Where Michael Howard learned to "talk tough"

Submitted by AWL on 30 March, 2005 - 11:24

Michael Howard’s summary execution of Howard Flight, the Tory MP who talked candidly about the Tories’ tax and spending plans at a private meeting, has prompted a storm of protest in the Tory Party. Tory Party members are apparently not used to such “firm leadership”, nor diktats from the centre. They are used to pottering around their leafy constituencies, networking over sherry. Maybe that is why the Tory Party has such a high quota of eccentrics and mavericks.

Now Michael Howard has decided the laid-back, decentralised ways have to change. He wants to do what Tony Blair has done to the Labour Party. He wants to “modernise it”. Which means local parties must do as the centre tells them, and if individuals don’t like it they can clear off.

Some people in Flight’s local Conservative Association seem prepared to do as they are told. The agent for the constituency, sounding drugged up and hypnotised, has said, “Howard Flight is ineligible to stand as a Conservative Party candidate. The association is in the process of selecting a new candidate.” But Flight is gathering support and may yet get backing from his local party. Howard’s off-the-cuff and over-the-top discipline will almost certainly lead the Tory party further into trouble before the election.

Michael Howard seems to think that behaving like a tin-pot dictator makes him look in control. In trying to be like more like Blair, he has actually ended up looking like a mad man and a rather a stupid one at that. By all accounts Flight’s speech about Tory policies did not suggest the Tories were going to make huge cuts if elected, despite what was written about the speech by a New Labour supporting journalist in the Times newspaper.

And Howard appears to be sacrificing the best (ruling class) interests of his party — super-rich Flight is the Tories’ main link man to the City, for god’s sake — to ensure a personal image of invulnerability is maintained.

But what is Howard emulating when he tries to create a more New Labour party machine? These are the people who have drastically reduced political democracy —effectively usurping what should be Parliamentary decision-making, giving power to a sleek-suited army of political advisors grouped around the Prime Minister. They have systematically depoliticised public debate, elections and cultural life over the last years. All that is important to New Labour is the relative competency of their party machine.

It is not true to say that New Labour has no ideology — they have a great deal of admiration for all kinds of capitalist dogma. But because they feel no pressure from the labour movement and have no socialist commitment whatsoever, all they can do is churn out a bland, but insidiously reactionary, capitalist consensus.

In order to appear different, the Tories have been reduced to mouthing the crassest populist “common sense” phrases — “How would you feel if your daughter was attacked by a man on early release” and the like.

We shed no tears for Howard Flight, but the manner and course of his demise tells us a lot about the state of mainstream British politics.

By Rosalind Robson

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