“Thirteen years of Conservative government” has become something of a meme in right-wing online circles; it invariably accompanies a news story which illustrates the extent to which an extended period of Tory rule has not seemed to produce a more conservative nation.
It also invites the comparison with New Labour, which was only in office for 13 years but managed to deliver a transformational programme, whatever one’s view of much of the content.
And in the run-up to the 2010 election when it looked like they were on the way out. Gordon Brown busied himself setting traps, such as the 45p rate and the Equality Act, which would bedevil his opponents.
Meanwhile the Conservatives, who electoral fate at the next election looks more certain at the minute than ever did Brown’s, are busying themselves with such vital work as, er, ensuring you need a licence from the state to play professional football.
Two stories this week once again call this dismal meme to mind: a school chaplain getting not only sacked but “secretly reported […] to the anti-terrorism Prevent programme” for telling an assembly that they were allowed to disagree with new LGBT policies; and four children getting suspended from another school after accidentally scuffing a copy of the Quran.
In the latter case there is, happily, no suggestion that the boys have been referred to Prevent. But nor does it seem to have much to say about the school pupils allegedly making death threats against them.
Likewise local politicians seem to feel free to support the expulsion of the original four – and give one of their mothers “credit” for not seeking prosecutions against those making the threats – without the shadow of the state’s official counter-extremism programme intruding on their thinking.
As for the other case, we don’t have a full transcript of the Revd Dr Bernard Randall’s sermon, and perhaps it was full of fire and brimstone rhetoric. But the Daily Mail quotes him as saying:
“You should no more be told you have to accept LGBT ideology, than you should be told you must be in favour of Brexit, or must be Muslim.”
Perhaps the imprecision of “LGBT ideology” is a problem here. Are the pupils of Trent College now obliged, for example, to believe that anybody who identifies as a transwoman is a woman? Because Humza Yousaf, the man who will probably be the next First Minister of Scotland, does not.
(Meanwhile the consultant the school had called in to institute their new policies, and pupils’ concerns about which had prompted Randall’s sermon, reportedly kicked off their day by getting the staff to join in a chant of “‘smash heteronormativity!”, which doesn’t sound especially tolerant. “[S]imply an enthusiastic attempt by Ms Barnes to warm up the teachers at the outset of the day”, according to the judge.)
Suella Braverman has declared her intention to overhaul Prevent in the wake of the latest report into it’s failings. But as Paul Stott wrote earlier this month, this isn’t the first time a Conservative home secretary has made that commitment.
And the broader point stands: that many things the Tories like to complain about, especially the ballooning influence of explicitly progressive HR culture, has its roots in policies and legislation they have done nothing about whilst in office.
As a result that agenda – and the haphazard growth of de facto blasphemy law around Islam – has motored along quite happily whilst Labour have been opposition. So as and when they return to power and put their foot down on the accelerator (via such means as their proposed Race Equality Bill) the momentum will be firmly behind them.
If so – and if they struggle to rouse much enthusiasm from their voters or activists to prevent it – the Conservatives will have few people to blame but themselves.