This is the speech delivered by Lord Frost at the Popular Conservativism ‘Beginning to Rebuild’ conference today.
My Lords, ladies and gentlemen, friends and colleagues,
We meet today at a moment of calamity for our Party. We’ve just had our worst result for a hundred years. We lost over half our 2019 vote and two thirds of our seats. Worse, we have to sit and watch while Labour use the levers of government that we failed to. And we have to accept the painful reality that, for the time being, no-one is interested in what we think.
So soon after the triumph of 2019 and of Brexit, we have fallen far. I don’t ever want to be in this position again.
It’s right to avoid recriminations, for there are many authors of this disaster. But it is also right to be angry, for the catastrophe was entirely foreseeable, and was indeed foreseen by many. I admit I feel angry myself. I came into politics to help deliver Brexit. Having succeeded in getting it done and digging us out of the mess one generation of Tory leadership had created, I have found it hard to watch as we failed to deliver on the benefits. And it will be even harder to see Brexit further watered down by a Labour Party that never wanted it in the first place.
So those who decided upon the strategy that got us here, and stuck to it in the face of evidence it was failing, then slandered and tried to knee cap their opponents – they need to get off the stage as soon as possible and let the party move on.
Are we learning from this catastrophe? That’s an open question. We are already hearing people saying that the problem was that we tilted too far to the right and need to move back to the centre. We are also hearing people saying that the problem was untrammelled neoliberalism and free markets, and that we now need a softer economics more respectful of community. Really? Which “right” was this? Which free markets were these? The ones that pushed tax and spend to the highest ever levels? The one that banned fracking, kept Soviet-style production targets for electric vehicles and boilers, and made energy prices the highest in Europe? The one that endlessly defers to the doctrines of a foreign court rather than fix illegal migration? The one that brought 1½ million people into the country in two years and five million since 2010? I must have missed this right-wing paradise.
No. The truth is that on virtually every issue we followed the collectivist Zeitgeist leftwards. And we left conservative voters nowhere to go – that is, until the rise of Nigel Farage and Reform. Even then, instead of accepting that we had made a mistake in allowing a challenger on the right, we acted as if we had divine entitlement to their votes, and spent our time complaining about the lese-majeste of Reform voters desperately looking for an actual alternative to liberal collectivism.
We must do better than this. The electorate is never wrong. We must learn from the kicking we have been given and the first thing is to get serious.
What does that mean? It means not immediately descending into the mudslinging of a rushed leadership election. I can’t see why we shouldn’t have an interim leader and time to debate things properly.
It means having a proper investigation into what is wrong with the Party organisation at the centre and being honest with ourselves about its disintegration in constituencies and the deep deep hostility to the brand among voters.
But above all it means getting serious about our ideas. For politics is, or should be, about ideas as much as individuals. If we are to offer an effective critique of Labour’s governance, we aren’t going to achieve it by simply shouting yah boo at everything they do.
Take, for instance, Keir Starmer’s comment that he wanted “a politics that treads a little lighter on all of our lives”. I had to laugh when I heard that. I doubt there is a single Labour MP who actually thinks that. Labour’s high tax, high regulation, high nannying, high hectoring and banning manifesto is about as far from getting politics out of everyone’s lives as anyone could imagine. If anything convinced me that Labour’s approach to government was just meaningless words, then it was that comment.
But how can we criticise? We pushed up taxes. We made pet abduction a criminal offence and banned silent prayer by abortion clinics. It was us who tried to tell landlords which tenants they could rent to and stopped them getting their own property back unless the government agreed. And we too would have banned smoking if we got the chance.
That’s why we have to be serious about ideas. Our attack on Labour has to be based on a credible set of ideas, a serious alternative proposition for how our country should be governed, based on tried and tested conservative philosophy.
That involves more self-confidence about conservative ideas than we have shown in recent years. We need to keep on saying that conservatism is the best philosophy, it’s one that makes people freer and richer wherever it’s tried, it’s one to which much of the rest of the world is turning once again, but one that we lost sight of it in a misguided attempt to modernise, drift Left, and be all things to all men. We turned conservatism into a publicly funded support scheme for pensioners and the asset rich in Southern England. So we have to shed this baggage and get back to our core ideas. We don’t have to be embarrassed about them. They can still be popular in the country. Across Europe people are still voting for them. What we must do is show how they can solve the problems the country faces.
We know what these problems are:
– a low productivity economy, overly biased to the SE and dependent on mass immigration;
– a crisis of governability, with weak national institutions enmeshed in a web of international treaties and undermined by the quango and devolution state;
– the decline in belief in individual freedom and free speech and the growth in belief in group rights and controlled expression of opinion;
– and, overall, the gradual shift of the country leftwards, to a collectivist mindset in which nothing can be achieved without the involvement of the state.
Labour will not reverse any of these trends: indeed they will make them all worse.
We must be unashamed in saying we need to track back. Hold our nerve about our traditional ideas and values. Get back to supporting free market nation state conservatism: freedom, the free economy, our nation and its independence. Stand up for getting the government off the back of the people and of enterprise; accepting the necessity, given what we have allowed to happen to the population and asset prices, of building millions of new houses where people need them; winning the culture war for our history, traditional values, and free speech; stopping immigration and rebuilding national cohesion; and letting our governments actually govern so they can achieve all this.
These are mainstream ideas. So the way to win next time is to build the largest possible winning coalition by convincing people of the power of conservative ideas like these to solve the country’s problems. For politics isn’t solely about following public opinion. It’s about persuasion, convincing people you have the best ideas and moving the centre ground your way. That means we must be confident in our conservative ideas and persuade people they are the best ones for the country. Then, by being recognisably conservative, we will bring back conservative voters who left us. And by showing that conservative ideas are the best ones to fix the country’s problems we start to attract everyone else.
I reject therefore the caricature that all this would represent is a shift to the narrow Right, a move from one narrow bit of the spectrum to another. Rather, it is a return to mainstream conservatism, attractive, coherent, conservative ideas, which can attract many many voters. We would be turning away only from being all things to all men. Turning away only from pushing a flabby mish mash of sub-socialist ideas. And turning towards offering a real alternative, a properly thought-through conservative proposition, and advocating it convincingly.
If we can do this, for sure we can cooperate with Reform. But if we can do this there will be no need for Reform.
And if we don’t do this, and instead draw the conclusion that we must tilt further to the crowded centre? – well, then, we are leaving the whole political space of the right of British politics to Reform. That way lies destruction. We are perilously close to bad decisions which could end up wrecking the Party. Some people will be sad about that, in the way that it’s always sad to see an old warhorse at the end of its days, to watch the Fighting Temeraire brought into port. But personally I’m a loyalist to our ideas, not the institution. And if the Party shows that it isn’t interested in standing for our ideas, fir conservatism, then what will be the point of it?
I don’t think that worst case scenario has to happen. We can get the philosophy right; and we can get a leader and a leadership team, who understand the problem and want to fix it. By 2027 we can have a single party of the Right, with no competitor to its Right, and with a clear philosophy and policies, ready to fight an election. That is absolutely do-able if we get serious now. As Lady Thatcher said: “first you win the argument, then you win the election”. There’s no shortcut. Hold our nerve. Keep the faith. And get to work.]