Tory Hypocrisy Is Breathtaking

Grant Shapps says Labour can't be trusted on defence. He's right - but neither can the Tories, and they've spent 14 years proving that beyond any possible doubt.

Spithead Review of the Fleet in 1977. We don’t hold these anymore, because it would be too embarrassing. The Royal Navy has shrunk by more than three-quarters since this photo was taken.

On 31 May Defence Secretary Grant Shapps wrote an article for the Daily Telegraph in which he warned that, despite Sir Keir Starmer’s reassurances, the Labour Party can’t be trusted to defend this country. As it happens, I agree with him. Starmer is making the right noises - apart from his, probably significant, reluctance to put a date on his plan to increase the defence budget - but he isn’t exactly known for an unswerving attachment to either policies or principles, and his party is still dangerously infested with far-left Ban The Bomb nuts and people who supported the IRA. Shapps has a point: Labour will say they’re committed to defence, if that will help them get elected, but will they stick to that when they’re in power? I have my doubts.

Can We Trust The Tories On Defence?

However, the fact Labour can’t be trusted on defence shouldn’t distract us from the fact that the Tories can’t be trusted on defence either. Here’s a graph showing the difference between the Armed Forces we had when the Conservative Party returned to power in 2010 and the ones we have now:

From this graph it’s clear that the Conservatives most certainly can’t be trusted on defence. What they’ve done to the British Armed Forces over the last 14 years goes far beyond mere decimation. The damage is ongoing, too. Since the war in Ukraine began in February 2022 the trained manpower strength of all three services has fallen by an additional 4%.

Can We Trust The Tories On Immigration?

So OK, 14 years of Conservative government has left the military far weaker than the last Labour government did, but what about immigration? Rishi Sunak keeps assuring us that only the Tories have a plan to reduce immigration, and warns that Labour plan to open the floodgates. Well, let’s look at how those floodgates have been doing since the turn of the century:

It seems we can’t trust the Conservatives on immigration, either. Over the past six years the Tories have boosted immigration to levels Tony Blair never even dreamed of. In 2022 immigration amounted to almost 2% of our entire population in a single year. Obviously if you go with net immigration, which politicians tend to do because it makes the numbers look smaller, this falls to a little over 1% - but this is still a shocking and completely unsustainable number. Now Sunak promises that his new policies will cut net immigration to a mere 300,000 or so a year. That’s just 50% higher than it was the last time Labour were in office, and only about 2,500% higher than it should be.

Not good enough, Tories.

Can We Trust The Tories To Protect The Union?

Blair’s experiment with devolution was one of the most stupid and destructive things any British politician has ever done. Devolution has saddled us with unnecessary extra layers of expensive, meddling politicians, many of whom hate the UK and want to break it up. If a giant space rock landed on the Wee Parliament at Holyrood tomorrow and reduced it to a smoking crater, nobody would be happier than I. Devolution was an act of constitutional vandalism that put the Union in needless danger, and it should be reversed.

We can’t trust Labour to preserve the Union, but we can’t trust the Tories - and let’s not forget that their full name is the Conservative and Unionist Party - to preserve it either. It was David Cameron, after all, who presided over the 2014 referendum on Scottish secession. And let’s just have one final graph here:

Thanks to Conservative bungling we now have a border, regulated and patrolled by a foreign power, inside our country. This is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland - but its two constituent parts are separated by a border imposed by a Conservative and Unionist Party government.

We Can’t Trust The Tories

If you want this country to have a right of centre government, you’re obviously never going to dream of voting Labour. Unfortunately the evidence of the last 14 years shows that you can’t in good conscience vote for the Conservatives either. Whatever they say, whatever half-formed attempts at crowd-pleasing policies Sunak pulls out of the hat between now and the 4th of July, it’s clear that if he somehow managed to get re-elected the moribund Conservative Party would continue down the failed One Nation route of more taxes, more public spending, more immigration and less defence.

If only there was a real right-wing party we could vote for instead…