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September 10, 2024 - 7:20pm
So Mel Stride has been knocked out of the latest round in the Tory leadership election. Remember Mel Stride? No, me neither. But as one of the few ministers left willing to go out to bat for Rishi Sunak’s dying government during the daily media rounds, could he really have represented the future of the Conservative Party anyway?
Not that the remaining candidates fare much better by this metric, former senior ministers as they all are. Each seeks to disown the inheritance they played their own personal part in building.
But a leadership campaign is an opportunity for ideological freedom — for unhelpful shibboleths to be discarded, biases to be challenged and fixed viewpoints and policy positions to be reassessed in all frankness. It is easy to deliver sermons on the moral failures of Boris Johnson’s premiership, or to lament the political and operational failures of the Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak governments: these are self-evident. It’s easy, too, to promise the red meat of tax cuts and an anti-woke agenda to the party base.
Yet examining whether Truss might have been right in her diagnosis — if not her prescription — is a far more difficult proposition of introspection. Who among the candidates has a theory about how the party managed to oversee more than a decade of stagnant economic growth and wages, and has challenged the Conservative hierarchy to understand the economic and political underpinnings of this unsatisfactory order?
Tory defeat in 1997 may have been comparably catastrophic to 2024, but the party at least felt it had a record to defend. This year offers no such indulgence. Not even leadership frontrunner Robert Jenrick is keen to defend his party’s record in government.
Just look back to Ed Miliband in the 2010 parliament. By casting doubt on the worthiness of the last Labour government with his own faint praise, he offered up political territory to the Conservatives: they could simply march their troops onto the open, undefended land.
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SubscribeThe answer to the headline is No!
Next question?
Dickson: “…challenging the status quo of a pensioners’ welfare and planning system that hands out cash to retirees, and prevents the building of infrastructure and new homes, is vital. Not facing up to these realities has led the party to catastrophic defeat…”
Really? THOSE were the issues that resulted in Reform eviscerating the Tories’ electoral base?
What Dickson is saying is no more relevant than what the pathetic set of Tory leadership candidates are saying. The Conservative party needs to disappear as promptly as possible so that there can be substantial opposition to Labour. There is no alternative.
Thus spake Betteridge . . .
Quite! Along with many others…
They have to win on 3 fronts: the electorate, the bureaucratic state and accessories (OBR, BoE, quangos, etc), and CCHQ
Because they failed to understand the damage wrought by Blair’s shennanigans (constitutional reform act 2005 and equal opportunities act 2010 particularly) and have a disdain for real power, they are coming from a long way behind. I believe that one or 2 of the candidates “get it” and have the appetite to take it on, but I suspect that it is CCHQ which ultimately disable the winner’s ability to operate, parachuting in candidates that make the church so broad they become atheists as a moment where counter-ideology and boldness will be required.
When managing brands in decline there is a point where it does a roadrunner – hanging in the air, and then dropping like a stone to its death. I was once in the hot seat for such an event and it’s commercially terrifying: the fall comes out of nowhere. I sense the Conservative party is approaching that moment in the wake of the realignment. The electorate is becoming extremely restive and “brand loyalty” is going to be in scarcer supply than ever in the this parliament as the sovereign debt crisis and stagflation takes its toll, particularly if Labour continue making unforced errors. I suspect we will need to wait until the 4th turning reaches its apogee and then we’ll be presented with an entirely different entity to get us out of the threat that will face us (eg national government with some unexpected players taking a disproportionate part of the mix). I am not personally expecting Business As Usual.
Interesting and in many ways persuasive, but I don’t know what “4th turning” means.
Unless of course it was actually a failure to appeal to their core support (NIMBYS, older voters, social conservatives) that cost the Tories the election…
The problem is after 14yrs the contradictions became impossible to square. Their core support wants contradictory things – low migration, low inflation, minimal tax (thus insufficient to invest to address decrepit services or drive a better national skills and training plan). The core support is as much to blame because they suffer from ‘cakeism’.
I don’t know whether my views are representative, but I prioritise low migration and low inflation above minimal tax.
Low invasion rates do NOT contradict either low inflation or minimal tax. The Tories core support anyway cannot possibly be to blame for anything since the Tories never gave them anything but lies.
The down votes suggest that you are preaching to idiots. We only have had low inflation for most of the last 25 years because of high immigration. Reduce immigration and inflation rates and interest rates will rise, leading to a collapse in asset prices. In the long run a good thing in my view. People will once again be able to afford a house and a pension out of an average income. I doubt however that the idle old see it in the same way.
How does high immigration directly lead to low inflation? Increased demand usually leads to higher prices, not lower. This certainly applies to housing. Wages maybe, but it’s a complex picture. As a matter of recent empirical record, very high indeed unprecedented levels of immigration are coincided with high inflation rates.
Mr. Dickson is an analyst who is not paying attention. He is several weeks out of date, as he would have discovered if he read the Conservative Home website.
He would have said something a little more informative, if he had summarised the debate this far.
Regardless of the merits of individual candidates l remain sceptical of the Tories being seen as electable again in my lifetime, if ever.
They offer little to attract younger voters and many of the older generations feel too betrayed by them to ever vote for the Tory party again (l’m one of those). Then, of course, you have to factor in how many of those older people who might vote Conservative will still be alive in 5 or 10 years time.
The country does need a viable alternative to Labour but l’m looking elsewhere for it now.
As an actual conservative, I voted for Reform in July, and very much doubt I will ever vote “Conservative” again.
So did l after 50 years of voting Tory – and probably for similar reasons
I think they have an opportunity now it literally feels that the National Socialists are back in government this century.
But they must tack to the right and emphasis a low immigration revolution. Tack to the iright in a unified fashion that is, being that they can’t leave the ECHR when out of power.
The contradictions in Right wing thinking are going to be v difficult to address and it’s understandable so much reluctance with resulting desire to find scapegoats. Neo-liberal economics and ‘conservatism’ were never as natural bedfellows as Thatcher/Reagan and successive ‘believers’ thought.
More recently the fault-line has been ‘legal’ migration – the belief the ‘market’ will naturally reduce it’s reliance on the latter and Govt doesn’t have to do much to stimulate alternatives coupled with the electoral calculus that we can kick the can down the road and stay in power if we can just squeeze the public realm to deliver tax cuts. Works…until it inevitably runs out of road.
Neo-liberal economics, as in the free movement of capital AND labour, was what the traditional conservatism of Burke and Peel opposed. Also, Thatcher passed the British Nationality Act within two years of entering office.
And joined the free market which included free movement
It is unlikely that a new leader can pull the party together and cleanse their image before the next election, so we are likely doomed (blessed?) with another 5 years of the same. I believe the best chance for a conservative win at the next election is for the conservative Conservatives to jump ship and join Reform with their leader as co-leader of Reform with Farage. This gets over two problems – one is that Farage is a bit too much for some voters and two is that it gives Reform some badly needed government experience. They could probably take some of the party infrastructure with them, alleviating another of Reform’s shortcomings.
Starmer may be trying to be clever being really unpopular at the start of his government, relying on short memories and things only getting better to give him another 5 years. Of course if he makes the UK a better place, he will deserve it, but their putting ideology ahead of reason makes me doubtful. It is therefore imperative that we have an alternative government in waiting in less than 5 years’ time. Unless the Conservatives bolster up Reform, I don’t see that happening. I am hard-pressed to see anything on the horizon that would cause me to vote Conservative again because of their divisions and appalling record.
“It is unlikely that a new leader can pull the party together and cleanse their image before the next election, …” Well, Starmer managed it.
Starmer managed it because Labour had not been in government for a while and not antagonised so many of their supporters. If the Conservatives follow the Labour pattern, then we will have 14 years of Labour before the Conservatives sort themselves out. Not A happy prospect to my mind, but you can never be sure. The Conservatives turned out unexpectedly bad. Perhaps Labour will turn out unexpectedly good. Unless the Conservatives reach some arrangement with Reform, or jump ship like I suggested, they are going to remain in opposition for a very long time. It is unlikely that they can rebrand as New Conservatives and become real Conservatives.
“But challenging the status quo of a pensioners’ welfare and planning system that hands out cash to retirees, and prevents the building of infrastructure and new homes, is vital.” Very true, the Conservatives need to reflect the interests of a broader electoral base. However, even more important is for the Conservatives to stop serving the interests of their funders.