Tories have destroyed themselves but they've destroyed Britain too

The banks were too big to fail, but ordinary people were small enough to suffer; so small, indeed, the poor could be ground down to dust.

The path was set: the Tories would help their own, and to hell with everyone else.

Families were sacrificed for bankers. And so began the journey towards institutional, state-sponsored inequality, so deep, so cruel, so Victorian, it caused the height of British children to decline.

Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross (Image: free)

Nothing defines the Tories so much as the rich getting richer, while the poor get poorer. Even the disabled were to be trampled and humiliated, made to grovel, told to prove their suffering, in a degrading Darwinian struggle for financial support from a brutal and brutalising government.

And this is how it ends: Rishi Sunak, the banker in Number Ten, married to a woman richer than a monarch, presiding over a nation of food-banks. When the Tories took office, there were 35 food banks, today there’s 2800. If hell existed, that alone should damn every Tory who’s held office since 2010.

In between, Conservatives took a hammer to Britain. Austerity set the path towards Brexit. Communities destroyed by the butchery of public services were left hopeless. Why shouldn’t they seek answers in some destruction themselves – especially when Conservatives had created an imaginary phantom from the EU?

But ordinary people – in England, at least – lashed out in the wrong direction. Brexit only served the rich. If there’s one man who sums up this period it’s Tory donor and hedge fund multimillionaire Crispin Odey.

He profited by betting against Britain over Brexit. A leading Brexiteer, he donated nearly £900,000 to leave campaigners. He placed huge bets against the pound and government bonds before the referendum, making an estimated £220million when the pound collapsed after leave won.

The day after the vote he said: “There’s an Italian expression - Il mattino ha l’oro in bocca [the morning has gold in its mouth] and never had one felt so much that idea as this morning.”

Brexit began that other great Tory project: dividing us against each other. We were shirkers or strivers. Patriots or citizens of nowhere. Woke or anti-woke. We couldn’t just be ‘people’ - because that would be an admission that we really are all in it together and government ministers should be in it with us.

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Division and culture wars mean there’s always imaginary folk-devils to blame. And for the Tories, the greatest bogeyman was refugees. Those fleeing war and persecution weren’t victims in their eyes, but a ‘flood’ come to destroy our country.

Rather than create a functioning asylum system, the Tories simply reverted to type. They broke the system. Once the hammer was wielded, they could get inventive with their cruelty: deporting people to Rwanda.

The Rwanda plan exemplified a government dangerously out of control. To get its way, the Tories had to reinvent reality, passing laws which claimed Rwanda was safe, even though its own government guidance declared the country unsafe.

Once politicians bend reality to their will we’ve entered dangerous territory. The Tories had form though. When is a party not a party? When the government of the day is drinking and dancing while people die from Covid, while the Queen sits alone in a face-mask mourning her husband.

But this is the party of patriotism, no? A government wrapped in red, white and blue. What a lie. They’re masters of gaslighting us.

This is a party which hates Britain and the British people. It’s a party in love with the idea of what it wants Britain to be – some 1950s imperial idyll. But that never existed, and so Conservatives hate what we are in reality.

They hate this country so much they sell it off to their friends, and let sewage pour into rivers. They literally turned Britain into their toilet.

They hate us so much they hurt us. This is the party which put Liz Truss on her rotten throne. In just 45 days, this fool, this failure, shattered the country, sending our mortgages spiralling.

The party laughs and sneers at the weak, whilst putting the likes of Michelle Mone into the Lords. It dares talk of serving the people, yet it gave us Boris Johnson, a delinquent hooligan and serial liar who serves only himself.

In just 48 hours we’ll be rid of this gangster government. Yet the most bitter irony is this: the Tories have inflicted such disgrace on the nation, it seems they’ve destroyed themselves.

'We’re now on a journey towards the creation of a new British right' (Image: free)

We’re likely to see not just a government fall, but a party disintegrate. But this won’t be the destruction of the British right. We’re now on a journey towards the creation of a new British right. And that new British right will make the Tories seem stable.

So the Tories’ parting gift will be Reform, a party now quite evidently infested by extremists.

After the parting gift, comes the legacy: Britain as an international laughing stock, a pity-case, shunned by Europe, and a joke in America.

Public services have been so obliterated that even if Keir Starmer had the reforming zeal of Clement Attlee he’d unlikely make a dent in the ills besetting us.

The Tories have most certainly consigned themselves to history. A fate richly deserved. But their greatest sin is that they’ve taken this country down with them: the NHS is Britain’s symbolic death.

On the Conservative headstone it should read ‘The Party Which Destroyed Britain’. For that is what’s happened. In 14 years, anything good or decent about Britain has been crushed. The vandalism has been so complete it seems impossible that what’s lost can be resurrected. And if it can be resurrected, Starmer isn’t the man for the job.

And that, in the end, is how history will remember the last 14 years: the period in which the party which claimed to love Britain, killed Britain.