.580 allow crime to run rampant, someone who doesn't allow for national infrastructure to break down,

00:06:12.240 someone who doesn't commit us to an endless series of self-defeating wars. In terms of, I would say,

00:06:20.580 borderline competence. You can perhaps look at Margaret Thatcher. There are elements to say that

00:06:28.580 John Major wasn't as bad as the current sort of the last sort of crop of four Prime Ministers.

00:06:35.220 I'm not necessarily enthused about either of them. And I think all of them committed in their way to

00:06:39.860 the result that ultimately transpired on Thursday night where the Tories collapsed. But when I'm talking

00:06:47.900 competence, I'm talking just not allowing the country just ultimately to disintegrate. I know a lot of people

00:06:54.160 are wanting the Labour Party to come in and be that competent sort of demonstration of sensible centrism. I

00:07:01.400 don't see that at all. But nevertheless, all the Conservatives had to do was not go out of their way to actively

00:07:08.720 betray their voters on such an easily observable scale. But alas, as has been proven again and again in their

00:07:16.160 history, they really can't help themselves.

00:07:18.440 So you're setting an extremely low bar on Rishi Sunik, still tripped over even that.

00:07:23.180 Oh, yes.

00:07:23.420 But when it comes to betraying their voters, of course, an argument could be made that they've been doing that for quite a while.

00:07:28.140 So let's come back to your comment about the Conservative Party for 200 years. I mean, when do you actually date

00:07:33.960 the origins of the Conservative Party to? Because you could say it goes back even further.

00:07:38.220 Well, yes, there are the Tories. And then there is the modern Conservative Party. The Tories date to 1679,

00:07:49.100 where in the aftermath of the Test Act, a group of parliamentarians supported the right of King

00:07:56.760 Charles II's brother, James II, to inherit the throne. And the modern Conservative Party came about

00:08:03.860 under the leadership of Sir Robert Peel in 1834. It is, however, interesting to note the original

00:08:11.940 Tory party, because if they stood for anything at all, it was two things. One was the defence of the

00:08:19.180 monarchy. And this, of course, is in the aftermath of the English Civil War. So the Tories were the

00:08:24.840 successors of the Cavaliers, and the Whigs were the successors of the Roundheads, obviously,

00:08:29.360 royalists and parliamentarians. However, only nine years after 1679, you had the quote-unquote

00:08:37.820 Glorious Revolution, which more aptly could be referred to as the Dutch coup d'etat. And the

00:08:44.580 reason this is significant in terms of the broader trajectory of the history of the Tories and later

00:08:49.140 Conservatives, is that the Tories, very shortly after their inception, betrayed King James II,

00:08:57.040 and became signatories to the letter, essentially, of invasion handed over to William III to come over

00:09:04.660 and seize the throne from James II. So very early on in their history, they were party to the betrayal

00:09:12.680 of their core constituents and whatever sort of philosophical affectations or beliefs they had.

00:09:18.760 That is a very obvious example. And in fact, as with so many Conservative betrayals, the result was

00:09:25.940 completely devastating for the success of Toryism in England, to the point that Whigs became ascendant

00:09:32.920 for about 100 years, to the point that when the Tories squeaked through during the reign of George

00:09:37.940 III, they were a much diminished force. Instead, and again, looking to that, the Tories, the defenders of

00:09:45.900 the royal prerogative, they already portrayed that. The other aspect of them, of course, is defending

00:09:51.580 the Church of England. Of course, who were the ones to bring in Catholic emancipation?

00:09:57.340 It was the Tories under the Duke of Wellington, interestingly enough, brought in Catholic emancipation.

00:10:03.060 So before the Conservative Party had even formally been created, Toryism had already chopped, had already

00:10:11.640 essentially destroyed the foundations of the two pillars of their core ideological tenets.

00:10:17.900 So the very first constituency was effectively, did you say James II?

00:10:24.480 Yes, the cavalier successors of the English Civil War. So those who supported the rights of the King

00:10:31.220 versus the rights of Parliament. So very early on in their creation, they betrayed James II.

00:10:36.500 They betrayed him. What did they betray him for? What did they get out of that betrayal?

00:10:42.240 Well, interestingly enough, those that did betray James II believed they were doing so to defend

00:10:47.980 the Church of England because James II was a Catholic. However, many of those Tories believed

00:10:54.780 that if they got rid of James II, his son, James III, would become king. And essentially,

00:11:02.440 there would be some sort of continuity in government. But of course, that didn't happen. When William came

00:11:08.220 over, he insisted that he be king. And so all of those Tories who had gone along with the Dutch conquest

00:11:14.820 in order to save the Church of England found that the entire dynasty that James III represented

00:11:20.800 was deposed. And all of their successors, later the Jacobites from James III, the old pretender,

00:11:26.620 were deposed. And as you can probably see, that was devastating for the Tories. Many of them became

00:11:34.400 Jacobites, those that still believed in the defence of the old monarchy. And quite a few of them

00:11:41.000 accommodated themselves to this new order of things. And they supported the later Stuarts and

00:11:48.140 very tentatively also some of them, the Hanoverians where they came in. But they only really became

00:11:54.060 reconciled in part when we get to the reign of George III. George III being essentially the last king

00:11:59.700 who decided to act as a monarch compared to everyone since, or even you can say his grandfather

00:12:06.300 and his great-grandfather. So it is during the reign of George III that we see the Toriesim,

00:12:12.500 which is going to ultimately coalesce into the Conservative Party. And like I said, it ended

00:12:17.780 with the betrayal over Catholic emancipation, and the destruction of the monopoly of religious

00:12:24.040 instruction and privilege coming to the Church of England. And that was only five years before. This

00:12:30.200 was in 1829, before the creation of the Conservative Party. So all this is to say that the Conservative Party

00:12:39.880 have already betrayed their core principles before becoming essentially a party. So betrayal is the bedrock

00:12:46.760 from which the entire establishment of the Conservative Party is later built, to the point that over the next

00:12:52.520 50 years, they have a crisis of identity. And as you can probably see with what's going on now,

00:13:00.680 the Tory party go through a series of identity crises. And as a result, it's actually very hard to pinpoint

00:13:08.440 what the Tories have ever stood for. And as we see now, it has ultimately ended up in the trajectory that

00:13:16.120 the Tories have ultimately stood for nothing other than betrayal, not just a betrayal of the country,

00:13:22.280 but a betrayal of themselves and their constituents.

00:13:25.880 Well, is it perhaps as simple as they stand for the opportunity for the Sons of Gentlemen to enter

00:13:32.520 Parliament and take power?

00:13:35.960 Yes, there is certainly an element, not necessarily take power, because the Tories were seldom actually in

00:13:43.080 power throughout a large part of the Victorian period. But you can definitely say that essentially what

00:13:50.120 happens. Robert Peel comes in and Robert Peel, if anything, is an exemplar in terms of what I'm

00:13:57.240 talking about. He comes in and he would assume the high Tory position on any given subject. So he would

00:14:05.800 start off as a protectionist and end up as a free trade zealot. He would start off as a defender of the

00:14:12.360 Church of England and he would end up essentially as a low church non-conformist. He would start off as the

00:14:18.600 defender of the monarchy and end up as some sort of rabid democratic parliamentarian. Encapsulated in

00:14:25.640 the person of Robert Peel, the very founder of the Conservative Party, represents, you can say,

00:14:30.600 the seemingly inevitable leftward trend of all conservative politicians, to the point that during

00:14:37.720 his second premiership towards the end, he splits the Conservative Party over the issue of free trade,

00:14:44.120 betraying the core, essentially noble constituency of the Conservative Party, which is the noble gentry,

00:14:51.960 for the sake of allowing cheap American grain to be flooded into the English markets.

00:14:55.880 And that forms a great split in the Conservative Party. A large section of them, who are Robert

00:15:03.960 Peel's ideological disciples, become the Peelites. And one of them is William Gladstone. William Gladstone

00:15:11.800 didn't start off his career as a Whig. William Gladstone started off his career as a Tory.

00:15:17.640 And that, again, should explain to you this phenomenon, essentially, of the Tories not

00:15:22.040 only betraying their constituents, but betraying themselves. Because William Gladstone is the

00:15:27.000 heir of Robert Peel in this regard, starting as not only a high Tory church Anglican, but also someone

00:15:33.800 who was committed to the defence of the slave trade, and then ultimately becoming the sort of rabid agent of

00:15:40.920 free market forces and government retrenchment and Irish home rule. So all of these interesting

00:15:47.080 personalities crop up so as to try and illustrate this point. So you come back to this point that

00:15:53.880 the Conservatives of the party for the landed gentry, and for the sons, essentially, to enter into

00:15:58.920 Parliament, those who aren't already sitting in the House of Lords. And you're correct, for 40 years,

00:16:05.400 essentially, the Conservatives were kept out of power,

00:16:08.280 apart from a couple of brief stints when the Earl of Derby would come in and assume a caretaker role

00:16:14.520 of government. And the MPs, essentially, were there, not very bright, representing a certain social

00:16:22.440 class. And because of the constituency, essentially, the electorate that was established after the Great

00:16:28.520 Reform Act of 1832, there was always an inbuilt liberal majority. So roughly 60% of the electorate would

00:16:36.520 always be Whig liberals, and 40% of the electorate would always be Conservatives. And this would only

00:16:41.720 represent, what, a couple of million voters, nothing compared to the mass franchise that we

00:16:47.960 see later on. And the only reason the Conservatives did well at all, really, and got into government,

00:16:54.840 is because the wealthy sons of aristocrats were the only ones who could actually afford

00:17:00.440 to stand as parliamentary candidates in so many seats, where the Liberals didn't even bother to stand

00:17:05.560 at all.

00:17:08.200 Ah, okay. But can I just draw down on something? What is so significant about Peel? Why do we have this

00:17:16.360 this sort of modern beginning of the Conservative Party? I mean, in what way would say,

00:17:21.160 Pitt or Lord North not? Why is there that distinction between that era and the post-Peel era?

00:17:27.480 One factor which reigns over all of this, which is the Great Reform Act. If you look at someone like,

00:17:36.200 I mean, the Earl of Butte is probably the last sort of aristocratic favourite Tory that you can

00:17:43.320 imagine in this political system. But coming back to someone like a Lord North or a Pitt the Younger,

00:17:50.120 these people never sort of consciously refer to themselves as Tories in the way that we would

00:17:54.360 think. I mean, William Pitt the Younger, for example, referred to himself as an independent

00:17:59.720 Whig. And of course, his father, the Earl of Chatham, William Pitt the Elder, was a leading light

00:18:07.240 of the Whigs, in a sense. And much of what typified William Pitt the Elder was also evident in the sun.

00:18:17.080 Ultimately, the power base of these Prime Ministers was royal favouritism. It was their support

00:18:24.120 from the King. So when William Pitt the Younger's first ministry collapsed, it was a result of the

00:18:33.240 loss of royal favour. However, when we get to Sir Robert Peel, post the Great Reform Act,

00:18:42.360 Britain has essentially turned from a limited monarchy. And again, I use these words very loosely,

00:18:48.840 a limited monarchy in the sense that you still have a monarch, but he is not an absolute monarch.

00:18:53.560 And by a monarch, I mean someone who gets involved in the day-to-day business of government, and

00:18:57.800 especially over the purview of foreign policy. By the time of the Great Reform Act, and 1832,

00:19:04.920 and later the creation of the Conservative Party in 1834, Robert Peel is instead looking to establish a

00:19:11.080 voter constituency, as opposed to simply relying on the previous system, which was a series of nobles

00:19:18.040 monopolising a, ultimately, a system of court politics.

00:19:24.520 So I can't help but feel, but I can't express it properly because I don't have the full command of

00:19:29.400 the history that perhaps you would, that the conditions leading to the Great Reform Act, and you've

00:19:34.600 and so on, but there was a sense of constitutional crisis, and the people were greatly dissatisfied

00:19:41.480 with the governance they were receiving. And I wonder to what it, perhaps you could summarise

00:19:46.920 what led to the Great Reform Act, and roughly what it was, and if you can see any parallels with the

00:19:52.440 sort of constitutional situation, this widespread displace for the Uniparty, and there was a great sense

00:19:59.880 that something needs to change, although perhaps it's not entirely clear what that is.

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PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ The Tory Obituary with Apostolic Majesty

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