Sir John Redwood is MP for Wokingham, and is a former Secretary of State for Wales.
Millions of former Conservative voters are sitting at home refusing to vote Conservative again. Some say they will vote Reform. A small minority will back Labour. Most do not want a Labour government, and have not warmed to Sir Keir Starmer.
They all feel let down by the last five years. They are angry over the huge surge in migration despite promises to reduce it. They resent the rise in their tax bills. They are critical of the state of public services, and rightly appalled by the Post Office scandal, the NHS blood scandal, and sewage in rivers.
Those frustrations are understandable. But I just ask such voters to think about what a Labour government would be like.
It has already told us it will create more safe routes for more migrants to come. It will offer an amnesty to illegals already here. When last in government it opened up our borders and invited in hundreds of thousands more.
Labour has proposed tax rises. More windfall tax on energy, VAT on school fees, more taxes for rich foreigners. Looking at their spending plans they will need much more than that. Expect extra CGT, Inheritance Tax, green taxes, motoring taxes and the rest.
Labour does believe in taxing anyone with a decent job, pension, nice home or car more. They will not be trying to lower the tax burden as they find even more ways to spend and waste your money (and are too hungry for office to threaten a direct assault by hiking income tax rates).
The Opposition’s plans for public services are bland and timid. There is absolutely no wish to reveal and tackle, or even talk, about the collapse in productivity which lies at the heart of the quality and cost issues with the sector. They will offer more pay to many groups of public sector workers without new service quality and productivity clauses in contracts, and change labour laws to make good managerial leadership more difficult.
Wes Streeting is, it is true, sometimes critical of the NHS. But his plan is to make a small addition to the number of appointments on offer – as successive Conservative health secretaries have regularly done with extra cash.
Tackling waiting lists has to include making them accurate. Current ministers are at last challenging officials to get rid of double counting: people who no longer need an appointment, people who have died, and other false entries. They also need to report in a different category people receiving regular treatments at specified future dates as they need to wait.
In short, there are not 7.5 million people in need of treatment waiting for it, or anything like that number. If you want to manage a problem, first understand and measure it accurately.
Likewise, the Blood and Post Office scandals occurred under Labour, Coalition, and Conservative governments – but only Tory ministers moved to recognise the disasters and start to sort them out.
Labour’s big idea is to double down on forcing net zero costs and measures on; they have a fanciful policy to end fossil fuel electricity by 2030 which no expert thinks can be done or is achievable, and have also taken much of the extra public spending out of their budget plans that their Net Zero ambitions require.
So here’s a bind for former Conservative voters: stay at home (or vote Reform in big numbers) and you get a Labour government which will as a matter of instinct and belief make worse the very things that have most annoyed you about the last five years.
You want lower taxes, they love more taxes. You want many fewer migrants, they will offer more. You want public services that serve you better and cost you less, they want public services that reward their trade union paymasters and feather bed well paid unaccountable public sector managers.
The sad truth for many Conservatives is we have not got some of the things we wanted and expected from five years of Conservative government, but staying at home or voting for a party like Reform that is unlikely to win a single seat does deliver us a worse government.
To the 10 to 15 per cent who say they will vote Reform because it is what they believe in, I ask: have you studied the detail? Their main message is the negative one that they wish to destroy the Conservative Party.
But looking at the polling, it is Labour they need to destroy to win the election. They want proportional representation which, on the continent of Europe, has led to an undemocratic lurch to government by an elite official class, with coalition governments that tear up promises to electors to form a government.
Conservative government has raised school standards, halved unemployment levels, and avoided deep recessions and financial crises that brought down Labour in the 1970s and 2000s.
This time, why not tell the Conservative canvasser how things have to be better? Leave your Tory candidate in no doubt about what you want. But do not inflict a Labour government on Britain. With them in office, things would get worse.