I'd rather be a red Tory than a wet Tory

Every party is a coalition. No party is illustrating that more explicitly at the moment than Labour, though commentators, journalists and politicians alike have ideologically categorised the British Conservative party’s different wings in a lot more detail and with a much wider degree of specificity. I’m the kind of Tory sometimes pejoratively but, I’d like to think, nonetheless affectionately labelled ‘red Tories.’ Others describe themselves as “Ken Clark Tories.” Whatever!
As a One Nation Tory, I subscribe to the free market concepts underpinning Thatcherism but without the reflex hatred of public institutions, the hard-line Euroscepticism and the absence of pragmatism when it comes to state interference, regulatory matters and so-on. Yes, some fellow Tories view us with a degree of suspicion, whilst we lap up their ‘EU is evil’ line with a weary sigh, but as a party, the leadership has always understood that we are better united than divided and that we need to accommodate each other as members of this grand coalition. So if there is any suspicion of red Tories, it isn’t exactly well-founded.

But there is a new kind of Tory – a kind of Tory that threatens John Redwood and Ken Clark Tories alike: I call them the ‘wet Tories.’ They are the subversive threat to the party. Here’s a striking example of a wet Tory: Charlie Evans.
Evans, a gifted writer and third-year economics and politics student at Exeter University, has delighted lefties up and down the land by announcing yesterday his decision to leave the party. Writing in the Huffington Post, Evans complains about tax credits, gas and oil drilling and a generalised belief that the party is simply not being compassionate. Nor, apparently, are its hundreds of thousands of members who pay their £25 every year, knock on doors and organise events up and down the land. Summing up, Evans writes: “After Cameron's Tory Conference Speech earlier this month, many were impressed with the emphasis on a need for social justice and progressivism and the politics of it was clearly designed to solidify its position in the centre-ground in response to Corbyn's shift leftwards. But delivering a craftily written speech by a gifted speechwriter is the easy bit; actually putting this action into practice is a different beast all together. I can be persuaded to return if this 'One Nation' approach is implemented. But tax credits and disability benefit cuts are not things that the membership should just dismiss easily because they are not affected by it. Actually take action and follow your 'compassionate conservatism' instincts, and leave a party that isn't being very compassionate.”
It is clear that Evans, who even tried to stand as a candidate for the Welsh assembly for the party, has simply given up after a mere 6 months in government and has latched on to the favoured tactics of the left: fact-light arguments that only work by appealing to some kind of instinct of humanity that the subjects of your vitriolic rants apparently lack (in other words, the easy way out). So we have to assume, of course, that he is right that party members aren’t affected by cuts made to disability benefits or tax credits. Proof? Who the hell needs that when you’ve got self-righteous indignation to carry you through? What he doesn’t bother to acknowledge, though, are the many reasons why disabled people, who of course don’t just vote on disability issues, would nonetheless have every reason to back the Tories. The fact is that many of them, myself included, were forced to be registered as ‘incapable of working’ by a binary system within which one was either completely incapable or completely capable of work – no middle ground. The government was happy to give me taxpayer-funded incapacity benefits for years, but help me find a job? As one of the tracksuit-clad brain- aches of Job Centre Plus once remarked when I asked about finding work: “I don’t know about that but you should apply for benefits. Here’s a form” (it was in print, obviously, so bang goes the blind man’s data protection).
This has all changed. The bigger picture that Evans doesn’t seem to realise is that thousands of disabled people now have, at the very least, the right to expect and demand help to find work. They are recognised for what they are: people who can do many things, not all things, but enough to be given the chance to work, to have aspirations and to not be labelled a vulnerable group that can only be a cost burden. The idea that being disabled and a Tory member can’t, therefore, go hand in hand when Tory policies are transforming our lives for the better, is the kind of statement you’d only ever hear from some-one unaffected by the continuing support that the party that introduced the Disability Living Allowance still offers to transform the lives of disabled people.
Next, we see the same ‘Tories lack compassion’ drivel applied to tax credits where Evans again reminds us of the Question Time incident, where a woman broke down over tax credit cuts. Not only does he mislead his readers about Cameron’s claims prior to the election about what would and wouldn’t be cut, but he also has completely omitted to outline the case that has already been made for why this lady got it wrong according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies: changes aren’t to be applied to children already born and she’s not making the kind of profit from her small business to be affected. But never mind, eh Charlie?

The thing that really makes me laugh about Charlie’s article is the ‘I’m so surprised by all this’ routine. Where did he think £12bn in welfare cuts were going to come from? Did he not understand that behind the bigger picture of creating a high wage, lower welfare economy, were always going to be tough and often unpopular decisions? Where did he think they’d find the cuts, and who else would he have taken from? Of course, by simply joining the growing bandwagon of people simply attacking a decision for lack of humanity, and outside of the governing party, they are questions he will never have to answer now. Lucky chap. But the same cannot be said for the wet Tories within the party, opportunistically striving to scupper the government fresh from an election. Yes, we all like cuts when they are an abstract concept, but when some are actually made, the wet Tories will sound like reluctant Corbynistas. And here’s the thing: there is etiquette in backbench rebellion. First, you don’t mouth off to the media. You make your displeasure known by trooping through the lobbies and being an anonymous collective of rebels that the media refers to, thereby limiting the damage. Only sad people like me that read Hansard records will discover you, and only then if you give us a reason to snoop at your voting behaviour. If one must go public, the rebel must be a much-loved maverick like David Davis, or not appear smug. They must insist that they disagree sufficiently on this issue but stress overall loyalty to the government. Motor mouth Stephen McPartland MP was jubilant, dancing the same merry jig as his Labour opponent on the Daily Politics Show, to such an extent that he thanked McPartland for doing his job for him. “I think I’ll keep the government guessing,” McPartland crowed when asked how he’d vote: a fine way to treat what is his government, on the back of whose manifesto he was elected, after all. Meanwhile newly-elected MP Heidi Allen used her maiden speech to attack the reforms, stealing the day’s headlines. This is a mere 5 months after she was elected on that very manifesto. And of course, same old: MPs couldn’t possibly know hardship, of course. Bla bla bloody bla!

The truth about the wet Tories is that they see the bigger picture, and they see the need to rebalance the economy. But the minute any cuts are made, they start screeching like demented socialists. So, one is left to wonder how sincere they are as Tories anyway, and whether they are perhaps bandwagon hoppers who have latched on to the winning prospect but are found to be running scared whenever they get an inevitable bit of rough to go with the smooth. Fact is, we Tories disagree about things. I’ve got a long list of complaints about the party, as I’m sure every member, even David Cameron, will have. And whilst other strands of the party will call people like me ‘red Tories,’ the emphasis is always on Tory, just as mine is when I complain about their attitudes to Europe or their constant moaning about the BBC. At least we’re not going anywhere, nor are we intent on damaging the party to feather our own electoral nests like the new kids on the block such as Heidi Allen, or happy to stand on the side-lines trumpeting fiscal responsibility whilst opposing every measure taken to achieve it. I’d rather be a red Tory than a wet Tory any day.