What’ll They Do?
If the worst happens, if the Conservatives stay in power, here’s what we might expect from another five years of Tory governance.
Can’t you just feel it in the air? A vague feeling of unease — like we might not be done with this whole extreme conservative Right resurgence nightmare.
Frankly, why would we be? Nothing has changed. People are still suffering, the media are still out for clicks and the Far Right have united around keystone issues that cut across their usual divisions, like trans rights. Meanwhile, we continue to splinter and fight amongst ourselves. Actual Nazis are knocking on the door, and we’re too busy fretting about whether we should call trans kids by their chosen names.
The Labour Party, under Keir Starmer, is now a centre-right political party. It should be a party of the left and of liberalism, especially given its deep roots in trade unionism. Starmer is deeply unpopular: as a person he is uninteresting and bland, as a leader he is a ruthless dictator and as a politician he’s a man of little conviction other than the desire to be elected.
Put all that together, best beloved, and I see a Britain that may very well return the Conservatives to office. Labour are only ahead because everyone hates the Tories — suppose the economy starts to improve around Autumn? Maybe a few tax breaks are announced? Slather on six months of newspapers talking-up any perceived evidence of economic recovery. Add a dithering broadcast media, hamstrung by a child’s idea of balance, and you might just find a slim majority don’t want to risk economic recovery by changing government.
Additionally, those “disaffected Tory voters” will probably turn out for them at the election because most people will vote for Their Party, regardless, in the end. It’s usually derived from their family tradition. Then there are the constituency amendments that have cost Labour seats, and the SNP in Scotland who have cost them more. That predicament in Scotland has gotten better but hasn’t gone away.
Make no mistake: this system is a die that, when rolled, is weighted to come up “Conservative” far more often than it should. It’s a system designed to naturally return the Tories to power, except in extreme circumstances.
I do not want this to happen, but I fear it may. We should prepare ourselves for the worst case scenario of the Conservative Party somehow clawing their way back in power for another five years.
Forewarned is forearmed, so if it does happen what will they likely do over that term in office?
A Coup, Sir, a Coup!
The Tories have been described as “an absolute monarchy tempered by regicide”. They have no compunction about ruthlessly removing leaders, and Rishi is unpopular. He’s not unpopular for sensible reasons, either, he’s disliked because he’s not seen as a True Believer like Liz Truss. The Party want a man who is committed to lassaiz faire regulation, minimal taxation, no social safety net, conservative values, white supremacy and who (under no circumstances) should be a person of colour.
Why not remove him now? Because the Conservatives are bracing themselves for an electoral wipeout. Who in their right mind would step up to captain The Titanic just before she slips beneath the waves? If, however, they get another term… that’s when the knives will come out.
Boris’ Back, Baby
We’re not done with that asshole. Once the dust of the election settles, he’ll either be handed the keys to a safe seat — you know, one of those places where the locals delight in their lot as cap-doffing peasants and would happily vote for Satan if he wore a blue rosette — or he’ll be placed into the Lords.
Boris is stupidly popular with the Tory Party and their base. They think he’s a political genius, funny, witty and just the sort of fellow who should be in charge. He delivers on their priorities and incenses their enemies.
Johnson would murder his own mother if it was of even the slightest utility to him and would then claim that he didn’t. He’d still be clutching the knife, drenched in blood, stood over the body and surrounded by witnesses; but he wouldn’t care. He has no goal other than “what is best for me right now”.
Like Trump, he’s a pathological liar. Boris is also very hard to nail down: his nickname is not “the greased piglet” for compliment’s sake. Like Liz Truss, he is supremely confident. Of what? It doesn’t really matter.
Put all this together and you have a man who is effectively a battering ram: the opposition can’t pin him down any more than they could nail smoke to the wall. The few media outlets critical of him will be trapped into spending their time trying to unravel whatever latest ball of yarn he has spun about Peppa Pig World or Wiff-Waff [content warning: Daily Telegraph] or “piccaninnies”.
Like a drunken elephant, Boris is exceedingly difficult for his opponents to counter. His personal enrichment and corruption are but a small price to pay for his talent as the ultimate siege weapon: breaking down protections and barriers to leave us all in the grip of unhinged oligarchs.
It’s not so much “why would they bring him back?” as “why would they not bring him back?”.
Migration
The Tories will continue with their various culture war issues, with migration being top of the list. Having just won the election, the heat will be off to some extent, but the overall project of demonisation will continue.
The problem that they will have is how? They already house migrants in disease-infested barges and are trying to ship asylum seekers to Rwanda. What more is there for them to actually do, short of human experimentation or concentration camps?
Well, the first move will be to scrap the Human Rights Act. It won’t be easy, politically or legally, because so much legal precedent has been built on it since its introduction in 1998. Nevertheless, they will do it. It’s too totemic for them not to: it’s symbolic of everything the Daily Mail has railed against for twenty years.
They will also do it badly. The last fourteen years of Conservative rule have been notable for two things: their personal enrichment and abject incompetence. Look at Truss, Brexit, Rwanda — all of it absolute idiocy. Their rescinding of the Human Rights Act will be no different: an announcement to please The Daily Mail, and then it’ll be tied up in court cases, suits and a legal Never-Never Land for years.
That’ll be a new quagmire to add on to the Rwanda debacle, leaving them exposed to an increasingly radicalised base who just want to see someone suffer.
Gender and Sexual Minorities
Short answer? More of the same. Very little outright legislation, but more sabre-rattling; more legislative tinkering; more court cases and more fuel for the Extreme Right.
Consider that, without a single piece of legislation being passed, trans healthcare for under 18s is now effectively banned in the UK. There are no clinics available to handle patients: the Tavistock saw 0 new referrals in the last two years. Hormone therapy is now blocked, despite similar hormones being available for birth control and different — though still hormonal — treatments being used on fat people.
The draft guidelines for schools will be implemented and will effectively end social transitioning for young people in public.
After that, much as with migration, there isn’t much the government will have the competency to be able to enact. Noises will be made about the Gender Recognition Act, but I don’t foresee it being a big enough priority to the Tory base for them to want to invest the work needed to remove it.
It’s a lot easier to keep trans people around as punching bags for Prime Minister’s Questions and bogey-men for the “un-woke” brigade.
All of this will continue to embolden the conservative Far Right and, despite protestations from cretins like Rowling and the nimrods in the “LGB Alliance”, it will continue to spill over into broader attacks on queer people and, increasingly, women.
Remember, best beloved, that feminists; gay men; lesbian women; bisexual people; trans persons and non-binary peoples all have committed the same basic sin, in the eyes of the conservative. We have all broken traditional roles of gender.
Feminists want equity with men: the options to do men’s work, wear men’s clothes and to be dominant. Queer people want to be visible, protected and have equity with straight people despite being attracted to people of their own gender and thus create non-traditional family structures. Trans and NB people want visibility, protection and equity with cisgender people despite assuming a position, role and duty belonging to a gender which we are presumed not to have.
That is why the trans issue will always spill over to the queer community and to women. The Far Right hate me for the same reasons they hate gay people and women. Throwing trans people to the wolves will not appease them, because they will simply move to the next group and then the next.
You see, it turns out that the “groomer” / “pædophile” bullshit is very, very easily applied to queer people. It was so during the 1970s and 1980s. Then it will be full-tilt at abortion rights, birth control and women’s rights: all in the name of Family Values, doing the best for the children and tradition.
It’ll spread, like an ink blot over wet paper. The campaign against transgender people is in full swing, and we have already seen this translate into a rise in hate crimes against queer people generally. Shadowy donations are being made to anti-abortion groups in the UK.
Five more years of Conservatives will bring probably not much actual legislation, but a hell of a lot of anti-trans “guidance” and rhetoric. It’ll continue the gutting of healthcare for us. It’ll gnaw at the edges of our legal protections, limited only by their own political incompetence. But most importantly it’ll be succour for some terrible groups that are an existential threat to us all.
There will be more violence, more intimidation, more bloodshed and more death. I sincerely hope that Helen Joyce, Kathleen Stock et al will be happy with this dreadful beast they have strengthened and loosed. What’s a few dead trans schoolgirls in the name of Sex-Based Rights, eh?
The NHS and Public Services
As with gender and sexual minorities, we can expect more of the same. Incompetence and arrogance. Nobody in parliament will have the slightest clue how to effectively manage the health service, improve outcomes or bring down waiting times.
This is by design. Parliament don’t want to improve it, so idiots are put in charge of it.
Firstly, they know full well that the NHS only continues to function using the blood of its staff as fuel. Because Brits love the NHS, we will suffer to protect it. Few people suffer more than the staff: caught in a death-march whereby budgets always shrink, conditions always worsen, yet the NHS must be maintained.
This means that the Conservatives will continue to cut “waste” and “inefficiency”, by which they mean tightening the screw and increasing the tension on the rack. It’s a delicate operation, you see, because no Health Minister wants to be the one to give the rack that final twist which ends the victim’s suffering.
That cannot stop them, however, from tightening the rack further.
This is because, secondly, the government want the NHS to die. Make no mistake, they don’t want it to die so that they can replace it with something better. No, best beloved. They just want it off the books. It’s too hard for their minuscule brains to properly manage and it’s expensive. That latter point means that, should something happen to the health service, then a big surplus would open up in the UK’s budget. I’m sure our leaders have some very definite ideas on where that surplus could go… tax cuts and business incentives, all of which will mysteriously benefit Tories and their pals. I’ve no doubt, either, that our elected representatives wouldn’t mind a few dinner-dates from lobbyists looking to bring American healthcare to Britain, either.
Somewhere between the soup and the duck course, and with whistles whetted with Dom Pérignon, they can explain that a US healthcare system is just what the Tories need! It fails patients, but it makes insurance companies rich as rich. Those insurance companies can offer favours, board seats, advisory roles with fat salaries and nominal work schedules. Gold-plated pensions. Stock options. Company cars. What’s not to love! And, of course, you and yours will get the best private treatment money can buy.
The commoners? Oh, yeah. Them. Fuck ‘em.
What the government has wanted for years, including under Blair, I sincerely believe, is to do to the NHS what they did to the post office. Bleed it, bruise it, hamstring it and hobble it. Claim there’s no choice! It must be done! Budgets! Efficiency! Make it worse, year on year, until the people are sick of it and its poor performance. Once the voters hate it, you can carve it up like a roast and sell it off by the pound. We’ll fix it by opening it to competition and privatisation, they can say.
“I don’t belong here!” said old Tessa, out loud. “Easy love, there’s the safe way home.” Thankful for her fine, fair discount; Tess co-operates. All alone and oh hello, see the deadly nightshade grow. — Aisle of Plenty, Genesis 1973.
They did exactly this with the post office, which was previously a nationalised Public Good. Now it’s a kiosk window in a corner shop, assuming the shop owner hasn’t been sent to prison based on a computer error.
What successive governments have failed to grasp is just how much British people cherish our NHS and how much blood its workers will spend to keep it running.
Thus, the victim continues to scream on the rack as the screw tightens. Each Health Minister, their face hidden by a black mask, continues their grim work. Surely, surely this must be the point where they yield? Where they confess that they don’t want the NHS any more! How much more of this can they take? But the victim, between sobs and screams, holds fast and the executioner increasingly frets that they next turn may be the one that rends limb from limb.
The Right to Strike and Protest
This will be a softly-softly move. The legal frameworks are now in place through the Public Order Act (2023), all that remains is to start setting precedents, one by one, until the fall of pebbles has become an inescapable landslide on civil rights.
The police will be placed under increasing pressure to clamp down on protests — just as Suella Braverman did. Her mistake was doing it too early, we’re not quite there yet.
Protests about the climate emergency, the genocide in Gaza, the increasingly genocidal rhetoric against trans people: all these things will be steadily minimised and quieted. Nobody will actually lose the right to protest, because that would be an affront to civil rights, but they will lose the right to make noise. Or to hold placards, depending on the message. Or to link arms. Or to cause any impediment whatsoever to commerce — eg a planned march closing down a major road. You’ll still be able to protest, it’ll just have to be done quietly, at home, and with carefully chosen words that don’t imply your protest may go further or cause disruption.
The right to strike will be attacked from the other direction — the implication that it is unethical to withhold work. We can already see this with the government mandating minimum service levels for striking workforces, despite this already being the case voluntarily from unions. If the government decides that the minimum service level is 80–90%, what good then will a strike do? Withholding our labour is the last alternative that workers have.
Meanwhile the media ghouls will continue to demonise unions, strikers and protesters. It’s a lot easier to grind someone’s face into the dirt if you convince all the onlookers that they’re bad.
Ah, one important note: this is already here. In the last 18 months, all of this has been put in place. Now we’re just waiting to see how it plays out.
Hold tight, then. If the Conservatives win we can look forward to five more years of mind-boggling incompetence, cruelty, corruption and in-fighting. In between their inept circus performances, I predict:
- The ousting of Rishi.
- The return of Boris.
- The scrapping of the Human Rights Act, in a desperate attempt to be even more cruel to refugees. When this fails to bring about the much ballyhooed renaissance in British fortunes, another victim will be selected for calvary.
- More extreme rhetoric about gender and sexual minorities — with a corresponding uptick in authoritarian, fascist group activity.
- The continuation of the Americanisation of British health care, whereby local bodies are re-organised to resemble HMO’s and public health spending is further cut. Staff will be blamed, waiting lists will grow and the Tories will wait and see whether we’ve now had enough of our precious NHS.
- The laws already implemented will be used to clamp down on protest. It’ll be under the guise of protecting order and commerce. Strikes will be made ineffective by restrictions on them as “disruptive” and their impact will be minimised through government-mandated minimum service levels. That way people can strike all they want, and all that’ll happen is they’ll lose a day’s pay while the government won’t be forced to change a thing.
Best beloved, how do we fix this? How do we get off of this awful road? Well, I have a plan. It’ll take you, me, and everyone we know. We must:
- Join a Union. Find the union that represents your work and join it. Try to bring others with you. Try to unionise your workplace — your union can help with that.
- Vote Labour. They fucking suck, Starmer is a tosspot and they’re mostly indistinguishable from Cameron-era Tories. Those facts notwithstanding, we must vote for them. Bear with me.
- Get involved in your union, specifically in getting your concerns and issues talked about. Union members, together, democratically set the agenda for what that union will campaign for.
- Get involved with the TUC, the trades union congress. The priorities of the unions are brought to the TUC and then the TUC, democratically, chooses policy positions and political agendas.
- Get out and organise. Protest, march and bring people with you. You stand up for me, and I stand up for you. Gender and sexual minorities march with Black Lives Matter. Protestors against the genocide in Gaza march with advocates for women’s reproductive rights. We support each other.
None of these things will affect the Tories: they’re privately funded and operate only for the rich. These things will, however, twist Labour’s arm. Labour is still the party of the trade union and, regardless of their posturing and barking, the TUC wields a lot of power over them.
Labour will hate it. Their politicians will whine and complain. They’ll try to bore us to death with patronising speeches. Then, in the end, they will back down because they have no choice. Without union support, they don’t exist.
Unions brought us weekends, pensions and minimum wages. Unions have fought for civil rights and were instrumental in the UK decriminalising homosexuality, equality of age-of-consent law and civil partnerships. Unions only last week helped block anti-trans legislation in the Scottish parliament through our influence over politicians.
Join a union, vote Labour in and then hold their arms around their backs until they cry “uncle!”. Let’s take this goddamn rotten country back, best beloved, and turn it into somewhere decent human beings might want to live.
