Thread by @cjayanetti

The Tories are lost because every part of their ideology has failed.

Commentary on the leadership race has focused on the candidates, but their fundamental problem is that their entire worldview has collapsed

By me, for Bloomberg - £ but screengrabs: 🧵
bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

First, the rap sheet. This is the legacy of 14 years of Tory rule. Nothing works, because nothing they did worked, because none of it could ever work because they were fundamentally wrong, or at best incoherent:

Now, the angry online Right - the most stupid people in Britain - may be around at some point to tell us that Real Conservatism Has Never Been Tried.

That the Tories 2010-2024 were actually leftists.

But Tory tax rises were actually to plug budget gaps their failures had left.

And the rise in immigration latterly seen under the Conservatives was a desperate attempt to plug labour shortages in key services and industries, which is what happens when you do things like paying care workers absolutely sod all because austerity requires it.

Anyway, the Tories' ideological cult of Thatcherism, combined with a strategic need to oppose New Labour from the Right, meant the Tories either didn't realise or outright ignored that Blair and Brown sought to pursue their aims within a broadly Thatcherite economic model.

Then there's the 2008 financial crisis. The reasons for the banking crisis went to the heart of Thatcherism - but as it hit under a Labour government, the politics of it played out very differently:

Therefore, when the Tories won power in 2010, they - consciously or otherwise - misdiagnosed the problems the country faced. They acted as if Britain had an overregulated statist economy with profligate public spending, hardline unions and welfare dependency

None of it was true

The Tories misdiagnosed Britain with mythical diseases and administered treatments that acted as toxins, like chemotherapy without the cancer.

It is no surprise that it all went to shit.

But the ideology that lies across the Tory spectrum is not just central to their worldview - it's at the heart of their identity

Honestly confronting this wholesale failure would mean a crisis of identity, and need a huge change of direction

Easier to just double down:

There's little to suggest the Tories can overturn the iron rule of British elections - that no government loses power without an economic crisis first.

But it could be even worse for them than that:

Fourteen years ago the Tories pretended that it was 1979 all over again. It wasn't. They eked out a far longer term in office than their record remotely warranted

And 2024 isn't 1974. The country isn't drifting towards the Tories' fundamental worldview - quite the opposite

For 14 years, the Conservatives were given chance after chance by an absurdly patient electorate. They blew it because they were wrong. Eventually they’ll have to confront that. Until they do, they’re lost in the wilderness. bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…