Conservative Party (UK)

"The Tories are absolutely mendacious in their empty and meaningless promises to "do everything necessary". [...] The Boris Johnson governments initial response to COVID-19 was the now discredited policy of "herd immunity" — the strategy of letting the virus rip through the population, infecting up to 40 million people, most of whom would recover and then supposedly be immune to the virus. The only problem was that this would have resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths — a prospect the Tories had to abandon in the face of expert denunciation and widespread public outrage. [...] The experts in a health emergency are, of course, the health workers. But they are silenced by the Tories and the NHS bosses — threatened with dismissal if caught telling the truth to the public they serve — as if we were living in Stalinist China."

"The Tories are terrified by any kind of from below — because it would marginalise elites and empower ordinary people."

"The reason Thatcher was attractive was that she in many ways was a classical liberal who had allied herself with the Tory establishment. But when I saw authentic Toryism up close, when I taught at Peterhouse, I had very little affinity with it. I mean, if it means anything it means a reverence for the organic institutions of the English constitution, and I’ve never had any very strong commitment to those. In fact, they are patently obsolescent."