Pandering to Reform won’t revive the Conservative Party, it will kill it
The Conservative Party doesn’t need to unite with Reform, it needs to remember what it stands for, writes Aaron Newbury
In a political world where nuance gives way to performance, Robert Jenrick’s call to “unite the right” might animate concerned Tory councillors facing the polls next week. But let’s not kid ourselves.
Folding the Conservative Party into a nationalist-populist blob with Reform may go some way to mitigate electoral risks, but it risks something far greater: trading principles for votes, and killing off Britain’s free-market soul in the process.
The Conservatives once stood for something
There was a time (and I for one hope there still is) when the Conservative Party was the party of free enterprise, individual aspiration and entrepreneurship. It was a movement that believed the greatest minority was the individual, and that life was to be lived free.
But that movement has increasingly been at risk of becoming the home of pessimism, protectionism and paternalistic politics. Jenrick’s musings may be manna for Reform UK voters, turned off by the Conservatives’ less-than-inspirational post-Covid turmoil, but they should terrify anyone who believes in open markets, personal freedom and a dynamic, global, entrepreneurial Britain.
Reports abound this week that Robert Jenrick, leadership rival to Kemi Badenoch, suggested it was time for Conservatives and Reform voters to “bring this coalition together“. As if trading principles to block Starmer from another term in Number Ten were the end goal of politics for the right.
His implication? A Jenrick-led unification of the country’s right-wing parties, fusing the Tory base with Nigel Farage’s latest vehicle of populist fury. Sources in the Jenrick camp say he meant voters, not party machines, but the message is clear: subsume conservatism beneath a new veneer of populism and nationalism, and call it a win.
No doubt this is a tempting proposal for party apparatchiks in Westminster, concerned as they will be by vote-splitting. Such concerns will only intensify next week, following what will likely be damaging local council elections for the Conservatives. But electoral convenience is not the same as ideological soundness, and this shift threatens to push the politics of aspiration off the map completely.
London is still a city of aspiration
I’ve worked in politics in London for nearly a decade. Our city is not, as many in the Conservative machine believe, some sort of ‘lefty black hole’. It’s a place where the aspirational come in their millions to seek a better life, in whatever shape that may take. London is a signal. One that shouts that Britain still matters, still competes, and still leads in global finance, in technology and in so much more. None of that happened because we blocked ourselves off, erected barriers to trade, or chased populist grievances.
It happened because we opened up, welcoming capital, talent and ideas. The Conservatives under Thatcher championed this core ideal, standing up for an aspirational nation, one of enterprise, privatisation and one that enabled people to purchase their council homes. In fact, when I first moved to London, one of the most robust Conservatives I met was at a technology company.
Essex born and bred, she was an account manager who had been able to purchase her first home because of Thatcher’s reforms, and would never hear an ill word against ‘Maggie’, something which often made any discussion on politics with some of the more Corbynite staff far more electric.
It was this model, despite its imperfections, that made our country dynamic and enabled it to punch above its weight on the world stage. And it could be so again, if we stop allowing the nostalgia born of collectivism, whether it stems from the left or the populist right, to rewrite the terms of debate.
Reform is not interested in innovation
Jenrick’s proposed “unity” would make London’s innovators the enemy, not the engine. It would confuse national interest with economic insularity, and abandon the very formula that made the UK globally competitive in the first place. Which policies of Reform would the Conservative Party need to embrace as part of this great unification? Nationalisation of British Steel, perhaps? A policy so obviously absurd it should be soundly dismissed.
The rise of Reform cannot solely be viewed as a threat, but as an opportunity to restate what conservatism can truly mean for Britons everywhere. It’s a chance to restate the case for free markets, limited taxation, deregulation and open trade.
For years, the Conservatives stood for a set of ideals which showed that freedom works. It works better than technocracy, better than central planning, and certainly better than a nationalist form of economic engineering.
The last thing our country needs is a new form of “managed decline” dressed up as post-Brexit realism. It needs a supply-side revival: serious tax reform, bold deregulation and a willingness to embrace global trade, not fear it.
An opportunity for the Conservatives
London’s Conservatives, and indeed the wider party, have an opportunity here to be a leading voice in the call for a better approach to politics. Londoners are not crying out for culture wars. They want tax cuts. They are not crying out for closed borders, but for smarter immigration so they can hire the talent their businesses need. Startups want regulators that don’t strangle their ambition, not a handout from the state or a quango.
True revival, or to coin a phrase popular with the current party leadership, renewal, will not come from aping Nigel Farage. It will come from outflanking other parties on growth, enterprise and upward, aspirational mobility. Freedom, free markets and everything that comes with them are not some dusty ideology, they are the only pathway back to prosperity.
The right does not need to “unite”. It needs to wake up. A party that sells its soul for electoral arithmetic will find itself winning something meaningless. And whilst this political chess is played out in Westminster, young aspirational voters, the ones who still believe in building something, are watching.
We need a revival of the freedom-loving, risk-taking, future-building politics that made this country matter. A Jenrick/Farage blob won’t do that. But maybe, just maybe, a bold Conservative Party still can.
Aaron Newbury is a former Conservative Party press officer