Torygeddon – In the End, It Ended
Torygeddon – In the End, It Ended
After Labour's landslide ends a wretched era, Russell Jones shares a spark hope with a shattered population, desperate to rebuild.
In 2011 I lived in a tiny apartment in central Manchester, from where I watched as the riots reached the streets of my beloved hometown.
There was nothing I could do to stop the destruction, but the following morning I woke early, headed down to Piccadilly Gardens, and joined hundreds of volunteers as we cleaned up the mess. We had to. This was our home. We loved it.
That sense of pride in our communities belongs to neither left nor right. It need not be nationalistic or isolationist, it is not defined by class or wealth, and it doesn’t belong solely to those with an abundance of flags and deep roots in our country's soil.
And this is why the Conservatives lost the election. Yes, there’s the corruption, the ineptitude, the colossal self-absorption, hubris, and casual malice. But the key to their loss is that Tories have spent years on the wrong side of the national mood. Everywhere you look, you see a shattered population desperate to rebuild. By contrast, all Sunak and his smooth-brained gang of vandals could offer was yet more pastiche Thatcherism, shorn of any intellectual depth, shrieking blame at everybody not in power, and revelling in the fetishised cruelty at the heart of their brand of Conservatism.
You’d think such a vast rejection of this ethos would feel like a moment for joy. Worryingly, it doesn’t. Starmer’s soaringly drab pitch to the country was that things cannot get better, so put out the bunting because they’re going to get worse at a slightly slower rate. I’ve clung to the hope that Labour was managing expectations, only to wildly exceed them later. I worry I have been fooling myself.
Because despite Labour’s win, I still sense around me a mood of sour exhaustion and bilious rage. We’d have rioted again if we weren’t so damned knackered; if we could afford petrol for the Molotov cocktails; and if there was anything left for us to smash up in this dilapidated land.
That pent-up tumultuous anger powers Farage’s latest vehicle. Reform voters seethe over collapsing living standards while the wealth of billionaires has tripled. Their natural sense of community has been shattered not by immigration, but by austerity draining the life out of vital local services. Their hometowns have fallen into neglectful ruin without any help from rioters.
As a result, an entirely benign civic pride has become displaced into raging nationalism, and they’ve cast their lot with a bleached Grinch, who somehow attracted their votes despite honking a denunciation of everything his voters want back: fairer distribution of the nation’s wealth; a truly nationalised NHS; a state that delivers for the people; and greater equality of opportunity.
I can’t claim to speak for Reform voters – although seemingly the same applies to Reform candidates, who have spent their elections either denying they said the racist thing they were definitely filmed saying, or resigning from the party because they’ve only just discovered the “vast majority” of its candidates are “racist, misogynistic, and bigoted”.
Imagine their amazement at this shocking final-episode twist about the underlying nature of Reform. It certainly came as a shock to Rishi Sunak, who said he was hurt and angered by such racism. The good news is that recent history has proven his hurt and anger can be assuaged by a donation of £10 million. The bad news is that the Conservatives don’t have £10 million – during the final week of campaigning they had to stop spending money they didn’t have, a lesson they’ve learned only 14 years too late to have an effect on the national debt.
Anyway, as I was saying: I might not speak for Reform voters, but somebody needs to, and it can’t be Farage. Both Labour and the rump of the Conservatives must recognise the threat from the far right, and draw the poison from Reform’s ugly, nationalistic hypercapitalism.
The incoming Labour government must make the most of their honeymoon. The Tory press will snipe, of course, but nobody needs to listen to them for the next five years. The Conservatives will be too focused on blinkered infighting to do anything consequential, although that’s nothing new. And the global markets will mainly be relieved that Britain is governed by a knight, instead of knaves and jokers, and I expect the FTSE to be delighted at the novelty of fiscal and political stability.
Starmer would be wise – in fact, he would be deeply patriotic – to use this window to implement policies that redistribute power, wealth, and opportunity. He must not fail to resolve the underlying pressures that Europe’s far-right expertly exploit.
The signs are here in Britain too. Electoral volatility brought Labour their worst defeat for almost a century, and just five years later, its greatest ever triumph. Britain is casting around desperately for somebody to give them a better life. If Labour fails, there’s a risk yet more voters will give up on the democratic centre entirely. And you need only look at Trump to see that once it gains power, the nativist right does not willingly surrender it.
It’s far easier to smash things up than to mend them, and the work will take time, but there is hope. It can be done. But it must be done in a way that palpably improves the lives of those who are so cynically exploited by Farage. Their lives must change, and quickly, before they lose all faith in the mainstream. Voters want to fix the country: they just don’t want the country to remain the obvious fix that has been for far too long.
The people wielding brooms on that post-riot morning in 2011 were a rainbow of humanity, gathered in the People's Republic of Manchester to enact the city's famous – perhaps mythical, but nonetheless essential – kindness and inclusivity, and united by one thing: a determination to restore things. The riots were over. The rampage done. In the end, community won.
Thirteen years after those riots, I spent my fourth of July dancing away a wretched era. But I awoke on the morning after, apprehensive, certainly, but with a spark in my heart and a hope that things can be made whole again. I come back to this thought often when I think about the small-minded negligence and vandalism of the Torygeddon years – in the end, it ended. All things do, save this alone: the spirit to renew.
Russell Jones is the author of two books, The Decade in Tory, and most recently, Four Chancellors and a Funeral. His forthcoming book Tories: The End of an Error, the final volume in the ‘Torygeddon’ Trilogy, is currently crowdfunding on Unbound. His legendary #The Week in Tory threads can be found @RussInCheshire on X/Twitter
You can read his epic take on the past 14 years of Tory rule in the new print edition of Byline Times, available in all good shops now.
A bit of a mixed up rant. What the people need is education and a media willing and capable of doing it, penalised or closed down if they lie. For example, my excellent next door neineighbour wants to retire in Spain but can't as you now need £36,000 a year for a visa thanks to Brexit. He vote for Farage saying he (F) was not pro Brexit and the only one who talked sense. He honestly believes, along with other pensioners in lala land, that he knows as much as someone with a degree in economics and government. We need better broadcasting and more open minds and borders for us and foreigners. Scotland needs half a million more people. If people think its crowded where they are then MOVE. You can't go abroad. Brexit ruined that, it was about removing freedoms so you could be exploited even more without the protections of the incredibly democratic EU with its sense of fair play.