The Tories are lurching into far-right politics to keep their voter base – racists and bigots
Border Force: immigration is likely to become an even more pressing public issue in the future, despite Rishi Sunak’s plan to strengthen the UK’s ability to foil illegal channel crossings. Is this because the Tories see it as a way back to power after losing the next general election?
A poll reproduced on the Mainly Macro blog shows that 56 per cent of the UK’s population now believe Brexit was a bad idea, compared with only 32 per cent who support it.
Why is the Conservative government still slavishly pushing the falsehood that Brexit was ever going to do us some good, then?
The answer should be obvious: it was a huge fantasy for right-wing, racist flag-shaggers who wanted to get rid of Johnny and Janey Foreigner and thought that saying we would all be better-off was a great way of getting it.
When the Brexit-supporting political parties started cropping up – most notably Nigel Farage’s UKIP – they drained off support that the Tories wanted to keep for themselves.
The only answer they saw was to support leaving the EU and hope that this would draw the headbangers back into the fold.
And it did – albeit with the help of the strongest Brexiteer party in the 2019 elections, that withdrew its candidates from standing in constituencies where the Conservatives had safe seats. Remember that?
But support for Boris Johnson’s ‘hard’ Brexit deal is now becoming an electoral liability for the Tories. Public opinion is shifting away from supporting Brexit, and from fearing the consequences if it is modified.
The costs of Brexit have become so obvious that the broadcast media now feel compelled to start talking about them and the message is that Brexit has reduced living standards and held the economy back.
This means that support for Brexit will be associated with a party that wants to keep the UK poorer.
And that’s a huge relief for This Writer, because I have been saying the same for years!
According to Mainly Macro, it is unlikely that public opinion will have changed enough for a Brexit-opposing party to take power – which is why Labour still supports the policy at the moment.
But this is likely to change during the time that Labour is in office (as still seems a certainty after the next general election).
Where does this leave the Tories?
According to Mainly Macro (again), it leaves them to take a hard line on immigration.
It is the most potent issue among potential Conservative voters, therefore newspaper stories about immigration or asylum-seekers are likely to proliferate in the Tory press under a Labour government.
This Writer is led to guess that this is the reason Rishi Sunak and his ministers have been announcing a series of unpopular and probably ineffective policies to tackle illegal immigration; by attacking the symptom and not the cause, they ensure that the problem remains when a Labour government takes over – and Labour may then be attacked over it.
This in turn may create an obstacle to any return to the EU Customs Union or the Single Market that Labour may plan.
The flag-shaggers, racists and bigots who support Brexit (remember them?) would see the Tories doing all they could to prevent a return to what they consider the bad old days of EU membership – with free movement of working people between countries, remember – and would commit their support to the Conservatives to ensure that it doesn’t happen.
… In theory.
So we see that current Tory policy on immigration is less likely to be about stopping foreigners from coming to the UK illegally, and more likely to be a grubby bid to find a pathway back to power.
Source: mainly macro: The implications of a tipping point in public support for Brexit
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