The following is a letter to the Conservative Party Chairman from a member of the Campaign for Conservative Democracy:
Dear Richard, many thanks for this opportunity to share thoughts & ideas.
Firstly, we need to accept what just happened & be honest. There was no shift to Labour who had fewer votes than in 2019. The Tory vote stayed at home or voted Reform. We need to disavow ourselves of the notion that the result was to do with a right wing element. We should also recognise that the membership in voting for Truss over Sunak, voted for the policy not the person.
The damage of the Truss leadership was largely one of implementation, not policy, and especially the energy price cap that had not been discussed during hustings & was what caught the markets on the hop. The LDI situation simply exacerbated the situation. Dropping the entire policy suite rather than accommodating much of & better implementing it has been a huge mistake.
The Party has drifted into following polls rather than influencing them. As a result it has departed from traditional conservative/classical liberal philosophy. Free speech, equality under the law, property rights, low taxation, small government. When Thatcher revitalised the Party ahead of the 1979 election she did so on philosophical rather than policy grounds. This needs to happen again.
The Party has gone along with the narrative, largely pushed by progressives, that populism is a rising problem. But so called populists are not on the streets as activists are; they are more correctly classical liberal reactionaries who remain attached to the ballot box. Their frustrations are hence manifested in staying at home or voting Reform.
You can also see the growth of civic/grass roots movements, engaging in this classical liberal revival: FSU, New Culture Forum, Academy of Ideas, Equiano, Together, Don't Divide Us, etc. It should engage with these movements, because insurgent parties recognise this & already are doing so.
We need to recognise that the so-called centre has drifted left in the last 2-3 decades, assisted by the Tories wilderness years producing an 'heirs to Blair' mentality. The failure of the ensuing technocracy is what the membership & the country are walking away from. This will continue because the Labour Party, as a continuum, will be disastrous.
This is why 'winning from the centre' is a delusion. We need to recognise that the Overton window is shifting to the right & that is where the centre is going to lie as we go into the next election. The Red Wall will fall to Reform unopposed.
When the Party returned to power in coalition, it failed to understand what had happened under New Labour. Power had shifted from Parliament to NGOs & Supreme Court. To some extent it approved of this democratic deficit for its own purposes, but instead of replacing the heads of these bodies with Conservative thinkers it stuck with the 'cool' progressives. We can now see the damaging results.
Worse, we brought in NGOs of our own such as the OBR which helped to institutionalise many of the mistakes of the Brown chancellorship. Neither did we bring in fresh blood at the Treasury, BoE or MPC to form fresh ideas, so again, continuity Brown.
We are intellectually shallow. We have not tried to seize the narrative over net zero, where the lack of debate is leading to an energy policy that will undoubtedly fail & is not even environmentally friendly.
Similarly, immigration, where the tired ideas of boosting GDP ignore the deteriorating GDP/Capita numbers & infrastructure problems.
With Covid, we did not stick with Conservative principles & too easily took a technocratic approach, using coercion rather than persuasion. The lack of a cost-benefit study pushed us into a damaging long term economic problem.
With Brexit, we have not attempted to use the fact as an opportunity, looking at it as a failure to be 'managed'. I suggest the entire Party read Roger Scruton's 'Where We Are' (2017). We can collaborate with the continent, but we should recognise the decline of the EU (obvious to many) as a warning & not as something we should embrace like a comfort blanket.
We have completely ignored cultural matters as seemingly insignificant. These were policy open goals, given a population that is still socially conservative, which we did not take advantage of. By the next election, culture is going to rise in salience.
The Party Board & Chairman needs to embrace the CDO initiatives & discuss them openly & broadly. The membership is a very important part of the Party, having witnessed in the election campaign the lack of foot soldiers. It used to be the main source of funds, but now we rely on donors, some of whom are knowingly dodgy, and who may now desert the party out of government.
We need to seriously consider whether the centralisation of the Party. More power needs to be given to local constituencies over candidate selection, with CCHQ simply rooting out the mad, bad & sad. It is frankly outrageous that someone such as Lord Frost cannot find a seat in which to challenge.
If this were to happen, it may not even be necessary to have the membership involved in the leadership selection.
The membership needs more involvement in conference & hence policy.
Many thanks in advance.
Bruce Goodwin
