Isaac Farnbank is Chairman of the London Universities Conservatives and President of King’s College Conservative Association.
The 2024 election is a foregone conclusion. So goes the popular media account. Reporting on the opinion polls makes for easy news. The main question relates to the scale and nature of defeat, not the relative likelihood of such an outcome. Most significantly, this account appears to have become the presumption of many Conservative MPs, activists, and voters in the country.
To confidently say the Conservatives can win the next election is to invite accusations of delusion, offers of a glass of water, and a sympathetic tut, accompanied by the shaking of heads. But this perception itself serves as an impediment to winning the next election. Overcoming it is essential to our standing a fighting chance of securing victory.
In 2019, many of us enthusiastically braved winter weather to canvass support for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives, in the context of a bitterly frustrated and deeply divided electorate. We were motivated primarily by the campaign being the final chance to deliver some meaningful form of Brexit and break the unprecedented deadlock in Parliament, subsequently delivering a record win.
There was both a powerfully persuasive and positive case for the return of a Conservative government, and an equally potent urge to spare the country the spectre of a Jeremy Corbyn administration.
Restoring the drive for victory requires rekindling a deep aversion to a Labour government whilst devising the positive case so essential for mobilising Conservative support. Easier said than done, of course. But perhaps a reminder of basic principles is not amiss.
Let’s start with Labour’s readiness for power. Keir Starmer is no Tony Blair. He is not popular, charismatic, or compelling; he cannot define a woman and has devised a policy platform notable for, well, what exactly? After 14 years of preparing for power, ask an average voter to name just one specific Labour policy and you’ll likely be waiting a while. While you wait, you can tot up all the Labour U-turns conducted under Starmer’s leadership. That alone should be fertile ground for Conservative criticism.
That which Labour has managed to outline is also eminently attackable. Their plans to make independent education less accessible is not only a self-defeating policy, but also symptomatic of attitudes and approaches synonymous with ‘Old Labour’: an obsessive focus on class, tax and spend policies, statist control, and the curtailment of choice.
If we had a failing record in the state sector, an embarrassment about pursuing this line could be excused, but again and again we are missing open goals. Labour’s commitment to a range of climate policies – including the vacuous pledge to advance the phase-out of petrol and diesel cars to 2030, ahead of Europe – is easily ridiculed. Contrasted with a more pragmatic, reasoned approach to the UK’s climate commitments, especially within the context of the UK’s already impressive progress, Labour is left exposed on a central priority.
Some would-be strategists suggest attacking too much, too early will allows Labour to clear their decks ahead of the election, as is apparently demonstrated in their ditching of the £28 billion pledge. This strikes me as ill-founded. The longer Labour are subjected to robust scrutiny, the more the polls will narrow, restlessness on their side will grow and further splits emerge – simultaneously delivering a morale boost to Conservative ranks.
The reality is that a ‘You Can’t Trust Labour’ message can be soundly founded and vigorously pursued. That said, an incredibly underdeveloped policy platform alone is insufficient to turn voters away from Labour to positively supporting the Conservatives.
A light policy platform is a significant weakness to the extent that it is accompanied by an underlying apprehension of Labour and of Starmer in No. 10. Starmer insists that he has changed his party. Unlike Blair, however, that change is contestable and almost intangible, as exposed by the blatant defiance by shadow ministers of their party’s official stance on the conflict in Israel, the public wrangling over the £28 billion climate pledge, or the continued commitment to nationalisation.
Yes, some change is discernible – totemic gestures like Corbyn’s ejection from the parliamentary party, just like Kinnock’s attack on the ‘Militant Tendency’ within his Labour – but voters do not look at Starmer and see a leader who has transformed fundamentally the values of his party, nor a politician they identify as synonymous with a distinct personal vision. Unknown quantities pose a risk.
Voters tend to be risk-averse, especially at times of uncertainty. The conomic recovery and fragile global security context provide the apposite backdrop. Labour needs a record swing of 14 per cent to win, significantly greater than they achieved in 1997 – and within the context sketched briefly here, is that credible, let alone a foregone conclusion?
There is a tendency amongst Conservatives to apportion blame for political difficulties on communication and the CCHQ operation. Yet it really does appear as if the Party has been failing to capitalise on its successes and on obvious opportunities to expose Labour’s weaknesses.
On the offensive, where is the tally of Labour U-turns, or the number of times a shadow minister has contradicted the party line, or the spending analysis of Labour’s thin plans? Conversely, where has been the trumpeting of the various Levelling Up funds, the migrant return agreements, the bus fare cap, the (albeit limited) Brexit deregulation, the lifetime skills guarantee, the living wage, rising home ownership (not nearly enough, but a start), record literacy rates and so on?
Are we really so despondent with our current government that we are ready to allow Starmer’s Labour Party into Whitehall? That is the price of apathy, supporting Reform, and of accepting that the next election has already been decided.
In echoes of 1992, however, activists and MPs appear to be asking not whether they could win the next election, but whether the party should win. The wilderness would grant the space to ‘purify’ the party, detoxify the brand, and craft a new, more in-tune version of Conservatism, to be enacted after the inevitable collapse of a Labour government in 2028-9.
As seductive as this appears, it should hardly need saying that this view is fantastical. Tellingly, the damage a Labour government would inflict upon the country, and to the future return to Conservative principles, doesn’t feature in these accounts. The ever-multiplying array of factions within the parliamentary party are hardly likely to reconcile conflicting explanations for any defeat. The dynamics of those groups will also likely be transformed by a redrawing of the electoral map – a rightward shift in opposition is far from guaranteed.
Whilst indulgence in a factionalist battle for the ‘soul’ of the Conservative Party is exclusive to opposition, a wider renewal of Conservative vision for government need not happen outside of government. Indeed, the process of moulding the manifesto offers an optimum opportunity to devise a compelling vision for a fifth term of Conservative government.
It should focus on making the state work, fostering economic growth, protecting national interests, including Brexit – on which Labour have observed near radio-silence – and adopting a pragmatic, common-sense approach to the so-called culture wars and climate policies, combined with a shrewd deployment of Conservative communicators, including Johnson.
We have a fighting chance at the next election – will we seize it? If we fail, it’ll be a lesson hard learnt.
The post Isaac Farnbank: The Conservatives can win the next election. But do we want to? appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: Isaac Farnbank
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