Christopher Howarth is a former special adviser in the Home Office, parliamentary researcher for the European Research Group, and Conservative candidate at the 2019 general election, and author of a forthcoming political thriller ‘The Durian Pact’.
Some politicians say they don’t read the polls, others tell the truth. We don’t know the result of the election but bar a major upset it’s not looking good for those of you, like me, who have spent years working to get the Conservative Party elected and then do conservative things.
Whatever the result, the Conservatives must regroup, rebuild, and rethink. This requires something that the Party has never been very good at: honestly admitting where it went wrong. After failing to win the election in 2010 there was no postmortem since the personnel at the top of the party were in government. Likewise, we did not adequately analyse the 2015 and 2017 results – or even 2019, to see what had gone right. That needs to happen now.
So, what has succeeded over the last 14 years? It has not all been gloomy. Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms have done what they were supposed to do – make work pay. Michael Gove’s education reforms have improved standards and the life chances for millions. We have also left the European Union, despite rather than because of the Conservatives, something I will come back to.
However, after 14 years of various forms of Conservative government, beyond that, the record is threadbare. A party that promised time after time to reduce immigration has left office having propelled it, by choice, to the highest levels in history.
The tax burden, again the highest in history, and although external factors were largely to blame that is not the whole story. There was always a strange Tory reticence in cutting tax. Osborne failed to cut the top rate back to a more dynamic 40 per cent Labour had lived with and when Liz Truss planned to go back to Gordon Brown’s 40 per cent MPs rebelled.
We went into the 2010 general election promising cuts to inheritance tax, and periodically reprised the same idea, but curiously never delivered. Nor was waste in government spending tackled or redundant programmes curtailed in any sustained manner. The promised ‘austerity’ was nothing of the sort, just bad marketing covering up the fact the state remained unreformed.
We were not even good socialists. When interest rates were low there was a perfect opportunity to renew the UK’s infrastructure – but at the best possible time, we cut capital expenditure except for the vanity project that is HS2.
When it comes to the constitution and the nature of society, we as a party again chalked up several failures. Not only did we accept the disastrous Labour devolution settlement, but we accelerated it, adding to the centrifugal forces pulling the United Kingdom apart. Even before the spectacle of a Conservative and Unionist government building a border in the Irish Sea, Conservative Prime Ministers had accepted the separatist logic conceding powers to the SNP and Welsh Labour and then to other local potentates.
On cultural issues, what is nominally a conservative party has accepted the vocabulary and reasoning of the ‘progressives’. Yes, some Tory MPs occasionally have a pop at the excesses of ‘woke’ but by and large ‘woke’ has passed through the Conservatives as it has most other British institutions.
So, were the last 14 years a waste? To some extent. While there were some successes in total they did little more than slow down the damage done by Labour – the destination remaining ultimately much the same. Same destination, different speed.
That is now gone. The question is how to recover. It is vital that the UK and our democracy that we have a viable centre-right alternative.
Firstly, the next centre-right government will have to be the Conservatives. Reform UK can never win, but can prevent the Conservative Party from winning. They need to be brought back on board. We all know people voting for Reform, or standing for Reform. They are by and large doing so as a result of Conservative failure. Mend the ship and they will come back. We need a united right of the type that swept the board in 2019.
Next, we need new ideas and leadership. Ideas that address the real reasons people have left the party. Leadership that is not encumbered by defending the failures of the last few years. For those who sat in the Cabinet to the last, either mute or incapable of seeing the iceberg approaching, there should be no place in rebuilding our party.
So, what new ideas are needed? In the round, it is not that hard to divine why people stopped voting for us. We stopped listening to them. We ended up creating a country that seemed to be run for the benefit of all manner of ethereal causes rather than one for the benefit of the British people.
We wanted to grow the economy, rather than see individuals were better off. We talked about small adjustments to the National Insurance system when people could not afford their mortgages. We genuflected to numerous organisations rather than governing ourselves. We allowed the Bank of England to escape responsibility for its failures on inflation, and we treated OBR forecasts as if they were scripture, even though we know they are often wrong.
We accepted the faulty idea that mass immigration was necessary to increase prosperity. We took the easy decision to write new visas to cover domestic failures rather than invest in UK workers and training.
But above all, we failed in our contract with our core voters – hard-working families trying to improve their lives. By stoking house prices, via immigration and low interest rates, to the temporary advantage of existing homeowners, we priced out the next generation. The unwritten contract that if you work hard you will get on in life broke down. When even those with the best jobs can not afford houses for decades it is clear something is wrong.
Onto this broken contract, we then opened up our labour market to the world, to workers unencumbered by student debts. It was somehow seen as sensible to use immigration to fund our universities and our NHS, allowing in ever-increasing numbers of international students while talking about reducing domestic university provision and reserving low-skilled jobs for UK workers. No wonder the voters questioned if we had their best interests at heart. Often we didn’t.
We then spent many years lumbering our voters with costs. Foreign aid, the hidden costs of Net Zero, numerous petty taxes and bans. We often seemed to be more concerned about wearing the correct wristband and foreign living standards than our own neglected provincial towns.
On culture, for an electorate by and large patriotic and small ‘c’ conservative, we allowed – sometimes championed – a massive cultural change that voters were at best uneasy with. It is a long time since we have heard politicians unapologetically champion British history and the British state against the relentless onslaught of left-wing academics promoting ‘decolonisation’ and various groups using similar ideas to attempt to break up our country.
The UK is not a global city. It is the home of an old culture that has made a massive and unique contribution to world history. The UK is not a global resource that people pass through. We must rebuild our shared sense of belonging to our history and shared future.
So, what should the Conservative Party do now? Two immediate actions.
Firstly, be honest. Accept and understand the failures. We need a new leader who understands this and is brave and capable enough to produce a new vision.
Secondly, we need to reform the party. The personnel that sat through this defeat or contributed to it in terms of failed ideas or no ideas at all need to be removed from the bridge. We need real Conservatives to rejoin the party and share in our revival.
When that is done we can then rebuild. And when we do that we will find that it is not all doom and gloom. In Europe, North America, and New Zealand there are centre-right parties not only regaining support but support of the young and the next generation. They are flourishing and we should heed their examples. Voters are keen for a party that returns to the basics. Values our culture, and prioritises its people.
On housing, the Conservatives have suffered from a double wammy of opposition to immigration and the consequent development pressure it brings on rural areas. We need to make housing affordable by building houses, and aesthetically pleasing communities, where it’s needed.
Reducing immigration is key to that. A party that promotes the training and retention of UK workers over the easy (temporary) fix of immigration. A party that is on the side of those who want to get on, work, and save. A party that promotes the UK and its culture over the disparate hostile cultural forces of separatism, nationalism, and left-wing ‘decolonisation’. A party that wants to govern not administer by leave of various quangos. A party that cuts the Gordian knot of law designed to tie the hands of Ministers – the Human Rights Act, Equalities Act, Net Zero, and many others. A party that wished to reform the state to concentrate on what it does well, and accepts that that is not everything.
All these tasks are fortunately made far easier by the British people’s decision to leave the EU. While we must be honest that the Conservatives wasted five years of political activity fighting to reverse Brexit a strong Tory Government can use its fortunate position outside of the EU to cut back stifling EU laws. Out of the EU, we can secure our borders, create a sense of national purpose, and stem population increase to solve the housing crisis. With Brexit, we can play a wider role via AUKUS and our new trade policy.
There is a huge opportunity. Labour is incapable of doing any of these things as they have not come to terms with the new post-Brexit world and will quickly run into all the same problems the Conservatives have. If we have the solutions our time in opposition can be short and well spent. 2019 need not go down in history as a freak result but the beginning of a new Conservative coalition forged in opposition.
Christopher Howarth is a former special adviser in the Home Office, parliamentary researcher for the European Research Group, and Conservative candidate at the 2019 general election, and author of a forthcoming political thriller ‘The Durian Pact’.
Some politicians say they don’t read the polls, others tell the truth. We don’t know the result of the election but bar a major upset it’s not looking good for those of you, like me, who have spent years working to get the Conservative Party elected and then do conservative things.
Whatever the result, the Conservatives must regroup, rebuild, and rethink. This requires something that the Party has never been very good at: honestly admitting where it went wrong. After failing to win the election in 2010 there was no postmortem since the personnel at the top of the party were in government. Likewise, we did not adequately analyse the 2015 and 2017 results – or even 2019, to see what had gone right. That needs to happen now.
So, what has succeeded over the last 14 years? It has not all been gloomy. Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms have done what they were supposed to do – make work pay. Michael Gove’s education reforms have improved standards and the life chances for millions. We have also left the European Union, despite rather than because of the Conservatives, something I will come back to.
However, after 14 years of various forms of Conservative government, beyond that, the record is threadbare. A party that promised time after time to reduce immigration has left office having propelled it, by choice, to the highest levels in history.
The tax burden, again the highest in history, and although external factors were largely to blame that is not the whole story. There was always a strange Tory reticence in cutting tax. Osborne failed to cut the top rate back to a more dynamic 40 per cent Labour had lived with and when Liz Truss planned to go back to Gordon Brown’s 40 per cent MPs rebelled.
We went into the 2010 general election promising cuts to inheritance tax, and periodically reprised the same idea, but curiously never delivered. Nor was waste in government spending tackled or redundant programmes curtailed in any sustained manner. The promised ‘austerity’ was nothing of the sort, just bad marketing covering up the fact the state remained unreformed.
We were not even good socialists. When interest rates were low there was a perfect opportunity to renew the UK’s infrastructure – but at the best possible time, we cut capital expenditure except for the vanity project that is HS2.
When it comes to the constitution and the nature of society, we as a party again chalked up several failures. Not only did we accept the disastrous Labour devolution settlement, but we accelerated it, adding to the centrifugal forces pulling the United Kingdom apart. Even before the spectacle of a Conservative and Unionist government building a border in the Irish Sea, Conservative Prime Ministers had accepted the separatist logic conceding powers to the SNP and Welsh Labour and then to other local potentates.
On cultural issues, what is nominally a conservative party has accepted the vocabulary and reasoning of the ‘progressives’. Yes, some Tory MPs occasionally have a pop at the excesses of ‘woke’ but by and large ‘woke’ has passed through the Conservatives as it has most other British institutions.
So, were the last 14 years a waste? To some extent. While there were some successes in total they did little more than slow down the damage done by Labour – the destination remaining ultimately much the same. Same destination, different speed.
That is now gone. The question is how to recover. It is vital that the UK and our democracy that we have a viable centre-right alternative.
Firstly, the next centre-right government will have to be the Conservatives. Reform UK can never win, but can prevent the Conservative Party from winning. They need to be brought back on board. We all know people voting for Reform, or standing for Reform. They are by and large doing so as a result of Conservative failure. Mend the ship and they will come back. We need a united right of the type that swept the board in 2019.
Next, we need new ideas and leadership. Ideas that address the real reasons people have left the party. Leadership that is not encumbered by defending the failures of the last few years. For those who sat in the Cabinet to the last, either mute or incapable of seeing the iceberg approaching, there should be no place in rebuilding our party.
So, what new ideas are needed? In the round, it is not that hard to divine why people stopped voting for us. We stopped listening to them. We ended up creating a country that seemed to be run for the benefit of all manner of ethereal causes rather than one for the benefit of the British people.
We wanted to grow the economy, rather than see individuals were better off. We talked about small adjustments to the National Insurance system when people could not afford their mortgages. We genuflected to numerous organisations rather than governing ourselves. We allowed the Bank of England to escape responsibility for its failures on inflation, and we treated OBR forecasts as if they were scripture, even though we know they are often wrong.
We accepted the faulty idea that mass immigration was necessary to increase prosperity. We took the easy decision to write new visas to cover domestic failures rather than invest in UK workers and training.
But above all, we failed in our contract with our core voters – hard-working families trying to improve their lives. By stoking house prices, via immigration and low interest rates, to the temporary advantage of existing homeowners, we priced out the next generation. The unwritten contract that if you work hard you will get on in life broke down. When even those with the best jobs can not afford houses for decades it is clear something is wrong.
Onto this broken contract, we then opened up our labour market to the world, to workers unencumbered by student debts. It was somehow seen as sensible to use immigration to fund our universities and our NHS, allowing in ever-increasing numbers of international students while talking about reducing domestic university provision and reserving low-skilled jobs for UK workers. No wonder the voters questioned if we had their best interests at heart. Often we didn’t.
We then spent many years lumbering our voters with costs. Foreign aid, the hidden costs of Net Zero, numerous petty taxes and bans. We often seemed to be more concerned about wearing the correct wristband and foreign living standards than our own neglected provincial towns.
On culture, for an electorate by and large patriotic and small ‘c’ conservative, we allowed – sometimes championed – a massive cultural change that voters were at best uneasy with. It is a long time since we have heard politicians unapologetically champion British history and the British state against the relentless onslaught of left-wing academics promoting ‘decolonisation’ and various groups using similar ideas to attempt to break up our country.
The UK is not a global city. It is the home of an old culture that has made a massive and unique contribution to world history. The UK is not a global resource that people pass through. We must rebuild our shared sense of belonging to our history and shared future.
So, what should the Conservative Party do now? Two immediate actions.
Firstly, be honest. Accept and understand the failures. We need a new leader who understands this and is brave and capable enough to produce a new vision.
Secondly, we need to reform the party. The personnel that sat through this defeat or contributed to it in terms of failed ideas or no ideas at all need to be removed from the bridge. We need real Conservatives to rejoin the party and share in our revival.
When that is done we can then rebuild. And when we do that we will find that it is not all doom and gloom. In Europe, North America, and New Zealand there are centre-right parties not only regaining support but support of the young and the next generation. They are flourishing and we should heed their examples. Voters are keen for a party that returns to the basics. Values our culture, and prioritises its people.
On housing, the Conservatives have suffered from a double wammy of opposition to immigration and the consequent development pressure it brings on rural areas. We need to make housing affordable by building houses, and aesthetically pleasing communities, where it’s needed.
Reducing immigration is key to that. A party that promotes the training and retention of UK workers over the easy (temporary) fix of immigration. A party that is on the side of those who want to get on, work, and save. A party that promotes the UK and its culture over the disparate hostile cultural forces of separatism, nationalism, and left-wing ‘decolonisation’. A party that wants to govern not administer by leave of various quangos. A party that cuts the Gordian knot of law designed to tie the hands of Ministers – the Human Rights Act, Equalities Act, Net Zero, and many others. A party that wished to reform the state to concentrate on what it does well, and accepts that that is not everything.
All these tasks are fortunately made far easier by the British people’s decision to leave the EU. While we must be honest that the Conservatives wasted five years of political activity fighting to reverse Brexit a strong Tory Government can use its fortunate position outside of the EU to cut back stifling EU laws. Out of the EU, we can secure our borders, create a sense of national purpose, and stem population increase to solve the housing crisis. With Brexit, we can play a wider role via AUKUS and our new trade policy.
There is a huge opportunity. Labour is incapable of doing any of these things as they have not come to terms with the new post-Brexit world and will quickly run into all the same problems the Conservatives have. If we have the solutions our time in opposition can be short and well spent. 2019 need not go down in history as a freak result but the beginning of a new Conservative coalition forged in opposition.