This morning’s Times reports that Suella Braverman has “urged the Conservatives to embrace Nigel Farage”, on the basis that there is “not much difference” between Nigel Farage’s position and the party’s own:
“Saying the Conservatives should be a “broad church” and a “welcoming party”, she said that the Tories should find a way to merge with Reform UK because “we shouldn’t be divided on this side of the political spectrum”.
“Braverman said that she welcomed Sunak’s more hardline approach to immigration — such as his new policy to introduce a cap on work and family visas and his toughening stance on the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), joking that he had adopted the “Suella agenda”.”
Given the state of the campaign – with many Tories expecting a crossover poll wherein Reform overtakes – such talk is not surprising.
It is also true that the Conservatives have historically benefited from being the only major party of the right in British politics. There was much to complain about with the way David Cameron went about the EU referendum – holding such a vote with the Government on the status-quo side and totally unwilling to implement the change result was insane – but his progressive critics are wrong to think he could or should just have ignored the rising threat of UKIP.
Having come second in a hundred constituencies in 2015, it seems all but certain that the so-called People’s Army would have become a proper parliamentary force had something not been done to head them off.
But Reform UK is not UKIP, for all that it is basically the same idea with a new lick of paint. It doesn’t have that party’s long history, nor its activist base, nor its presence in local government.
If Farage is elected in Clacton, securing both a parliamentary platform and Short Money, the medium-term risk posed by the party might change. There may well come a point where serious negotiations to ‘reunite the right’ are necessary.
That, however, would represent a remarkable failure on the part of the Conservative Party. Even allowing for some of the more catastrophic scenarios limned by current polling, it should still outnumber Reform UK in Parliament by over a hundred to one, with a corresponding disparity in its financial resources and national infrastructure.
Consider Canada, which is becoming the go-to example of a proper worst-case scenario (and the eventual success of reunifying the right in a single party).
In 1993, the ruling Progressive Conservatives were routed so utterly that they were reduced to just two seats; the right-wing Reform Party broke into Parliament for the first time with over 50. Yet despite that it took ten years – and two further elections in which the PCs placed fifth – before the two merged into the modern Conservative Party of Canada.
If nothing else, it would be slightly embarrassing if the Conservative Party, armed with both a longer and more illustrious history than the PCs and a much stronger relative position, sold itself more quickly or more cheaply than its Canadian counterpart.
But the more substantive reason such talk is so precipitate is that there is, at present, no coherent agenda around which any ‘reunification’ could take place.
Reform UK enjoys the normal advantage of a minor party in that it doesn’t have to produce anything resembling a workable programme for government; it’s diagnoses do not need to engage properly with either trade-offs or the practicalities of implementation. At present, any merger would be little more than a union with the Tories’ renegade id.
It might be more comfortable for MPs to focus on the need to win votes to their right, but the cold truth is that the overwhelming majority of losses next month will be to Labour and the Liberal Democrats. The path back to office, however long and winding, runs through those voters.
That does not mean, as some commentators claim, that the Conservatives must do nothing but tack back towards the imagined ‘centre’, which is normally a label adopted by people who hold a clutch of minority positions which they imagine to be in the middle of their own Overton Window. As I recently wrote elsewhere:
“…the politics of being sensible can too easily stray into the politics of the easy short-term decision, even as the long-term costs (political and real) become increasingly unsustainable.”
There is plenty of scope – indeed, need – for radical challenges to the oh-so-sensible status quo. Mass immigration exacerbates the housing crisis and props up a low-productivity economy without raising living standards; large parts of the higher education sector freight taxpayers and young workers with debt merely to despatch workers into jobs school-leavers did a generation before; the forward projections of our biggest public spending commitments are unsustainable.
On those areas and others, such as tax and family policy, there is plenty of room for new answers. Finding those answers – and understanding why it has so totally failed to meet these challenges in office – must be the mission of the Conservative Party in Opposition.
The agenda that arises from that process may well prove a basis for an eventual, formal reunion of the right. But despondent Tories should not forget that a coherent right-wing diagnosis of what ails 21st-century Britain, and an attractive set of prescriptions, might also win voters back on their own terms.
Focusing instead on winning over a party that is free to call for an immediate freeze in immigration, and lower taxes, and protecting any spending voters care about, promises only to waste precious time in a retreat into magical thinking.