The great advantage of being in opposition is that one has the time and freedom to think aloud about the pressing questions of the day, without being constrained to stick to the Government line.
This freedom Tom Tugendhat yesterday used to deliver a thoughtful speech about the riots, published in full on ConHome.
In 2017 Tugendhat was profiled on ConHome as “a successful insurgent and a possible future Tory leader”. He is now one of the six contenders for that post, and one trusts that all of them will set out their ideas about where the country and the party should go next.
Tugendhat is unimpressed by Sir Keir Starmer’s performance during the riots: “We needed a leader. We got a lawyer waiting for the case to reach court.”
He is scathing about Jess Phillips:
“Later, when gangs of masked men gathered in Birmingham brandishing weapons and, live on camera, threatened female journalists, and attempted to slash the tyres of broadcast vans, Jess Phillips – a Home Office minister – chose to justify their behaviour instead of condemning it, because these were not Far Right hooligans, but young Muslim men. One man attacked by these vigilantes ended up in hospital…
“when Jess Phillips sought to justify vigilantism and violence, to excuse a militia on our streets, Keir Starmer should have sacked her, because ministers should always defend the principle of equality before the law.”
When Tugendhat served as Security Minister in the last Government, he found that during the pro-Palestinian marches he “constantly had to encourage the Police to make arrests as crimes were being committed, rather than waiting until after a protest had finished”.
Here is a lesson taught by the riots: that the law must be enforced speedily and impartially, no matter who is breaking it.
Social cohesion depends on the trust that we are all treated equally by the police and the courts. Nobody should be able to say with truth that he or she is treated as a second-class citizen. Tugendhat touched on this question when he said:
“Too many have lost their sense of self as they are denied opportunity and purpose in their lives. Many people are told, in effect, that they are not needed – that they have too little to contribute. They are parked on benefits and forgotten.”
This convenient but shameful practice is more easily looked into while in opposition, so spared the self-justifying requirements of day-to-day government.
The new administration will continue for as long as it can to maintain that whatever is rotten in the state of Britain is the fault of its predecessors.
Tugendhat does not shy away from admitting that some alarming developments occurred while the Conservatives were in power:
“According to research compiled by my friend, Neil O’Brien MP, the number of offenders with more than fifty previous convictions who were convicted but not sent to prison rose from 1,299 in 2007 to 3,196 in 2018. The number of offenders with more than a hundred convictions but who still avoided jail doubled to 295. Over the years of Neil’s study, 206,000 criminals with 25 previous convictions avoided prison for their next offence.”
The official orthodoxy is that prison does not work. The riots have just been brought to an end, at least temporarily, by tearing up that orthodoxy. The new Prime Minister had the sense to see that the law-abiding majority, frightened for the security of their persons and property, would accept no other course.
But what happens now? Will the orthodoxy reassert itself once the panic has died down?
Tugendhat does not in this speech discuss immigration, which is reasonable enough, for it is a large and difficult question.
But here is one of the principal reasons why the main parties command diminishing support. The illegal Channel crossings make a mockery of the rule of law.
Starmer and his colleagues announced that they would ditch the Rwanda plan, and have done so. We shall see how that works, but meanwhile the Conservatives must find some way of doing better than last time, if and when they are given another chance.
Tugendhat remarks that “we have seen sectarianism in our elections”. That is one of the functions of elections: to bring discontents to light.
Part of the point of the Conservative leadership election, and the several years of work on a new programme which will probably follow it, is to work out how to deal with the present discontents, including sectarianism.
Let it not be supposed this will be an easy work. It will be extremely hard, for it will mean challenging received ideas.
In the short term, Starmer has succeeded by allying himself with an alarmed public opinion, backing the police and encouraging magistrates to throw the book at the rioters.
But in the longer term, he has prepared an agonising dilemma for himself: will he continue to side with public opinion, or will he revert to the unbounded liberalism which has captured the chattering classes, the commanding heights of the Labour Party, and the judiciary?
At the start of his Thoughts on the Present Discontents, published in 1770, Edmund Burke observed that it is dangerous to challenge received opinion:
“It is an undertaking of some degree of delicacy to examine into the cause of public disorders. If a man happens not to succeed in such an inquiry, he will be thought weak and visionary; if he touches the true grievance, there is a danger that he may come near to persons of weight and consequence…”
But the Conservatives are now in opposition, and their plain duty is to challenge received opinion.
