Picture shows Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch.
The Tory party is being hit by a veritable wave of defections to the Reform Party. Some of those who have defected I would reasonably assume are defecting for cynical reasons such as hoping to save their Parliamentary seats should the Tories take a massive hit at election time. Some of those are without doubt likely to be hypocrites as they are going to be railing against policies as Reform members/MP’s that they might have supported during their time as Tory MP’s or Ministers. However I’m giving those in the second category a bit of a pass as many of us understand that it is possible for a person to change their political views and travel from Left to Right or vice versa in response to new information or life events that cause them to change their views.
A lot of those former Tories who have joined Reform are those Tories who are from the Right of the party. This is depleting the Tory party of political talent from the party’s Right and increasing the influence of those Tories who are basically Lib Dems with blue rosettes.
I believe that this will present a problem for the Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch. Politics is changing and public attitudes to things like migration, transgenderism, top down multiculturalism and an end to two tier policing and governance are hardening to an extent that would have been unimaginable ten or fifteen years ago. The Tory Party is going to have to present policy proposals that attract this new more hardline electorate if they are to a) fend off Reform and b) encourage a whole lot of voters who had previously felt let down by the Tories on certain issues to vote Tory again.
I’m sure that Ms Badenoch is clever enough to realise this and to see which way the political winds are blowing in the UK. Decent and in touch Tory leaders have always known that you need to go where the voters go. It’s why Britain had in the period between the 1950’s and early 1970’s a time which has become referred to as Butskillite from the period of broad agreement on social and economic issues between the Tory party influenced by Rab Butler and a Labour party that was personified by Huge Gaitskell. There was an agreement between Tory and Labour that social programmes, a mixed economy and a welfare state were not to be messed with. In my view that wasn’t just because of elites deciding to agree with one another, it was also because these policies were popular with the electorate at the time. An electorate who had amongst it older voters who remembered the privations of the 1930’s, the horrors of the First World War, the Second World War and the crushing fear of the Workhouse, liked social policies that made their lives better. It would have been political suicide for the Tories to be a fully Thatcherite free market promoting and public sector funding cutting party in say 1960. Such a party would have been completely monstered by Labour at election time.
Back then the Tories read the room and had enough politicians within the party who understood that they needed to go where the voters were politically. I do wonder whether the Tories are able to do that now?
I say that because with the country shifting towards a nebulous nationalistic Right of various flavours will a Tory Party stuffed with politicians who might be a better political fit with the Lib Dems, put in place and actually carry out the sort of policies that much of the public seems to want? At present the Tory Party as a whole is being blamed for many of the problems, especially the migration and ‘woke’ problems because many of these issues grew up during the Tories 14 year period in office either on their own or in partnership with the Lib Dems between 2010 and 2015 or when they won by a small majority in 2015, or in subsequent elections. Tories promised that they would control migration for example and did the complete opposite and gave us the Boriswave of migration. For a lot of people the Tories under all their leaders since 2010 have been a massive let down.
The Tories could have turned this round after 2024. They could have looked at the way the electorate is going and follow them and maybe that is the instinct of Ms Badenoch to do so.
I suspect that what Ms Badenoch might like to do would be to put out a comprehensive policy set that gives the British people much of what they seem to be hankering after such as better protected borders, maybe some remigration type policies, the evisceration of identity politics stuff in the public sector, rule of law reforms etc etc. She might be able to put together a policy team to create these policies but how would they be sold to the public? There’s a lot of people who now say that Tory promises are like pie crust and easily broken and that’s going to take a lot of concerted political effort to get over. She would need a large and active cohort of the sort of Tories on the Right who have both public recognition and public trust to be able to do this. The problem for Ms Badenoch is that these are the sort of Tories who are either lying low or have decamped to Reform.
Ms Badenoch might end up in the unenviable situation where her inner circle is producing amazing policies of the sort that the public seem to want and which would fend off the political threat from Reform only to find that the majority of her Parliamentary party, the most important bit, is vehemently opposed to such policies and will block them when they can. If there’s not enough Right wingers left in the Tories then even the best formulated policies might not come to practical fruition because of blocking from very liberal Tory MP’s.
Ms Badenoch needs the resources of the Tory Right in order to convince the public that the Tory party are now on the side of the ordinary Briton but that resource seems to be depleting fast. I don’t know how Ms Badenoch can square this circle. The only way that’s possible as I see it is for Ms Badenoch to rein in maybe with the threat of deselection, some of the worst offenders when it comes to Lib Dems posing as Tories. Whether she’ll do this sort of thing is another matter.
She’s got to, because the electorate are rushing towards the Right, make the Tories explicitly Right wing again. It doesn’t have to be loonspud Right but just Right enough to make the Tories trustworthy on things like migration, social policies, identity politics and the economy again. If we continue with the situation where the Tories are perceived by the public as a party that campaigns Right but governs Left then the Tories are going to continue to lose public support. The Tories have got to say what they are for and what they are against and have a mostly unified view on these matters. Allowing the Lib Dems in Tory clothes to control the party has been a terrible and failed experiment for both the party and the nation. Kemi Badenoch needs to call an end to the currents in Toryism that have created such a profound failure by the Tory Party to understand the electorate and act on their concerns. If she does this then she could go down in history as one of the greats in Tory leadership and be spoken of alongside the likes of Charles Grey who brought in the Great Reform Act of 1832 which gave more Britons the vote and helped to stave off potential civil unrest. If she doesn’t do what’s needed then she will be remembered among the less than effective Tory leaders such as William Hague and her party will end up as a footnote from history.