The sense of Tory panic continues and intensified, heightened still further by Corbyn’s ‘tanks on lawn’ decision today to continue in General Election mode and profit from his unassailable position to start attacking now the sixty-five most vulnerable Tory-held marginal seats.
And now the Tories have stopped even trying to hide it.
The Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) is one of the best-known and most influential Conservative ‘think-tanks’, a thought-leader for free-market Tories. Although notionally non-partisan, it was co-founded by Margaret Thatcher and its current president is Tory peer Lord Saatchi.
The CPS wholly owns and runs an online magazine titled CapX, whose editor is a former head of comment at the Telegraph. And on Tuesday, CapX published an article with the remarkably frank title:
The article examines the threat that Jeremy Corbyn poses to the Conservative worldview and to Tory power and reaches some remarkably conclusions:.
NOTHING else matters – not even keeping the country safe
Everything else is secondary now to stopping him. Austerity, Brexit, public services reform, trade deals with the US, foibles about doing deals with Irish politicians or Lib Dems – even new anti-terror laws. Everything else is secondary and expendable for the moment.
We’re hopelessly out of touch
[we] didn’t understand how it could happen, didn’t believe it was real while it was happening, and insisted right up to the day of the election that even if Corbyn had lots of supporters, they wouldn’t turn out to vote for him.
We were completely wrong, and we were completely wrong in a way that means we have no real chance of understanding why we were completely wrong. So what we are all doing now is to tell you what it all means and what should happen next, despite our just having demonstrated we have no expert credentials for doing so.
We can’t let May fight him again – and we don’t know who else can
we can’t have [May] fighting Corbyn again, because she’d probably lose. …perhaps if May can last a couple of years a better answer will turn up. I don’t know, and at this stage no one else does either.
We have to give up on any idea of, you know, governing
If [avoiding facing Corbyn] means, for the next five years, running a minority government that does little more than pass a holding finance bill each year, with the rest of the Commons’ time spent debating drain repairs and motions congratulating the Queen of Bhutan on the birth of her latest child, that’ll be just fine.
These are just a few examples of the frank terror with which the Tories now regard the ‘strong and stable’ Corbyn and Labour’s outstanding policy platform.
There’s also an accidental but utterly damning indictment of Labour moderates and why they cannot be allowed anywhere near the Labour leadership:
First, there must be no general election until we can beat him or he is gone. If Labour replaced him with someone more acceptable – Yvette Cooper, say – then if business became difficult to implement we could fight another General Election that we might lose, so that there would be a stable majority government.
The Tories are so desperate not to face Corbyn that they would be prepared to lose an election to have someone ‘safe’ like Yvette Cooper maintaining ‘business as usual’.
There could be no more compelling reason to avoid intransigent Labour right-wingers like the plague.
Likewise, there could be no greater tribute to the achievement of Jeremy Corbyn last week – no matter how hard the spin doctors and TV pundits are now trying to downplay it as they recover from their shock – nor to his credibility and eminent electability.
The frank panic and abject terror of the Tories is the ultimate compliment to the Labour leader. It should – and must – encourage all of his supporters to redouble their efforts and to emulate the Labour leader:
By remaining in General Election mode and preparing for government.
The SKWAWKBOX is provided free of charge but depends on the generosity of its readers to be viable. If you found this information helpful and can afford to, please do click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal. Thanks for your support so this blog can keep bringing you information the Establishment would prefer you not to know about.