Tag Archives: conservatism

Johnson IS Britain’s Trump

By Lord William Wallace | Mon 11th January 2021 - 12:45 pm

The Conservative Party is now racing to disassociate itself from the US Republican Party and Donald Trump. In the Times on January 8th James Forsyth did his best to argue that Boris Johnson was a very different politician from Trump. But he did not deny that the political, personal and financial links between the American Right and the British Conservatives have been growing closer for many years, and that right-wing foundations and think tanks in the USA have worked hard to infiltrate British Conservatism.

This first struck me many years ago, when at Heathrow at the beginning of a short parliamentary recess and waiting for a plane to Washington (full disclosure: I was going to a conference sponsored by the German Marshall Fund and the Transatlantic Policy Forum). There were over a dozen Conservative MPs boarding alongside me, none of them foreign policy specialists, going to a Heritage Foundation conference and to meet Republican Congressmen and advisers.

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged us links | 8 Comments

Conservatism and nationalism

By Lord William Wallace | Thu 2nd April 2020 - 12:28 pm

Embed from Getty Images

Some anecdotes throw sharp light on underlying realities. Nick Timothy’s reflections on his experience as a fiercely loyal adviser to Theresa May as Home Secretary and Prime Minister, Remaking One Nation: The Future of Conservatism (just published) provides a classic example. After the uncertain outcome of the 2017 election, May told Timothy and his equally fierce colleague Fiona Hill, “The donors think you ought to go”, and fired them both. She didn’t say that she thought they should go, or the Cabinet, or the party chairman, or the parliamentary party: the donors were the key voice and influence.

Money counts in British politics. It counts much more than it used to, because the Conservatives have found ways of getting round the rules loosely monitored by the Electoral Commission, in using the resources of its professional HQ to influence constituency campaigns, through paid-for mailings, targeted social media, etc.. LibDem and Labour activists have heavily outnumbered Conservatives on the streets and doorsteps; but the Conservative machine has enormously outspent us.

When British politics returns to something like normality, we will press in Parliament for a tightening of the rules on campaign spending – and press for the suppressed report on Russian interference (and funding) in British politics to be published. But the Conservatives have a strong interest in resisting rule changes, even as they move to redraw constituency boundaries to entrench their advantages.

Liberal Democrats are too nice to turn back the attacks our opponents direct at us. Right-wing media and political ‘technologists’ have created a popular image of ‘the liberal elite’ as a powerful establishment which lacks the gut loyalty to Britain that Tory nationalists claim as their own. Theresa May’s version of this, borrowed from David Goodhart, was that the liberal elite are ‘citizens of nowhere’, dismissing the small-town rootedness of the ‘citizens of somewhere’, who regret the pace of change and the swamping of English traditions and values by globalization and immigration.