Tories must win back the popular vote
Glastonbury Festival may primarily be famous for the pop music stars who attract hundreds of thousands of fans to set up camp for a few days each year in the West Country, but cranks and curiosities have also long been part of its heady appeal. The festival’s main stage is even shaped liked a pyramid, all the better to tune into the mystic forces that are supposed to run deep in the area.
All in all, it was probably an apt platform for Jeremy Corbyn to speak yesterday, as the Labour leader preaches a fantastical brand of politics whose superficial appeal has little basis in fact.
Still, there is no denying that it is now popular, particularly among young people, many of whom took to wearing Corbyn T-shirts at Glastonbury, and chanting his name. Even if the Labour leader’s economic ideas are dismal, he can no longer be dismissed as a fringe figure. It is equally sad but true that it is hard to imagine a Conservative Party leader addressing baying crowds at a pop festival.
This is more problematic for the Conservatives than one might imagine. Jeremy Corbyn and the grassroots Momentum movement around him have reshaped politics in a populist vein. The Tories must respond, putting greater effort into driving up their own membership – a membership whose numbers have collapsed even as Labour’s have exploded.
More important still, the Conservative Party must also reinvigorate itself with policies that ensure that everyone, no matter their age, feels they can have a stake in society.
The simple truth is that people in their twenties, thirties and forties are deserting the Conservatives because they feel that life’s chips are stacked against them. Most egregiously, they feel that no matter how hard they work, their chances of owning a home are slim to nothing. If the Tory Party does not address this issue with a bold policy response, it will back itself into a corner, counting on the support of an increasingly narrow demographic.
That is not electorally sensible. Nor, for a party which champions free markets as the best method of enriching society, is it just. For you cannot be both a free market advocate on one hand, and yet protect a housing market which is self-evidently broken on the other.
It is time for Conservatives to rebound from their defensive crouch – dwelling only on the many failings of Jeremy Corbyn without expounding their own positive vision of the world.
The election has been a terrible shock, but if the Tories choose to learn the right lessons, and respond accordingly, some good may come of it yet.