Would Disraeli, With Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Rising, Support a Realignment of the British Right?
Certainly the nation faces one of those existential crises that fortunately come only rarely.
“I am a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad.” With this simple declaration from his first poll at High Wycombe, let Benjamin Disraeli on his birthday speak again to his once great party.
Nor to the Tory party alone, but to all Britons of conservative temperament. For the nation faces one of those existential crises that fortunately come only rarely, but when they do, must be faced with resolute determination to conquer them.
With this Labour government the United Kingdom is ruled by an administration that appears hell-bent on destroying the very country it was elected to govern for the good of all.
According to the traditions of parliamentary democracy, the nation will be led by Labour until a general election three years hence. Though with local elections in various English constituencies having been “postponed,” even the possibility of a delayed Westminster vote is a reality.
A bad enough situation, given that Prime Minister Keir Starmer is at the head of a majority government — made worse by the divided opposition in the House of Commons: a flailing Conservative opposition still tainted by more than a decade of ineffective rule, and Reform UK, being small in numbers but having captured an enthusiastic public imagination.
Doubtless Disraeli’s “radical” temperament would welcome an understanding between the two parties. The prospect is being mooted by some conservatives under the slogan “unite the right.” Yet years of acrimony have made any accommodation difficult, if not, one would like to think, impossible.
At the same time, it is difficult to see either party unseating Labour acting alone. A reconciliation of some sort then becomes a necessity, however distasteful. Take the case of a one-time adviser to Conservative prime ministers, Danny Kruger, an MP who left his party to sit with Nigel Farage. Mr. Kruger believes that only Reform can “save the country.”
Like many, Mr. Kruger is alert to the perils of splitting the vote on the right. So he calls upon his former colleagues to face facts: “I think any Conservative who could see plainly what the national interest is would themselves step down — i.e. join the Reform party.”
Not that history itself doesn’t provide ready examples, whether Bolingbroke’s alliance with disgruntled Whigs against Walpole, the “national” governments formed during two world wars, even the coalition between David Cameron’s Conservatives and Nick Clegg’s Liberal-Democrats in May 2010.
These coalitions, however, were means to an end — of parties diametrically opposed in principle in order to realize a shared political goal. Remember, Disraeli himself observed that “England does not love coalitions.”
Dizzy, though, was nothing if not resourceful in squaring a circle. “As a statesman I should say that it is impossible to refuse popular demands well matured and energetically supported,” he declared at that first poll in High Wycombe. While common sense Britons may be split between the two parties of the right, they are unanimous in their animosity toward the Labour Government and its 18-months in power.
Were the Tories and Reform to come to an arrangement, however, at least there are shared principles upon which to build the basis of trust: limited government, low taxes, and personal responsibility. No true conservative would stand athwart such an alliance made in good faith.
Another stumbling block standing between co-operation is the oft repeated refrain from both that “we don’t need the other.” Yet a metaphor crafted by Lord Macaulay — applied originally to the Whigs and Tories of his day, but equally applicable to two contemporary conservative impulses — offers a way forward from such an impasse.
We can begin by viewing each party as “representative of a great principle, essential to the welfare of nations,” as Macaulay called them. With Reform’s rise as a battering ram against a stagnant status quo, we may call it “the guardian of liberty.”
Whereas the storied history of the Tories, from Pitt to Disraeli, and Churchill to Thatcher, allows the party to lay claim to the title as the representative “of order.”
Given this framework and the current nature of British politics, “one is the moving power, and the other the steadying power of the State,” respectively.
To wit, Macaulay summarised: “One is the sail, without which society would make no progress; the other the ballast, without which there would be small safety in a tempest.”
Neither party may particularly approve of this characterization. Conservatives will protest that as the party of Thatcher and especially of Brexit, they take a secondary role to no one on the question of political liberty.
Meanwhile, Reform will point to the Tories’ appalling Brexit record, of continuing overgovernment and overtaxation as proof that the system needs the sort of overhaul only they can provide.
Regardless, Macaulay’s imagery of the ship of state, which both parties would agree is near collapse, is powerful enough to warrant talking with each other to forge a way forward.
Otherwise, another Labour term in office is a real possibility if there is no “realignment of the right.” Examined from another perspective that should make any naysayer pause, for if neither Conservative nor Reform can work together, how does either party imagine it can govern a fractious United Kingdom?
