Julian Ellacott has served at all levels of the voluntary party over the past 25 years, and is currently a Vice President of the National Convention, sitting on the Party Board representing party members. He is now standing to become Chairman of the Convention – you can find out more at www.julianellacott.com.
A statue of Edmund Burke stands proudly in the centre of Bristol, the city he represented in Parliament from 1774 to 1780, and the city in which I live. From 1894 until 1997 the statue was in a Conservative constituency, then Labour and Liberal Democrat territory.
Now, after last month’s election, it stands in a Green constituency – a reflection of our changing political landscape and the changing fortunes of our party, which have brought us to the existential challenge we now face.
Change in response to such circumstances is easy enough to demand, but getting it right is much harder. As we enter our leadership contest and debate our political strategy, we must also look hard at our organisation to ensure that we learn lessons from our recent failures.
Out of this must emerge a party which is more unified, and able not only to rise to the challenges we know about now, but able to adapt to those which lie over the horizon.
As an active volunteer for over 25 years, I am as well placed as anyone to trot out the cliché that our associations are the bedrock of the party. Indeed, they really are the party’s equivalent of the “little platoons” about which Burke wrote: local bodies to which our members feel belonging, and into which they pour their energies.
Our activists truly do an amazing job, bearing in mind that they (we) are all volunteers, motivated by nothing more than a sense of duty.
But we mustn’t be blinded to the shortcomings of many associations; they need an open and honest appraisal, then urgent action to address them.
Reinvigorating our decentralised structure isn’t just a nod to our history – it is how I would design our party from scratch. As Conservatives, we know that trying to manage any large organisation from the centre is a doomed enterprise. Accordingly CCHQ must change, and indeed change will be forced upon it by the financial realities of opposition.
We must work with the grain of this financial necessity and devise new ways of working, which give more autonomy both to the voluntary party and regional CCHQ staff, so that together we can take the initiative and get things done locally without constant recourse to the centre.
When I was Chairman of the South West region, I ensured that we regularly brought together our key volunteers and CCHQ staff from across the region to share information and solve problems. With fewer constraints and some localised CCHQ funds, we could turbocharge this model, in turn motivating our volunteers further and drawing out more local funding – a true win/win situation.
But we mustn’t just think of volunteers in the context of their associations. We have a plethora of volunteers with top level skills – from legal experts and managers of multi-billion pound programmes to senior people-directors and leading-edge IT professionals. At the moment we do not routinely identify, encourage, or involve these volunteers at a national level, where they could have most positive impact (or when this does occur, it is sporadic and happens by chance).
We also rely on ad hoc, post-election reviews to step back and see how we can improve our party, rather than having a continuous way of gathering and implementing ideas for improvement.
Yet we have at our disposal the means of making this happen permanently: our National Convention, the “parliament” of the voluntary party, which can and should set up groups of like-minded and skilled volunteers, linking them through elected officers into the relevant teams at CCHQ to exchange ideas.
If the willingness is there to set aside mutual suspicions from the past and work together, great things will be possible.
Underpinning all of this, we need to be true to our Conservative values. We espouse strong values as a party – democracy, continuity, respect and meritocracy to name a few – but there are so many occasions where we fail to apply these values to our own organisation, from candidate selection and lack of consultation on how we operate through to poor communication and petty squabbles.
We need to ensure our values run throughout our Conservative family of volunteers, professionals, and elected representatives, applying them to all we do – and being unafraid to call each other out when we fail to do so.
Burke, the great Conservative, said “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation”. He might just as well have been referring to a political party. We do have the means for enacting change to our great Conservative Party – and now is the time to seize the opportunity to make it happen.
Julian Ellacott has served at all levels of the voluntary party over the past 25 years, and is currently a Vice President of the National Convention, sitting on the Party Board representing party members. He is now standing to become Chairman of the Convention – you can find out more at www.julianellacott.com.
A statue of Edmund Burke stands proudly in the centre of Bristol, the city he represented in Parliament from 1774 to 1780, and the city in which I live. From 1894 until 1997 the statue was in a Conservative constituency, then Labour and Liberal Democrat territory.
Now, after last month’s election, it stands in a Green constituency – a reflection of our changing political landscape and the changing fortunes of our party, which have brought us to the existential challenge we now face.
Change in response to such circumstances is easy enough to demand, but getting it right is much harder. As we enter our leadership contest and debate our political strategy, we must also look hard at our organisation to ensure that we learn lessons from our recent failures.
Out of this must emerge a party which is more unified, and able not only to rise to the challenges we know about now, but able to adapt to those which lie over the horizon.
As an active volunteer for over 25 years, I am as well placed as anyone to trot out the cliché that our associations are the bedrock of the party. Indeed, they really are the party’s equivalent of the “little platoons” about which Burke wrote: local bodies to which our members feel belonging, and into which they pour their energies.
Our activists truly do an amazing job, bearing in mind that they (we) are all volunteers, motivated by nothing more than a sense of duty.
But we mustn’t be blinded to the shortcomings of many associations; they need an open and honest appraisal, then urgent action to address them.
Reinvigorating our decentralised structure isn’t just a nod to our history – it is how I would design our party from scratch. As Conservatives, we know that trying to manage any large organisation from the centre is a doomed enterprise. Accordingly CCHQ must change, and indeed change will be forced upon it by the financial realities of opposition.
We must work with the grain of this financial necessity and devise new ways of working, which give more autonomy both to the voluntary party and regional CCHQ staff, so that together we can take the initiative and get things done locally without constant recourse to the centre.
When I was Chairman of the South West region, I ensured that we regularly brought together our key volunteers and CCHQ staff from across the region to share information and solve problems. With fewer constraints and some localised CCHQ funds, we could turbocharge this model, in turn motivating our volunteers further and drawing out more local funding – a true win/win situation.
But we mustn’t just think of volunteers in the context of their associations. We have a plethora of volunteers with top level skills – from legal experts and managers of multi-billion pound programmes to senior people-directors and leading-edge IT professionals. At the moment we do not routinely identify, encourage, or involve these volunteers at a national level, where they could have most positive impact (or when this does occur, it is sporadic and happens by chance).
We also rely on ad hoc, post-election reviews to step back and see how we can improve our party, rather than having a continuous way of gathering and implementing ideas for improvement.
Yet we have at our disposal the means of making this happen permanently: our National Convention, the “parliament” of the voluntary party, which can and should set up groups of like-minded and skilled volunteers, linking them through elected officers into the relevant teams at CCHQ to exchange ideas.
If the willingness is there to set aside mutual suspicions from the past and work together, great things will be possible.
Underpinning all of this, we need to be true to our Conservative values. We espouse strong values as a party – democracy, continuity, respect and meritocracy to name a few – but there are so many occasions where we fail to apply these values to our own organisation, from candidate selection and lack of consultation on how we operate through to poor communication and petty squabbles.
We need to ensure our values run throughout our Conservative family of volunteers, professionals, and elected representatives, applying them to all we do – and being unafraid to call each other out when we fail to do so.
Burke, the great Conservative, said “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation”. He might just as well have been referring to a political party. We do have the means for enacting change to our great Conservative Party – and now is the time to seize the opportunity to make it happen.