What would Osborne do? | Conservative house

“I think that the kind of ten -year trend in the conservative movement to try to copy the Brexit party or the UKIP party, or now the reform party, has not really worked.”

So George Osborne spoke to Andrew Marr On LBC yesterday. There is nothing remarkable – or perhaps more precisely, nothing unusual – about feeling. It is a standard Tory-Left Cauldron. If only we had not sung in Nigel Farage, everything would be fine.

This is one of those lines that seems perfectly sensible at first glance, especially if this is exactly what you want to hear. But as I noted in the TutorrecentlyThe big problem for people who peddled is that it was never clear what they would do in the party.

After all, the only parliamentary majority of the conservative party since 1992 – the thin secure by the modernization project of Cameron and Osborne in 2015, and the largest obtained by Boris Johnson in 2019 – occurred at points where they had more or less neutralized Nigel Farage. Elections where the party did notLooks more like last Thursday or the 2019 European elections, when we reached 8.8% of the vote.

Even then, these triumphs were obviously conditional. Consider 2015, the election with which Osborne was most directly involved. Despite David Cameron having offered an in / out referendum, UKIP managed to place second on a hundred seats. If he had not been such a promise, does the former chancellor think they would have done better, or worse?

Or how does he think that Farage would have done in the event of a remainder voting, when he would have been the other side holding the bag for an extremely unpopular status quo? Losing the independence referendum in 2014 has not, of course, hurtThe electoral prospects of the Scottish National Party.

If the Conservative Party ranked to UKIP, he did it for a reason: because a split on the right would be and turns out to be deeply deleterious to his electoral prospects. In addition, in a bipartite and varying system, the transition to the implementation of the radical parts is his workJust as it is work on the left.

The real load to be imposed on the door of the conservatives is very different, because in crucial respect, the analysis of Osborne cited above is completely wrong.

The conservative party since 2010 has rarely “tried” to welcome faragism, or even the public concerns that animate the Faragist parties; He was pretendIn Cameron has twice promised to bring net immigration back to “tens of thousands”, but he never tried to do it seriously, and he promised an in / out referendum only because he expected the Liberal Democrats in a second round of coalition negotiations.

No, you cannot really too fagure. But you can direct it to the pass by changing the conservative policy to deprive it of political space. But despite this, the conservatives have never really tried this, many people were denied by thinking they did.

Osborne is not the only conservative to make this mistake; As I noted in the link above Tutor play, on almost all the really important political areas that it was, throughout our 14 years in power, the “sensible” wing which had its path most of the time: “More young people than ever were channeled in higher education; Immigration was authorized to reach the level of the industry and the selected sectoral lobby groups; Tax levels have climbed. “

It's not just them. It was Kemi Badenoch's response to A question from GB News On the “details” a ceiling on immigration when launching the leadership campaign last year (a question she said “illustrates quite well where things went wrong”):

“We had a ceiling of tens of thousands when David Cameron entered. We have to ask ourselves, “Why didn't it work?” Rather than just saying that we will make another promise. Something went wrong there. It is therefore not only a question of throwing numbers, launching targets – something is wrong with the system.

“This is why I am talking about the system. The people who throw figures and say” Oh, we have to leave the CECH “, and so on, give you easy answers. This is how we had in this mess in the first place. I'm not going to do it.”

Further on, she describes the release of the CECH as “something else that we will end up doing that does not really solve the problem”.

Now, I'm not an engineer, so I may have missed something. Nor do I even think that a hard ceiling on figures is a good way to durably reduce immigration. But at the risk of resembling The witch of Charlie DrakeThe most obvious reason for the most obvious reason that the cap of tens of thousands of Cameron has not worked is that it has never been implemented. There was no cap.

In this context, Badenoch's pivot to talk about people who apply border control seems unpleasant; Liberal border guards cannot overthrow a restrictive policy that does not exist. The same goes to describe the departure of the CECH as “something else that we will end up”, as if the ceiling was something that really happened. (Maybe she wanted to say the huge increase supervised by her Foreign Affairs Secretary now Shadow?)

Both in the sections of the Conservative Party and in a large part of the commentary on this subject, the distinction between word and act collapsed. Senior conservatives froze the income tax thresholds and were called “tax reduction conservatives” – apparently sincerely, if their perplexity with the failure of the electorate to reward them is an indication. Meanwhile, commentators are watching a party that has done this, the non -ceiling students and tripled the Net Immigneton and say it “went around the right”.

So I ask: instead of “trying to copy the Brexit party”, or something else, what would Osborne do? The turning point in the elite consensus works on low -salience issues, such as the death penalty. It does not work on questions such as immigration. (The test to find out if a policy is in the first category where the second is whether or not a new party can mount it like the rider of An electoral apocalypse.)

In the latter case, double the status quo simply closes the valve of political pressure and defines the system on the path to an explosion. Especially if, unlike Germany, you cannot just ban the new party.

Thus, the whole analysis of Osborne (and it is peddled by many) is really the involvement that if we all had just ignored Farage, it would have disappeared. We could just as easily reprimand a recalcitrant audience of Peter Pan for having killed Tinkerbell because he did not believe strong enough in the fairies.