The Britain that John Major once ruled is dead
With a Labour landslide victory in July’s general election, John Major’s recent attacks on Conservative Eurosceptics, and Oasis set to return to the stage in 2025, you could be forgiven for thinking that Britain had been transported back to the 1990s.
And just as ageing rockstars are condemned to tour well past their prime, former Prime Ministers seem condemned to watch their parties outgrow them. In 1985, two decades after the end of his premiership, Harold Macmillan famously compared Margaret Thatcher’s privatisation policies to selling off the family silver. A late Victorian through and through, the doddering Macmillan was ill-suited to the political landscape of the late 20th century, a man out of time commenting on a context that he scarcely understood.
The latest unhappy addition to that tradition is John Major, who has recently taken to criticising the Conservative Party for its apparent right-turn on migration. In the latest of his not-so- rare interventions, the former Prime Minister admonished the Sunak Government’s efforts to curb illegal migration as “un-Conservative and un-British”.
It is noteworthy that Major did not advance a single substantive criticism of the Rwanda scheme – and there are plenty of criticisms that one might choose to make. In the two years from inception to cancellation, the scheme failed to remove even a single migrant, costing millions of pounds in the process.
Major’s objection was instead rooted in pure sentiment, a feeling of fundamental wrongness. For Major, this sort of policy doesn’t feel like the sort of thing that he would have done as Prime Minister – perhaps that’s because the country has changed beyond recognition over the last twenty-five years.
Now well into his twilight years, Major is simply out of touch with the political realities of the 21st century. When he was unceremoniously kicked out of Downing Street in 1997, net migration had crept upwards to 48,000. Last year, that figure stood at 685,000. On illegal migration in particular, the UK has seen a sharp uptick in recent years, as millions of people from fast-growing countries in Africa and Asia pour into Europe.
The Britain that Major once envisioned – of invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist – has been torn apart by the rapid social, political, and economic changes of the past thirty years.
The gentle shire Conservatism that Major and his ilk espouse bears much of the blame for this. Time and time again, so-called moderates in the Conservative Party have resisted sensible controls on legal and illegal migration because of misplaced sentimentality. Every effort to cut migration and harden our asylum policies has been resisted by One Nation Conservatives, who blindly insist that controlling our borders will somehow damage Britain’s international standing.
And yet Major seems oblivious to the damage that his intellectual tradition has wrought, insulated from the realities of modern Britain by wealth, status, and age. Splitting their time between Westminster, Pall Mall social clubs, and pleasant country piles, retired politicians like Major have constructed a comforting mirage of Britain as it once was. Their careers are no longer on the line, and they no longer need to think too deeply about how the country might look in twenty or thirty years, By then, they will be long gone, and their children will undoubtedly have the financial means to flee the sinking ship.
Those of us who need to build our lives in Britain over the next few decades don’t have the option of retreating into this comforting illusion. For us, this isn’t an issue of high-minded principle, but of day-to-day reality. If John Major has nothing constructive to say about how we can deal with the challenges of the 21st century, perhaps he should keep his thoughts to himself – some 90s throwbacks are best left in the history books.
