Onward? I should bleedin’ cocoa!

Somebody at CCHQ should have reminded Michael Gove and Ruth Davidson – not to mention Daniel Finkelstein and the others – that the organisation to which they all belong is the Conservative Party.

Going onward just isn’t in their remit.

And the Tories should have known what would happen after the Activate/Active Hate saga.

So let’s have a little honesty and describe this new think tank accurately. It is Backward.

The Graun‘s story about the new organisation also needs fixing. From the look of it, the paper took the material straight from a Tory propaganda piece – I mean, press release.

If we injected a little honesty, it would say something like:

“The Conservative Party will be finished for at least a generation if it cannot find a new way to fool the public.

“The party is out of ideas and has no broad appeal – that is the message that Michael Gove and Ruth Davidson are spreading with their support for a new, far-right “think” (and we use the word with irony) tank.

“Mr Gove, the environment secretary, is now considered one of the party’s most influential thinks – and that is an indictment in itself.

“He said: “The Conservative party is at its best when it promises the Earth to people beyond its core vote and they are gullible enough to believe us.

“If we pretend we are a reforming, forward-looking organisation that responds to the concerns of the entire nation, we might just get away with it again.

“We can let the facade drop the day after we win again – just like we did in 2017, 2015, 2010 and every time we won in the 20th century.”

Personally, I look forward to discovering how the Tories think they can con us this time.

Considering what they’re doing to public services – including the NHS in particular, the privatisation of law and order and its metamorphosis into a postcode lottery, their support for fracking even though fossil fuels are about to join the dinosaurs as relics of the past, the racism of their immigration policy and the elitism of their plan to divest working people of all their hard-won rights – and this is a highly selective list…

I think this new organisation will have a lot of hard work to do – especially if we do end up having a general election before the end of the year.

Oh, and let’s have a parting shot – even the title of this allegedly new think tank is a call-back to a Tory brand from nearly a century ago:

Michael Gove and Ruth Davidson have come together to back a new Tory thinktank with a warning that, without fresh ideas and a broader appeal, the party will be “be finished for at least a generation”.

Gove, the environment secretary, who has long been one of the party’s most influential thinkers, said: “The Conservative party is at its best when it appeals beyond its core vote and puts forward a reforming, forward-looking agenda that responds to the concerns of the entire nation.”

Source: Michael Gove and Ruth Davidson team up to back new Tory thinktank | Politics | The Guardian

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