John Oxley is a consultant, writer, and broadcaster. His SubStack is Joxley Writes.
In the summer of 1940, faced with the prospect of invasion, Winston Churchill initiated the creation of the Auxiliary Units. Known as the “scallywags”, they were to be Britain’s guerilla force in time of occupation, left to burn briefly, but brightly, causing maximum mayhem.
Now, the right needs to consider how it will keep the battle going after the election, using power inside and outside Westminster to advance the causes that matter to it.
The Conservative Party does not yet know exactly what resources it will have in parliament after next week. The current ranges are bleak – from something akin to 1997 to something far, far smaller.
For a party used to holding political power, this will be a rude awakening and a steep learning curve; few of the parliamentarians who will return after the election have experienced opposition, and are unused to wielding it effectively.
The scale of the defeat will also make this harder. With a large Labour majority, there will be little chance of inflicting defeats in the Lobby. Instead, the new opposition will have to find other ways of pushing the government, picking up the tricks that have been used against them over the last few years.
The party will need to learn how to use things like select committees, written questions and Freedom of Information requests to scrutinise and harry Sir Keir Starmer and his ministers. It will be a long time before the party can inflict big defeats; for now, they must content themselves with sniping.
Beyond that, the right will have to adopt some of the tools which so frustrated them in office. A Tory executive may have rankled at things like judicial review when it was wielded by activists to frustrate policy. Now the right will have to become adept at wielding it, using the courts to challenge the new government when they can.
This may be hypocritical, but there is no advantage gained in self-imposed impotence.
Through 14 years in government, the Conservatives have left a raft of bodies in place that constrain executive action. Now is not the time to have a debate about that, but to try to try to learn how to use them. The courts are one weapon, but so too are arms-length bodies, quangos, and regulators.
Exerting pressure through these may not be easy or familiar for the right, but giving up will further empower a government likely sitting on a huge parliamentary majority.
The coming challenge extends beyond that, though. The right has complained a lot about left-wing institutional capture, whether that is government or civic bodies. The idea of ‘the Blob’ has become pervasive in discussion. The right either needs to find ways of inverting this, or else focus on building their own institutions for advancing ideas.
When it comes to cultural battles, whinging seems less effective than simply leading by example. In opposition, conservatives cannot rely on the government to take up this mantle for them but must innovate themselves – building bodies that can encourage and promote conservativism outside of the state.
Think tanks already manage this for policy, but there is a need for a broader movement when it comes to matters like the arts and museums.
An advantage the right should have here is access to funding. It should be played more. Many of those who have vast sums to donate to institutions are broadly conservative in outlook. Giving them alternative places to put their cash, more in line with their views, could spark a renaissance on the right. More than that, it would also take advantage of the emerging kickback against corporate funding from the left.
The tussle over Baillie Gifford and literary festivals has shown that the left will demand ever greater purity. Paying a modern-day indulgence to a nice cultural institution is not enough to earn their absolution – instead, they demand a greater embrace of their goals.
The right can offer an alternative, far less hectoring, and potentially more rewarding option for those with spare cash. With the correct approach, a host of culturally conservative, not overtly political, opportunities could abound.
The key to this, however, is not simply being beholden to those who are already in the tent. Part of the problem for right-wing media has been that as audiences have declined, they have become more captured by them. This may make business sense, getting more engagement from those already on your side is more profitable than new conversions.
The same is not true of a political movement. Part of the rearguard action of the right should be about making the case for conservative values – tradition, duty, the family – in a way that appeals, rather than just preaching inwards.
Few on the right seem mentally prepared for just how miserable opposition is going to be. The left will have a powerful majority and will benefit from the soft power they have beyond parliament. The Conservative Party may struggle against the former, but the wider right should have some answer on the latter.
Winning back power is about more than rebuilding the party and waiting for Labour to fail. It should be about advancing conservative ideas and hoping that they take root, finding a positive vision and extolling it.
A week from now, the right will have to adjust to a new political reality – one where conservatives have less control both of government and the agenda. The journey back to power is likely to be long and will require adjusting to new demographics and issues.
In the short term, however, conservatives must remember their will to fight. The left has often been adept at influencing things from out of power, now the right must do the same.
For the parliamentary party, that means mastering quickly the few tools at their disposal; a priority after the election will be sharpening the tools of opposition, learning from those who had to deal with 1997.
More broadly for the right, however, it will be finding how to create not just mayhem, but something to build from, in terrain now largely held and shaped by the other side. After more than a decade in power, the right will need to rapidly learn some guerilla tactics and sow its own Auxiliary Units.
The post John Oxley: A long night beckons for the Right – we must swiftly re-learn the tactics of opposition appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: John Oxley
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