NOW is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.
A typing drill invented by Charles E. Weller has never been so apposite in relation to the Welsh Conservatives.
Nowadays, we would modify it to include women, but the words’ meaning remains the same.
Where are the good men and women in the Welsh Conservatives, and why are they not creating holy hell about what Andrew RT Davies and his clinkers are doing to their reputations?
The Welsh Conservative leader and the claque of Blukippers and Reform entryists surrounding him are doing untold damage to the Conservative brand in Wales. You might think that the Conservative brand doesn’t count for much here, but Welsh voters are overwhelmingly small “c” conservative.
Although Labour still relies on racking up votes in the Valleys, those votes can no longer be taken for granted. Reform’s strong pitch to working-class voters – especially those who feel left behind and disenfranchised – plays well with those who despise the liberal metropolitan attitudes that permeate the Welsh Government. Those voters will NEVER consider voting Conservative. They didn’t during the high electoral watermark under Margaret Thatcher and will not now.
The above is a lie and provably so. Tell a lie often enough and it becomes the truth, you might say.
Working-class voters in Wales, and you only have to look at how well Reform did in Llanelli, find Reform’s simple and pernicious nativist message attractive. After all, it provides them with an identifiable target for their resentment and prejudice. It’s all the foreigners’ fault.
However, those Llanelli voters will never vote Conservative. It is not in their DNA to do so. For the Welsh Conservatives, chasing their votes is the equivalent of looking for gold at the end of a rainbow.
The Conservatives to those working-class voters are “they”, the other, the unsupportable, the inheritors of the despised Thatcher and her ilk. Memories run long and deep, and hatred of the Conservatives is bedded in so firmly that it would take a political earthquake to shift it.
It doesn’t matter that Reform is way out there on the delusional wing of English conservatism, believing in the sort of half-baked quack economic policies that crashed the economy under Liz Truss. They are not the Conservatives.
Similarly, for all the influence and power the Welsh Government has over the UK’s immigration policy, the Welsh Conservatives may as well deploy Andrew RT Davies and George Carroll in a pedalo off Barry to repel immigrants from Lundy.
The Welsh Conservatives could have learned several lessons from July 4. They could have reflected that Labour’s vote weakness suggested things were not as dire as they appeared. They could have started drawing up a strategy to separate themselves from the complete Horlicks the Westminster party made of the election and the chaos of its campaign. Hell’s bells, they could even have started mapping out a strategy to consolidate its vote in the areas in which the Welsh Government is as popular as a dose of the clap.
Instead, their leaders and their leadership’s advisors ignored those lessons and decided the way forward was to lie, use racist dog whistles, fight the culture wars, and attack the legitimacy of the Welsh Parliament and devolution.
You keep hearing that decent and moderate Conservative politicians are aghast at what is being done in their name. These are the same sort of decent and moderate Conservatives who sat on their hands in the House of Commons while Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak propelled the party and the nation into a political cesspit. These are the same sort of decent and moderate Conservatives who have not raised a finger to stop the band of nutters around Andrew RT Davies from using the sort of divisive and racist language that shames them in the same way it does their leader and his hangers-on.
The law of averages and common sense lead to the inevitable conclusion that decent and moderate Conservatives must exist.
Recent communications by or on behalf of the Welsh Conservatives and their leader, the lack of any decent and moderate Conservatives sticking their heads above the parapet to say in public, “This is wrong,” or to take a stand against the racist dog whistles and the language of hate, also leads to the conclusion that if they do exist, they are spineless. Either that or RT’s comms team represents views they are too cowardly to express themselves.
The Welsh Conservative leader’s comms are shameless. Failure to do anything about them is shameful.
It’s time for decent and moderate Conservatives – if they exist – to take a stand before they end up circling the pan with Andrew RT Davies and his advisors and getting flushed away to oblivion.
