It took years for the stain of the ‘Winter of Discontent’ in the Britain of the 1970’s to be removed from the Labour Party. The memory of piles of rubbish left uncollected due to industrial disputes the fear that the dead might not get timely burial due to strikes and the for then very recent experience of having to live by candlelight due to coal miners industrial action had seared themselves into the memory of the general public.

Patrick O’Flynn of the Social Democratic Party has, in an article in the Spectator magazine, looked at the Tories immigration disaster and said that it will be the Tories equivalent of Labour’s disastrous ‘Winter of Discontent’. He said that ‘Tory Flood’ in reference to how the Conservatives opened the borders wide open during their time in office will become as attached to the Tories as ‘Winter of Discontent’ got connected to the Labour Party.

In his article, which is well worth reading in its entirety, Mr O’Flynn said:

After the winter of discontent, the rubbish got collected and the dead got buried. Thatcherite reforms slashed days lost to strikes. After Black Wednesday, interest rates and exchange rates returned to sensible levels and an economic recovery ensued.

It is far harder to conceive of British society recovering from the Tory Flood – we will live with the consequences for the rest of all our lives. Perhaps we should set the term of exile on the naughty step commensurately.

He’s correct in his assessment of the Tories. The betrayal of the public by the Tories has been absolutely huge. They promised the voters faithfully that they would get to grips which even ten or fifteen years ago was being recognised by voters as a serious problem. Sadly not only did the Tories do little about the rise in migration or the amount of migration from incompatible societies and cultures, they made an already challenging situation much worse.

I believe that it is possibly still practicable for the Tories to rebuild and come back to government and put right the issues that they’ve got wrong, but the question is after so many betrayals on the issue of immigration how many people will blindly trust them on this issue? It is going to take the party to do something very special for the Tories to be trusted again on migration and it’s going to take more than the usual nice sounding words on border control to regain that trust.