A new Conservatism must advance the working class
Johnson and the party should speak to the needs of the culturally despised in order to survive
Today’s conservatism still does not know why it won the last election, who voted for it or why. It has made the mistake of thinking that Brexit was the end rather than the means.
Believing its own fantasies of building Singapore-on-Thames, it failed to notice that nobody voted for that vision. It has become fundamentally disconnected from its new electorate. Both Johnson and the party need to radically reinvent themselves if they are to survive.
Over the last decade, helped by Labour’s divisive embrace of identity politics and minority extremism, the Conservative Party has mobilised an electorate that we simply have not had before in modern history; blue-collar as well as middle-class, rural and small town, northern and southern, true blue Tory alongside disillusioned ex-Labour voters and the previously apathetic.
The Conservatives were only able to tap into the realignment because they openly rejected a large part of the elite consensus that has dominated Britain and other Western nations for 50 years, a consensus defined by a commitment to elevating purported minorities over maligned majorities, all of which is driven and typified by hyper-globalism, hyper-liberalism, mass immigration, European integration and the hollowing out of national democracy and national solidarity. The vote for Brexit and the opportunity to forge an entirely new settlement marked a radical departure from this consensus.
That is why people voted for it, for Boris Johnson and the Conservatives.
But today that opportunity is now being squandered. The Conservative Party has let the country down through cronyism and chaos in No10. But also because neither the Government nor the party appear to know what their purpose is and who or whom they should serve. So, of course it is confused, of course it is divided because it is not being led by a coherent account of its majority and how to sustain it.
Whatever one thinks of Johnson, the current alternatives to him offer only a throwback to a past that Conservatives can no longer thrive in.
Many south-eastern urban cosmopolitans will now vote Lib Dem, while metro city liberals will vote Labour. The Conservative majority risks evaporation at the next election, as its voters, ignored and unaddressed, give up and turn away. All because the Conservative Party has refused to think seriously about its new voters and what they need to escape the penalties of class and place. That is why we have set up a project to rethink what a renewed Conservatism that speaks to the needs of the culturally despised and economically marginalised might mean. We will uncover the principles of this new political offer and the policies that it should engender.
Such as finally supporting the family and helping parents and particularly women negotiate both work and the care of children. Developing an approach to levelling up that is as much about elevating the status, culture and values of the masses in elite institutions, which remain dominated by vicious ideological minorities. Offering more than a debt option to people who need to upskill and reskill, extending the right to buy to those who rent in the private sector, not just the public. And challenging the elevation and ascendancy of unrepresentative minorities who unhinge majorities from their shared norms, language and collective belief. We must orient all of government around this, stopping for example the unhinged desperation of the Treasury to repeat a George Osborne-like austerity drive through an unnecessary rise in national insurance.
Politics has inverted – it’s a Disraelian moment and it’s time for a prime minister and Conservatives to craft politics that genuinely advance the British working class, or accept that they may not govern again.