This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Heirs to Blair

Your leading article (BLOODY OPPOSITION, JULY) finds fault with the policies of all Conservative governments since the “worst prime minister, John Major” who you credit with creating “modern Britain”.

Mainly, though, it is during the New Labour years that followed Major that you locate the roots of our current discontents. That is not only because of what Blairism achieved in office but also through its adoption by David Cameron’s modernisers. 

They accepted as holy writ the key mechanisms that ingrained the progressivism of identity politics in law and public sector provision. The Conservative modernisers also stitched up the candidate selection of like-minded MPs, few of whom proved either administratively capable or philosophically stout enough to challenge the liberal consensus they inherited and embraced.

Isn’t the blame a bit more widely spread? 

Yet, it does seem remarkable that it is only in the last couple of years, as it dawned on the Conservatives that their approaching election drubbing was unavoidable, that the endurance of Blair-era legislation has become a real talking point amongst Tories in the press and social media in trying to explain what on earth the party has to show for 14 years in power.

So, yes, the Tory modernisers — or “moderates” as we are schooled to describe them — continued the mechanisms ensuring identitarian and liberal dominance of public life and policy. But isn’t the blame a bit more widely spread? 

Hasn’t the Tory right been slow on the uptake too? Why has it only recently noticed these laws and the distorting practices they have wrought? 

Although it is unfair to single her out alone, Priti Patel might as home secretary have inspected the workings of the public sector equality duty or questioned whether post-Brexit migration laxity might set records for immigration — many of whom are the dependents of the low-skilled migrants. 

Was it just the Tory left who made it so difficult for housebuilding to keep pace with Britain’s population surge? Who, from any quarter, had anything useful to say about the NHS’s travails? 

To paraphrase the Jeremy Corbyn defence, were the Tory Right present but not involved? 

Patrick Jamieson

Lichfield, Staffs

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Rainbow reform

You published the following online (THE TRIUMPH OF ELECTORAL SECTARIANISM, 5 JULY 2024):

Coupled with the rise of Reform, widely viewed as a means of expressing frustration with our historically high rates of migration, we might expect to see this provoke an identitarian backlash from the white British population. Like it or not, when one group begins to advocate for its narrow self-interest at the expense of others, other groups soon follow suit.

I was disappointed your contributor repeated the lazy assumption of its opponents that Reform is exclusively white or otherwise ethnically selective. That is not the case, as a slightly curious journalist might have learned.

Andrew Smith

Epping, Essex

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Irregular derivations 

“In everyday life it’s the most common verbs,” writes Helen Joyce, “that conjugate irregularly. To be, to have, to hold: these verbs break the rules because they predate them.” (WEAPONISING WEASEL WORDS, JULY)

This isn’t quite correct. The most common verbs tend to be irregular because they mash up previous common and competing terms to describe the same everyday states of being, action or location. 

The verb “to be” combines two Old English verbs to describe states of existence or place: “beon” and “wesen”. From the former we get “be” and “being” and from the latter — in conjugated form — “is”, “are” and “were”. Something similar happened with “to go”. We no longer say “I goed” because for past actions in came another verb referring to movement, “wend”, to give us “went”.

This pattern of common verbs being irregular owing to amalgamation is replicated in other European languages. The Italian for “to go”, “andare”, comes from Early Medieval Latin, whilst “I go”, “vado”, is from Classical Latin.

Patrick West

Deal, Kent