‘Labour will make us colder, poorer and less free’

The Tories went from an historic victory in 2019, promising to get Brexit done, level-up left-behind Britain and push back against the rising tide of woke. Instead, they squandered the opportunity to reshape British politics and reverted to backstabbing, technocratic type. A succession of unelected leaders ignored the opportunities provided by Brexit, lost control of immigration and allowed identity politics to further entrench itself in our most important institutions. Is it any wonder that, in 2024, the Conservatives endured their worst election defeat in the era of universal suffrage?

Jacob Rees-Mogg was a Conservative MP for the 14 years his party was in government. He also served as business secretary and leader of the House of Commons. Rees-Mogg sat down with spiked’s Fraser Myers for a short video interview to discuss what went wrong for the Tories and what lies in store for us under Labour. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. You can watch the full thing here.

Fraser Myers: Were the voters right to kick you all out?

Jacob Rees-Mogg: On balance, I think they were. We let them down. Our biggest mistake was getting rid of Boris Johnson. This isn’t about whether Boris was a good prime minister or bad prime minister, a good human being or a bad human being. Personally, I like him and always got on with him. But what mattered was he had the mandate – the people voted for him. I thought there was an arrogance in saying: ‘Well, you little voters, you may have voted for Boris Johnson, but we don’t care.’ That was a fundamental error because it was disrespectful towards the electors. The electors, ultimately, are your employers.

The problem goes right back to the Brexit referendum in 2016. It was opposed by the leadership of all the major political parties. The Conservative government was formally against Brexit, and then had to implement it with Theresa May, a leader who had campaigned against Brexit. A majority of Conservative MPs had come out saying they wanted to remain in the European Union. But then Boris got a grip on that. He was somebody in favour of Brexit. That particular dial was beginning to turn until, of course, Covid-19 hit.

Myers: Having been minister for Brexit opportunities, do you think your government did enough to make the most of Brexit and defend it against its critics?

Rees-Mogg: The Sunak government wasn’t really interested in doing anything about Brexit. It didn’t want the benefits and it was responsible for the terrible Windsor Agreement, which has made Northern Ireland subservient to Brussels.

There was another problem, which was the inherently bureaucratic nature of the British state. We kept having arguments over imposing controls on goods coming into the UK from the EU, which were perfectly safe. The reason they wanted to impose controls was because that’s what bureaucrats do. For example, they were paranoid about Romanian pork. In which case, you should just ban Romanian pork, but don’t also ban French pork, which is perfectly safe. They are implementing these really stupid controls that put up the costs for consumers in an act of sabotage and self-harm.

People thought, ‘Well, the EU does it for us, so we should do it back’ – which is a mind-numbingly stupid approach to trade. You want trade to be as free as possible, and one-way free trade is economically beneficial for your consumers. The other part of it was that, if you ask the experts, they’re always going to advocate for the option that protects their careers. And the most career-protecting view is almost always to say ‘no’.

Myers: The Tories have widely been seen to fail voters on mass immigration. At the same time, there are some voices on the right who seem to want to take a more hardline, anti-migrant position that is far beyond what ordinary people are concerned about. You were asked recently if Enoch Powell was right in his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, and I think you handled it very well. Is there a risk of the right buying into the left’s bigoted caricature of the public – that voters aren’t just concerned about mass immigration, but they are actually anti-migrant and racist?

Rees-Mogg: Enoch Powell’s speech made it impossible to have an intelligent conversation about migration for decades afterwards. The consequence was that it was harder to control migration than before he made that speech. But I think there is a sensible conversation to be had, and that it is urgent. We need to get migration down into the tens of thousands that David Cameron promised when he was prime minister.

You also have to look at who is arguing for immigration. Illegal immigration gets all the attention, but numerically it’s a fraction of the problem. Right now, we have a lot of special pleading from businesses who want to pay low wages.

We should be telling them that the UK economy’s root prosperity is as a technologically advanced, innovative, automated economy. If your business is dependent on cheap labour, you should offshore it. I made this point about fruit picking. If it is not economic to pick fruit in the UK, those fields should be turned over to corn and the fruit pickers should stay in their home countries to work there.

Myers: The new Labour government has two main economic priorities – growth and turning Britain into a ‘clean-energy superpower’. Can Net Zero and growth ever really coexist?

Rees-Mogg: Not at all. Cheap energy has been the driving force of economic growth as far back as you can go in history. Why was the UK the engine of the Industrial Revolution? Because we had run out of wood. We needed other energy sources. Hence the need to use coal, hence the Industrial Revolution.

We now have a government that actively wants to lower people’s standard of living. It wants to make them colder and poorer, because it’s fussing about carbon-dioxide emissions. It’s completely wrong-headed and damaging.

Jacob Rees-Mogg was talking to Fraser Myers. Watch to the full conversation here: