David Frost was the Chief Brexit negotiator and a minister in Boris Johnson’s government. He is now a Conservative peer.
We can all see this week’s latest disastrous set of opinion polls. We can all see which way this election is going. It isn’t quite over, and there is still the chance to save some good Tory MPs if the Conservative Party can get these last two weeks of the campaign right.
Ideally, of course, we wouldn’t be debating the likely result till after it had happened. But against this dismal background minds inevitably turn to why things have gone so badly and what should happen next; and as so often ConservativeHome has led the way, with its Monday triptych of articles by Nigel Farage, David Gauke, and your esteemed acting editor.
The core of the coming argument is, at least as regards policy, whether our problems were caused by not being “centrist” enough, or whether they stem from a failure to advocate, and deliver, more traditional conservative policies on tax, immigration, and much more. David Gauke argues the first, telling the Right “you broke it, you own it”, though doing so with the blind spots and cognitive dissonance that we have often come to expect from unreconciled Remainers.
It is hard to know where to start with this argument. Let’s look at what has actually happened over the last five years.
We have had big state high tax and spend policies, with a manifesto pledge broken to deliver them; the fanatical pursuit of the crackpot Net Zero policy, driving energy costs up and business out of the country; persistently high legal immigration and refusal to properly confront the international law constraints on dealing with illegal arrivals; the reversal of the commitment to remove all EU laws from the statute book; an accommodationist policy, until very recently, on cultural issues; and a succession of unpopular regulatory laws from Levelling Up through Online Safety and culminating in the Renters and Leasehold Reform Bills.
As regards Brexit itself, I stand by the excellent 2020 Trade and Cooperation Agreement that Johnson and I negotiated. The problem has been the Withdrawal Agreement, largely a May government legacy; and there of course it was the destruction by Gauke and his allies of our negotiating leverage, by getting Parliament to make it illegal to leave the EU without a deal, which meant we got fewer improvements than we wanted in 2019. The situation has since been made worse by the Prime Minister’s abandonment of his leadership pledge to override the Northern Ireland Protocol and to put in place the regrettable Windsor Framework instead.
It would be reasonable to criticise the Right for allowing all this to happen without much meaningful resistance. It would be reasonable to criticise Liz Truss for miscommunicating and mishandling her well-justified and entirely necessary attempt to get the country out of its economic hole, making it harder for successors to make a Right-wing economic case. But what isn’t reasonable is to claim, as Gauke does, that the Right “dictated the policies”, tilted the Government far from the centre, and hence destroyed support for the party among moderate voters.
Far from it. Almost every time a choice has been faced, the current leadership has gone left: raised taxes, increased regulation, refused to face down the ECHR. On the rare occasions it’s done something different – overruling the Scottish gender recognition law, tinkering with Net Zero – the Right has got behind them and ratings have gone up. For the rest of the time, the polling path has been inexorably down.
That is why it is so bizarre for Gauke to complain that Sunak is running an election campaign focused on disaffected Tories and the Reform Party. He’s doing that – if he is doing it – because that’s where the threat is. According to YouGov, at the end of May, that is even before Farage’s return, nearly half of our 2019 voters had either gone to Reform or were sitting on their hands. Meanwhile, just 2 per cent had been frightened away to the Lib Dems from this supposedly Right-wing Tory party.
The real problem, of course, is not only that we have delivered left, but that we have continued to talk right. Having won an election on a prescription of radical change, we rapidly gave up and delivered more of the same policies that have been delivering relative decline for nearly two decades now – big state, high immigration, high regulation, and a tilt to the southeast, to the elderly, the property owners, the wealthy.
But we can’t win elections from within this laager – as we are now proving. The number of people not benefiting from this set-up has been growing, and because we have shown them no real free market right-wing alternative, they are largely turning left, and increasingly radically so too.
This country faces a set of really serious problems: the tax and spending burden, the huge levels of debt, the persistent refusal to live within our means, the belief there is always money for everything, the housing crisis, and the pursuit of vanity, trivial, ineffective, or actively damaging policies for the sake of international opinion.
As a result, we are in decline, like most of western Europe. One of the paradoxes of our current political set-up is that politicians who point this out, whether they are from our Party or Reform, and propose policies that might start to deal with these problems, are dismissed by people like Gauke as populists or extremists.
Yet the accommodationists, those who say there is no other way, those who say the way we did things over the last thirty years is the only way they can ever be done, are said to be sensible centrists and the key to political success. I think the British people deserve better than that.
I came to politics late. I haven’t lived my life through the Conservative Party, so I perhaps don’t have the emotional commitment to it that many others do. It’s certainly possible, though not yet certain, that, as Nigel Farage says, the brand is “broken”.
No party has a divine right to exist if it can’t offer policy propositions that are distinct from others’ and respond to the wishes of a voting coalition that can win an election. If all we offer is a mush of so-called “centrism”, a random collection of policies with no defining philosophy, then voters will give up or go elsewhere or both.
Luckily, the Conservative Party has a huge capacity to renew itself. It can yet do so, but only if we don’t heed those with their world-weary, defensive, and beaten view of politics; and show, instead, that we want this country to be different and better, and know how to make it so. It’s no doubt too late for this election; but we will only have ourselves to blame if the conservative movement is in the same place at the next one.
The post Lord Frost: Ignore the centrist gloom. To win, the Conservatives must offer a right-wing path to renewal. appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: Lord Frost
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