Many were happy to see the Tories voted out last year, and indeed hope to see them never voted back in. As such, polls showing the Tories fading into obscurity are somewhat heart-warming:
‼️ POLL | Labour lead by 1% (-1)
🔴 LAB 28% (-)
🟣 REF 27% (+1)
🔵 CON 20% (-1)
🟠 LD 12% (-)
🟢 GRN 8% (-)Via @OpiniumResearch, 5-7 Mar (+/- vs 19-21 Feb) pic.twitter.com/RW9vUEONrZ
— Stats for Lefties 🍉🏳️⚧️ (@LeftieStats) March 8, 2025
Chris Philp: Torying through a BBC interview
Of course, we can’t escape the fact that the Tories are only failing because we now have the Reform Party – a group which could be described as ‘The Tory Party Two’. The existence of Reform is the opposite of heart warming, and it’s happening because Labour is running a right-wing-light government that is failing to get results while legitimising the ideology of Nigel Farage.
All that aside, it would be inhuman of us to not enjoy the demise of the Tory Party; especially when these losers are offering loser excuses like this one live on the BBC:
#bbclaurak: If Reform are a protest party with no ideas… so why are they beating you in the polls on a very regular basis?
Chris Philp: "It's easy to come up with simplistic slogans." 😂
Just like the Tories over 14 years. pic.twitter.com/H8XuGeCXqP
— Haggis_UK 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 (@Haggis_UK) March 9, 2025
Twitter user Haggis UK really hit the nail on the head here, because the Tories have more simplistic slogans than a kids’ TV advertising block:
Let's get Brexit done and take back control of our fishing waters. pic.twitter.com/9uQq7J8Akt
— Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) December 9, 2019
1997 – The Tories Lose
The Tories most famous slogan from 1997 was of course:
New Labour, New Danger
The poster that went along with it was also iconic:
They had a point about New Labour and Tony Blair, but they weren’t complaining that Labour had mutated into a neoliberal shambles that existed solely to sell off public services and invade the Middle East; they were complaining because they wanted to be the ones doing that stuff.
What you probably don’t know is that the Tories had a second slogan, which was:
You Can Only Be Sure With The Conservatives
They couldn’t even be sure enough to have one slogan, so of course no one trusted them to manage the country.
2001 – The Tories Fail to Win
In their first year in opposition since 1979, the Tories went with:
Time for common sense
It really wasn’t the time for this, with 9/11 happening later that year and with it the start of our military misadventures in the Middle East.
Would things have been more common sensier under the Tories?
Given that they also supported the invasion of Iraq – and that they were the Tory Party – almost certainly not.
2005 – 2010 – The Tories Return
The Tory Party slogan in the 2005 election was:
Vote for Change
The Tory Party slogan in the 2010 election was:
Vote for change
You’re probably asking ‘how were they going to offer genuine change when they didn’t even change their slogan’?
To that we say you fool – you complete nincompoop – you clown – did you not notice that they capitalised ‘Change’ in 2005 but not in 2010? The slogans were completely different! And in the end, it was by not capitalising ‘change’ that they clawed back power.
Well, that and Labour failing to punish the wealthy elites who caused and profited from the 2008 Financial Crash.
We should also highlight that the Tories had a back-up slogan in 2005, which was:
Are you thinking what we’re thinking?
We can assure you that if we were ever thinking what the Tory Party was thinking that we would immediately report ourselves to the International Criminal Court.
2015 – The Chaos Era Begins
Things really start to pick up steam as we enter the four-year period in which we had three general elections and the Brexit referendum. Things also go completely off the boil, with the worst slogans we’ve seen yet. Forgive us for mixing our metaphors, but believe us, after you see some of these slogans you’ll quickly forget the literary blunders of The Canary.
First up, the 2015 election:
Strong Leadership, A Clear Economic Plan And A Brighter, More Secure Future
Okay, so now we get why Chris Philp is criticising Reform for having ‘simplistic’ slogans, because this is anything but simplistic. It arguably isn’t even a slogan; it’s more of shopping list.
Structure aside, this slogan is hilarious in that the leader who uttered it – David Cameron – was out on his arse a year later. Really, he probably should have gone with:
Temporary Leadership, A Failed Economic Plan And a Shitter, Less Secure Future
Or – better yet – with this absolute banger tweet that he also published in the run up to the election:
Britain faces a simple and inescapable choice – stability and strong Government with me, or chaos with Ed Miliband: https://t.co/fmhcfTunbm
— David Cameron (@David_Cameron) May 4, 2015
Did we mention that this was the first of three elections in a four-year period?
Bonus Round – the Brexit Referendum
In the EU Referendum we got one slogan from soon-to-be-disgraced PM David Cameron and one from later-to-be-disgraced PM Boris Johnson.
Cameron and his fellow Europhiles went with:
Stronger, Safer and Better Off
Probably not wrong, to be fair, although only because subsequent governments remained committed to the neoliberal politics that the EU promotes.
Meanwhile, Johnson and the Euro-sceptics he sided with on a whim went with:
Let’s Take Back Control
Also not wrong, as the people pushing this message would very much take control in the next few years. The problem was that they ‘took control’ from ordinary Brits who had some sort of say over their lives and sold it to their rich mates.
2017 – The Chaos Era Continues
This was another year with dueling Tory slogans. The first was:
Forward, together
The second was:
Strong and Stable
Yes, because nothing screams ‘strength and stability’ like having a general election every two years.
To be fair, what Theresa May gave us were at least slogans, and not the protracted sentence inflicted on us by David Cameron. To be less fair to her, she was also a terrible PM, and her own party forced her out not long after she downsized her majority government into a minority one.
2019 – The Chaos Era Becomes the New Norm
2019 saw the Tories deadliest slogan yet:
Get Brexit Done
The reason it was so deadly was because then-shadow Brexit minister Keir Starmer and a crew of centrist politicians pushed Labour into a disastrous ‘second referendum’ position which lost them the election.
Interestingly, these same centrists haven’t pushed for a second referendum since – almost as if they purposefully pursued a losing position to ‘Take Back Control’ of the party.
2020 – Coronavirus Special Mention
What this article is missing are all the mini-slogans the Tories invent on a week-to-week basis, with one of the most famous being:
Eat Out to Help Out
How did that work out?
So it turns out that Spready Boswell and Spread West aka Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak both lied under oath to the Public Covid Inquiry over their self concocted Eat Out To Help Out super spreader event that led to a huge spike in cases and deaths
Grimpic.twitter.com/F1wtmy7cL5
— Stuzi 🐝🐝 (@stuzi_pants) May 23, 2024
And it wouldn’t be the only Tory slogan to coincide with disastrous Tory policy:
Hearing Chris Philp on #BBCLauraK accusing Reform (who I despise) of having nothing but slogans made me chuckle. Stop the Boats, Brexit Means Brexit, Eat Out to Help Out etc
— stroppy old woman (@StroppyW) March 9, 2025
2024 – The Tories Lose (Again)
The final slogan we’re going to highlight was from last year’s election:
Clear Plan. Bold Action. Secure Future
Was their plan clear?
Unless the plan was to lose the election, it can’t have been, because we don’t remember what it was.
Likely they just offered more of the same, and that didn’t work, because inflation meant enough people in the country wanted more of something different.
Hmm, thinking about it, whenever the Tories or Labour lost power in the last 30 years, it was because they failed to manage a recent financial crisis, making their ‘status-quo’ politics toxic to a status-quo-adverse general public.
Depressing.
But if nothing else, the rise of Reform has shown that the age of Britons being forced to choose between Tory mismanagement or Labour mismanagement is over.
Let’s just hope we also see the rise of a party that has plans beyond slogans, privatisation, and war.
Featured image via BBC
