OPINION
Are conservative parties finally waking up that chasing after the left, blubbering ‘Us, too, but in blue ties!’ isn’t exactly an election-winning strategy?
Conviction, standing for something, anything, is key to winning elections. It’s not a guarantee, of course: you still have to convince the electorate that whatever you’re standing for is worth voting for.
But standing for nothing, just yapping and chasing witlessly after your opponents’ cars, is a one-way ticket to irrelevance. It pisses off your base, who desert you for minor parties who are at least the real deal, and it does nothing to convince swinging voters, who can just vote for leftist parties who really do mean what they say.
It’s a message that clearly hasn’t gotten home to Chris Luxon’s National, who are just coasting by on nothing but not being Chris Hipkins’ Labour. If Luxon had the guts to really stand firm against everything from co-governance to Net Zero, it’d be all over, Red Rover, for Labour, not to mention the odious Greens and Te Paati Maori.
Elsewhere, at least, the message is dimly filtering through. Peter Dutton is fast growing a pair, and putting the dripping wet dimwits of the Liberal ‘moderates’ back in their soggy little boxes. But Dutton, for all his hard work, is looking likely to play the Bill Hayden to Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s Bob Hawke. Dutton is particularly hampered by his bald pate. Peter Gutwein in Tasmania may have been the first bald bloke to win an election since Mussolini, but he had Covid helping him along.
British PM Rishi Sunak has an admirable head of hair – and he’s finally starting, however tentatively, to push back against Wokeism in the UK.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is channelling the Conservative Party’s most powerful leader Margaret Thatcher, in a desperate bid to change his party’s dismal trajectory ahead of next year’s general election.
At the Conservative Party conference in Manchester on Wednesday, Mr Sunak recognised that his party needed to be bolder, but a wearied electorate is demanding even harder and fiercer policies to counter widespread Tory fatigue.
Piddly, nanny-state policies like cracking down on smoking and vaping are hardly the stuff of Thatcherite recovery.
Pushing back against the lunacy of transgenderism, on the other hand…
He stated the scientific obvious – that men are men and women are women, to politically distance himself from the Labour leader Keir Starmer who still gets himself in knots trying to explain what a woman is in deference to the trans lobby.
Mr Sunak remarked: “It shouldn’t be controversial for parents to know what their children are being taught in school about relationships, patients should know when hospitals are talking about men or women.
“And we shouldn’t get bullied into believing that people can be any sex they want to be. They can’t, a man is a man and a woman is a woman. That’s just common sense.”
The Australian
Cue screeching hysteria from men in dresses who will, once again, attempt to prove that they’re not mentally ill predators by acting as barking-mad and threateningly as possible.
Sunak is also growing a pair on an issue that is riling up Brit voters.
He said he would do “whatever is necessary” to stop the boats warning that Labour’s immigration policy could see 100,000 asylum seekers arrive in Britain each year.
The Home Office this week confirmed the country spends £8m (A$15.3m) a day – you read that correctly – on hotels to house illegal migrants.
Home secretary Suella Braverman also took up the cudgels against the unhindered flood of illegals invading Britain and Europe.
In her keynote speech at Manchester to the governing party’s annual conference, Ms Braverman called migration a “hurricane” that would bring “millions more immigrants to these shores, uncontrolled and unmanageable,” adding that it would make her parents’ generation look like a “gust of wind.”
According to the British Home Office, more than 25,000 people have been detected crossing the English Channel in small boats this year alone, and nearly 50,000 migrants crossed the channel in 2022.
Ms Braverman, who gave a prelude to today’s address last week when she blasted a 1951 UN convention as outdated, said that UK governments had been “far too squeamish about being smeared as racist to properly bring order to the chaos.” The Conservatives, she said, would give Britain “strong borders.”
The Tories are dimly cottoning on to what was a lightning-rod issue for John Howard and Tony Abbott.
She hailed the government’s moves to make it harder for migrants to seek asylum in Britain, including a law that requires anyone arriving in small boats across the English Channel to be detained and then deported permanently to their home nation or third countries.
New York Sun
Of course the left-media and the chattering classes of social media are going to lose their minds. They did in Australia, too, when John Howard stopped the boats. But voters listened and liked what they heard.
But Sunak needs to take another leaf out of Abbott’s book and hire advisers who know how to write a halfway decent slogan.
Mr Sunak’s pitch was “Delivering Long Term Decisions for a Brighter Future” which excited no one.
The left may have sneered at stuff like “great big new tax”, and “stop the boats”, but short, pithy messages like those cut through the left-media’s cacophony like knives through butter.
And Sunak’s headline move of making it harder for wily teenagers to sneak a cigarette down the back shed is not an iron-fist first step, nor a tax-reducing hip pocket vote winner. His row back on net-zero recently was seen to be a more decisive move. The consensus across business and the party followers was that he has to [be] far bolder.
The Australian
In short: just grow a pair, conservatives. Stop trying to be pale, piss-poor, imitations of the left.
You might even start winning elections again.