The Anglosphere is killing the Tories
The party's love for the old colonies is pushing it towards bad politics
Let’s start off this week with a quiz.
A) Who won the election in New Zealand?
B) What was Australia’s referendum about?
C) How is Justin Trudeau doing in opinion polls?
D) Name at least two of the Polish parties forming the next government.
How do you think you did? You can find the answers at the bottom, but for your average Tory MP it is much more likely that they will have answers for the first three than for the fourth. That’s because while questions 1-3 deal with politics in Western, English-speaking countries, question 4 is about a European country.
Why does this matter? The point here is not necessarily about knowledge of politics in general, nor that a deep knowledge of Polish politics is necessary. Rather it is about the danger that a British party can create for itself when it is immersed in a different political culture from the one we actually inhabit.
For all that the ‘Anglosphere’ (the name given to the grouping of the UK, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) have some commonalities, their political cultures are defined more by their regional identities than by their brief shared history. Australia and New Zealand have particular features built around their closeness to Asia and the relationships with the native peoples of the two countries. The US and Canada are fundamentally North American, moulded by extensive natural resources and cross-country motorways across vast tracts of rural land. Meanwhile Britain’s people and values, tied to centuries of continental movement and exchange, are essentially European.
Yet the largely monolingual Tory party is far too focused on what they see as Britain’s ‘cousins’ on the other side of the world. Individually, Tory MPs rarely have much to say about European politics and institutionally the party seemingly has closer ties to Anglosphere equivalents than to sister parties across the Channel. Indeed, the Tories’ head strategist in 2019 and the likely pick to run the 2024 campaign, Isaac Levido, is himself Australian.
Failure to understand the gap between other Anglophone countries and the UK’s own political culture is pushing some Tories to think that what works in these places should work in the UK.
It’s what leads them to declare that we are a nation of motorists, quite ignoring how difficult it is to drive around many parts Britain and how we view the ‘road trip’ as a distinctly foreign (and especially American) idea. While some may indeed be keen car enthusiasts, they are hardly a more prominent constituency than cycling buffs or train fanatics. For most, car transport is a necessity, not a love.
It’s also what allows them to be drawn into a world where attacks on ‘woke’ will resonate with voters. Though it might make sense in the US, where the term originated with the left, or in New Zealand, where the government prided itself on being overtly progressive, it has little hold in a country like Britain, where ‘woke’ is a word you are unlikely to ever come across outside of right-wing online commentary.
And it’s how they fall into the belief that lashing out on net zero will be attractive to UK voters, despite all polling evidence to the contrary. Of course, the Uxbridge by-election will have given the Tories a push here, but it is also likely that many Tory strategists have been taking inspiration from across the pond. In the US, Republicans have leaned into public divides on climate change and are putting ‘anti-ESG’ (an investment term for environmental, social and governance considerations) at the heart of their campaigns. It’s also a more topical issue in Canada, with its large fossil fuel industry. In the UK, as in most of Europe, voters often see the fight against climate change as a key issue and are instinctively wary of anything that contributes to environmental pollution. It should have been obvious from the outset that a turn on net zero would be a difficult sell.
One recent Daily Telegraph headline is exemplary for the problem in the Tory ecosystem. It read as follows: “Australia’s ‘metropolitan elite’ headed for defeat in country’s ‘Brexit moment’”.
In just a few words, a direct appeal to the idea that these countries have fundamentally similar cultures, that the Australian referendum could be understood in the same terms as Brexit and that both the popular masses and the ruling elites of each nation are interchangeable, so alike are they.
Yet while they bathe in the comforting waters of right-wing ‘Anglosphere’ success, the Tories are blind to the warnings flashing in Europe.
Far from the Pacific waters, the Tories should be looking at the PP in Spain and seeing how the presence of an extremist right flank can be toxic to voters and push the left to mobilise against you. They should learn the same lesson from Poland, while also noting that a moderate centre-right can still be attractive when it focuses on the economy rather than indulging in endless culture wars and conjuring up fears of foreign domination. And in France, they should consider how a post-Macron LR have failed to create any new identity for themselves as they engage in performative opposition for fear of being seen as too centrist.
A Tory party that paid attention to politics in Europe would see the wind turning against them and conclude that they urgently needed to tack to the centre. They would moderate their position on the EU, refocus their criticism around net zero, discipline those MPs (and ministers) who publicly undermine the civil service or the judiciary and rebalance taxation away from young graduates.
This Tory party, uprooted and voluntarily cast adrift from Britain’s political culture, will not do any of those things. For the UK Conservatives, defeat speaks with an Australian accent.
Thanks for your essay.
Re: Creating an ‘indigenous Voice’, a form of special parliamentary representation for indigenous groups
The proposal was, among other things, to _mandate_ the federal legislature to establish 'A Voice' for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders -- the parliament has done this in the past and continues to be able to do so. The hope was that the recognition in the Constitution would promote justice and peace.
Support for the proposal went from an initial 70% of those polled to about 40%. An interesting essay on the matter is Joel Hodge's ☼Why did the [Oz ‘Voice’] referendum fail?
https://www.eurekastreet.com.au/why-did-the-referendum-fail