The Summer of Tory

A Nation on the RAAC

There are many signs of a nation in decline. The first clue is the word ‘decline’, as in something once regarded as good that is becoming smaller, fewer, or less. In geopolitical terms, national decline means that your country used to have more power and influence in the world than it does now, and that the rest of the world regarded your country with more respect than it does now.

This is the kind of decline that the succession of maniacal ‘make…great again’ populists of the twenty-first century seek to address, usually by attaching a sense of national victimhood, resentment and rancid nostalgia to some opaque and ill-thought out vision of the future which bears no resemblance to present reality.

You can pick your country here. I’ll just mention the UK and Brexit.

Another symptom of national decline occurs when a country constantly reproduces leaders who keep saying and doing stupid things, or making vainglorious and incoherent promises that bear no resemblance to what their country is capable or its actual position in the world.

Think Global Britain. Think trade deals that are worse than the ones you already had. Think a hard Brexit that hurt the economy when you could have had a softer Brexit that hurt it less. Think Boris Johnson predicting in 2019 that Britain would be ‘prosperous, dynamic and contented’ after completing our exit from the European Union.

Think so many things that were promised in 2016 and turned out to be the opposite, and the bleached bones of so many unicorns that came prancing out of the lie factory and promptly expired at their first breath of air.

That is national decline: not just the gulf between the real and the unreal but the inability even to tell the difference between the two.

One of the reasons why our leaders keep doing such things is because they are leaders of a very low moral and intellectual calibre, drawn from a very thin stock of human possibilities, whose role in public life isn’t necessarily due to any expertise they have in anything beyond their own advancement and satisfaction and the preservation of power purely for its own sake, or for the perks that come with it.

Think Rishi Sunak, Greg Hands, Grant Shapps, James Cleverly, Braverman, Dorries, Jenrick, or almost any Tory right now, not to mention those who have come and - thank God for small mercies - gone.

These people are arse-coverers, buck-passers, and look-over-there artists, specialists in propaganda, gaslighting and floating hot air balloons. Their metier, insofar as they have one, is deception, evasion, and falsehood. They cannot admit mistakes. They cannot take personal responsibility for anything, because they lack the honour, humility and integrity required, because the truth would have the same impact on them as sunlight on a vampire.

Instead they must lie, pivot and endlessly deflect and distract. And blame the ‘global left’. Or Labour. Or ‘the Blob.’ Or the EU. Or the lawyers who Honest Bob Jenrick is now proposing to put in jail for life.

Anyone will do, as long it’s not them.

So national decline takes place when a country puts itself in the hands of people like this, and not just once but over and over again.

It’s exhausting and demoralising, and not a little disturbing for those of us who didn’t choose this, and it’s also dangerous. Because ‘decline’ isn’t just a mood or a state of mind; it shows itself in tangible, crumbling, material things that weren’t as bad as they are now; in old problems that no one fixes and new problems that crop up because of the ones you haven’t fixed; in the rusting and corroded chains of accountability; in the nuts and bolts of systems worked out over years that that hold a complex society together and make the idea of a society in which we all have a common stake possible.

Think of the 57 triathletes who got sick after swimming off Roker Beach at the World Triathlon Championship last month. We know why this problem exists, because all over the country, water companies are pouring sewage into our rivers and beaches, essentially, because they can, because the government lets them.

Everyone knows this, but yet here we are, and Michael Gove has just introduced legislation that will make rivers even more polluted than they already area. And there is so much more than this. The dental patients in Leigh who had to queue up at four in the morning to see their local dentist. The 156 schools built from soft RAAC concrete that have to be closed, because they are falling apart and were not repaired because the government didn’t want to pay for new ones.

The flight suspensions. The queues and missed ferries at Dover. The danger to life as a result of delayed ambulances. The GP appointments you can’t get. The councils that are running out of money.

The Country and its Dogs

This has been going on for some time, but now even pipsqueak Tory propagandists like Sarah Vine has begun to wonder if we might be coming ‘a Third World country’ because she missed a British Airways flight, prompting her to wonder how

Once an example of can-do competence, community spirit and common sense, we seem to have turned into a nation where no one cares, no one can be bothered and everyone always has a excuse for why none of it's their responsibility.

A place where the ordinary law-abiding, taxpaying citizen or loyal, fee-paying customer is increasingly powerless in the face of other people's selfishness, incompetence or, in many cases, plain greed. It's all me, me, me and sod the rest of you.

A Tory country going to the dogs isn’t necessarily the one that you or I may be living in, especially when a minister’s ex-wife and a well-paid columnist misses her flight. So no one should be surprised that Vine’s ‘greed’ consists of - drum roll - Sadiq Khan’s Ulez scheme and cycle lanes. And the rail unions, and the teachers, doctors and civil servants, all of whom have forgotten the ‘sense of duty or vocational calling’ that inspires Vine and people like her.

The art of Tory living consists on blaming others, and no matter how bad things get, or much they fall apart, the Vines of this world will always be ultimately unconcerned and unscathed. They will find a doctor and a dentist. They will live in wealth and comfort for the rest of their lives. They will not be on benefits, but occasionally they will look through the frosted glass at the wreckage that they played a small part in creating, and ask themselves what the country’s coming to.

That too, is national decline. And yet, all is not lost. At the last wheezy gasp of this dreary Tory summer, just as the political class prepared to step back into parliament to perform its zombie rituals, there was hope, albeit from an unlikely source.

Step forward Penny Mordaunt - the seafaring lady with the steely gaze and the upright sword - announcing a new ‘Great British National Service’ scheme in order to harness the ‘goodwill and community spirit, energy and imagination’ of the nation’s youth.

If this scheme sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Back in 2010, as the Coalition government prepared to decimate UK society, David Cameron announced the coming of a National Citizenship Scheme that would be part of the ‘Big Society’ project. This was intended to ‘help communities save local facilities and services threatened with closure’ and enable ‘communities the right to bid to take over local state-run services.’

What a cheeky Tory wheeze - to close state-funded services and then allow the communities devastated by such closures to ‘bid’ to take them over as part of a ‘radical devolution of power.’

It’s not the most successful political party in the Western world for nothing.

The National Citizenship Service was also intended to ‘encourage charitable giving and philanthropy’, and ‘encourage volunteering and social action’.

Well, we did get volunteering and social action, in the form of food banks, or ‘community pantries’, as Mordaunt calls them, but these initiatives didn’t come from the government’s citizenship scheme. They were a grassroots response to the hunger produced by Cameron’s ‘radical devolution of power’ and his cruel treatment of ‘shirkers’ on benefits that left tens of thousands unable to feed themselves and their families.

This happened in one of the richest countries in the world, and no Tory ever thought there was anything wrong with it.

And now, thirteen years later, here is Mordaunt, the King’s sword-maiden, with a homily that sounds as though it were written by Alexa, telling the nation’s youth that ‘nothing is more rewarding than serving your community and nation’ and that ‘Service can build the resilience, skills, and pride in their community and country that many need’.

Mordaunt often looks like a hostage on Sunak’s frontbench. Now we know what she’s been wrestling with:

I’ve often thought about what makes someone take personal responsibility. For some, it’s a necessity. For others, it’s personal pride. For me, it’s duty. You can’t grow up in a naval town and not understand this. There is no greater personal responsibility than risking your life for your country. You can’t witness that duty, service, love and dedication without feeling a direct and personal obligation. That’s why the notion of military national service endures.

Coming from a politician who supported Johnson and Liz Truss, this sermon raises the question: Which Tory, in the last eight years if not further back, has ever taken ‘personal responsibility’ for anything at all? Which automatically raises another question: How dare they?

The scheme is the brainchild of the rightwing thinktank Onwards, fronted by Sebastian Payne, the former FT Whitehall correspondent who looks like an extra from The IT Crowd.

According to its report ‘young people are unhappy, unskilled and unmoored’ and national citizenship can ‘develop skills, improve mental wellbeing, and increase a sense of belonging.’

To avoid the low take-up of Cameron’s National Citizens Service, the scheme proposes to automatically enrol 600,000 people unless they opt out, who will commit to a two-week residential programme, six months of social action, and a voluntary addition year of service.

The report contains a lot of discussion of mental health, skills shortages, ‘civic apathy’, depression, and the ‘building blocks of character’ , which will be difficult for many readers to stomach given the quality of the ‘characters’ who have ruled the country for the last two decades, who may partly answer the question of why young people have grown ‘increasingly distrustful’ and prone to ‘civic apathy.’

The report wants to address this ‘decline in national sentiment’ and a ‘decline in national pride…compounded by a larger fracturing of society into siloed communities.’

Nowhere in this screed is there any mention of the fact that government spending on youth services was cut by an incredible 70 percent in real terms in the decade 2010-2020, resulting in the loss of 750 youth centres and more than 4,500 youth workers, or that some areas have completely lost youth funding.

Though the ‘cost of living crisis’ is touched on, it’s quickly skipped over, because solving problems like this is not what this report is about. And ‘taking responsibility’ is not what it’s about either.

It’s a stale, Groundhog Day idea in a GroundHog Day country stuck firmly in the Tory wheel of doom.There’s no app that can turn this on and off. A general election and the annihilation of the Tory Party would be a start, but that’s all it would be. Because the decline runs deeper than a change of personnel. Repairing - let alone reversing - the damage means recognizing the damage that’s been done.

We’re still a long way from that. And we may still have further to fall before we reach it.