Truss' Tories Are Far From Either Democracy or Toryism | Opinion

The last time Britain had a single-party, majority government that completed a full term with the same party leader was from 2001 to 2005. That government began over 20 years ago and was led by Tony Blair, who would soon lead Britain into George Bush's foreign wars, eventually stepping down to give way to Gordon Brown in 2007.

Then the financial crisis hit. David Cameron was elected prime minister in 2010, but not without the backing of Nick Clegg (now a vice president at Meta) and his Liberal Democrat coalition partners. Cameron, in his bid to win a majority in 2015, pledged a referendum on the European Union; his "Remain" side lost, leading to his ouster in 2016.

Since then, the United Kingdom has been led by Theresa May (also a Remainer) and Boris Johnson (a fence-sitter). And yesterday, Liz Truss (another erstwhile Remainer) was made the leader of one of the largest economies and militaries in the world without a single, national vote being cast.

When a Conservative Party prime minister leaves office, the party itself whittles down the options within its own ranks, and presents just two—usually both establishment favorites—to its dues-paying members. This is how we ended up with Truss facing off against the even worse Rishi Sunak.

Stuck in an early 19th-century battle between its internal liberal, conservative, and Tory factions, the party's ability to hold onto power effectively rests with the whims of its members of Parliament. If they fancy a prime minister to have overstayed his or her welcome, a few dozen letters into a partisan committee can topple the current leader and give way to factional in-fighting, while the rest of the country wonders who is running the show. It's usually no one, during this period. (Or perhaps Sir Humphrey Appleby.)

It is a thoroughly undemocratic way to run an ostensibly democratic nation. And that's because the Conservative Party has, for far too long, been primarily concerned with the wishes of its donors, rather than its voters.

Around 142,000 party members were given a choice only between Truss and Sunak in the recent leadership election. The rest of Britain—a country of around 70 million people—had no say in who became the next prime minister. That therefore represents a turnout of around 0.2%, with Truss winning with 0.12% of the population compared with Sunak's 0.08%.

You can probably tell why the electorate is already a touch skeptical of the nation's new leadership.

And while I too remain entirely skeptical of a once-vegetarian, anti-monarchist, irreligious, adulteress, self-proclaimed "liberal democrat" running the Conservative Party, Truss' first cabinet appointments haven't been totally terrible. She has picked the rightist Suella Braverman to run Britain's Home Office—which handles immigration, among other areas—though she also has the questionably wobbly Therese Coffey as her deputy prime minister.

So far, not much for the Tory old guard. This, despite the fact The New York Times risibly claimed Truss has anything philosophically in common with the late torchbearer for the Tory right, Enoch Powell. As the man who literally wrote the book on Powell, I can assure you he is chuckling in his grave at the suggestion.

What the Times is knowingly doing is reframing the Tory party under Truss as "right-wing" so the reader never really discovers who the real right is in the United Kingdom. Few British traditionalists, nationalists, populists, or social conservatives now vote with the Conservative Party, especially following David Cameron's machinations over same-sex marriage and Brexit. Instead, these voters either no longer bother to cast a ballot, or opt for one of the smaller parties: Reform, Reclaim, Heritage, ForBritain, or otherwise. None of them have performed particularly well in recent elections—partly due to corporate media blackouts for fear of another Brexit-style occurrence, partly due to lack of organized leadership and cohesive structure, and partly because of Britain's "First Past the Post" electoral system.

By way of example, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) would've won around 80 Parliamentary seats in the 2015 election under a standard proportional election system. Instead, due to the U.K.'s "First Past the Post" system, UKIP ended up with just one.

Former Prime Minister and founder of the modern Conservative Party Benjamin Disraeli once noted: "They [the Tory party] have existed for more than a century and a half as an organised political connexion and having survived the loss of the American Colonies, the first Napoleon, and Lord Grey's Reform Act, they must not be snuffed out."

But the modern "Tories" bear little resemblance to Disraeli's 19th-century movement, and in fact have little substantive claim to the philosophy of "Toryism." Modern Conservatives rhetorically deploy "Toryism" as an ironic badge of honor, whilst the opposition Labour Party hurls the phrase as an insult. Toryism, claims the Left, is obsolete. Many Conservative Party politicians feel similarly, as Disraeli also foresaw.

"In times of great political change and rapid political transition, it will generally be observed that political parties find it convenient to re-baptise themselves," Disraeli noted in 1880.

Liz Truss' party, replete with its support for same sex marriage, mass migration, corporate welfare, international aid, foreign wars, and global governance, has nothing in common with the philosophy that was not, per Disraeli, to be "snuffed out."

There are still some guardians of traditional conservatism in the United Kingdom, such as the Bow Group, the oldest rightist think tank in the world, which finds itself at the forefront of warning over new Conservative Party leaders such as Cameron, May, Johnson, and Truss. Those issuing such warnings are consistently derided, eventually proved correct, and then derided again the next time a milquetoast "Tory" comes along proclaiming the gospel of the Right.

Perhaps the British public will never learn.

By the day, revisionist historians and corporate media illiterates are rewriting Britain's history and airbrushing out Toryism. Take that New York Times article, for example; once upon a time, such a comparison would have been laughed out of the editorial room. Truss as Powell? That's like comparing Liz Cheney to Pat Buchanan. It is pure nonsense. But such nonsense is also, perhaps, somewhat fitting. Because without real Tory traditionalism at its core, that's probably what Liz Truss' government is going to be, too.

Raheem Kassam is the editor in chief of The National Pulse, a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, and a senior fellow at the Bow Group in London.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.