Tories the future (part1)
Discussion
McWigglebum4th said:
I think that both main parties seem to exist in a little london centric bubble of PC right-on bulls
t laden dreamworld
If anything i think that tory party are slightly more aware that something does exist outside of the M25.
The main reason people vote labour is to keep the tory party out
While most tory voters are voting tory to keep the labour party out
And then he goes and sacks Owen Paterson. Proof, if it were needed, that Cameron has little clue. He is taking what used to be the Conservative core voters out in the country for granted. Those once core voters have found that the Tory party has moved away from them, so many of them are returning the compliment. t laden dreamworldIf anything i think that tory party are slightly more aware that something does exist outside of the M25.
The main reason people vote labour is to keep the tory party out
While most tory voters are voting tory to keep the labour party out
One can argue the same sort of thing for Labour.
Will in twenty years people look back at this time and see a wholesale political realignment? The current established parties need to reinvent themselves or in worst case tear themselves to basics and start again.
FiF said:
And then he goes and sacks Owen Paterson. Proof, if it were needed, that Cameron has little clue. He is taking what used to be the Conservative core voters out in the country for granted. Those once core voters have found that the Tory party has moved away from them, so many of them are returning the compliment.
One can argue the same sort of thing for Labour.
Will in twenty years people look back at this time and see a wholesale political realignment? The current established parties need to reinvent themselves or in worst case tear themselves to basics and start again.
I think maybe the Owen Patterson thing is more tall poppy/green crap from CMD , really our current bunch are just immature kids in politicians bodys, a product of the system not experience of the real world..One can argue the same sort of thing for Labour.
Will in twenty years people look back at this time and see a wholesale political realignment? The current established parties need to reinvent themselves or in worst case tear themselves to basics and start again.
Esseesse said:
Derek Smith said:
I would not say small government is necessarily unique to tories. It is, of course, classic liberal, which is how I'd describe my own beliefs, although by no means a liberal.
Do you not mean classic libertarianism?Classical liberalism is a philosophy committed to the ideal of limited government and liberty of individuals including freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and free markets.
It obviously goes on a bit more.
AJS- said:
Seems like Boris Johnson is lining himself up for the leadership role next. Clever long term campaign of popular baffoonery to become well known then using the mayoralty to establish serious Boris.
Two points.Firstly, he needs to become an MP (until he does this he is on a parallel track
) .Secondly - and possibly more importantly to many in London (and of concern to the rest of us, read on) - he is already mayor and spouting unmitigated bo
cks such as offering diesel owners £2k to scrap their 2 year old cars 
. The man is not currently credible - if he wishes to portray "serious Boris" to a majority rather than to a few melons he'd better pull his finger out pretty sharpish! - yet (sadly 
) he will go far politically. I can see him as Tory PM in due course... 
To sum up, modern day politics is a race to the bottom in that no bugger wants to lead a main political party "in power" nowadays
... UKIP seems to be an exception, which is a reflection on how poorly regarded "mainstream" politics is in the UK .Love her or hate her, at least Mrs Thatcher had a backbone - the courage of her convictions - and stood by her statements etc
rather than backing down when the tide turned like the current jellyfish do. As such, she is arguably an example of what a major politician should be rather than any particular policies she followed 
.
According to Revd Blair, the future for the Tories includes a 2015 election victory thanks to Ed Miliband.
Miliband has failed to connect with voters and is doomed to election defeat
"The former Prime Minister has apparently told long-standing political allies that the under-fire Labour leader 'cannot beat' David Cameron in next year's vote"
Miliband has failed to connect with voters and is doomed to election defeat
"The former Prime Minister has apparently told long-standing political allies that the under-fire Labour leader 'cannot beat' David Cameron in next year's vote"
He's technically right though. In the normal scheme of things at this stage in the election cycle Labour should be about 20 points ahead of the incumbent government in order to give them a good chance of overall victory in face of a government surge in the latter stages of the campaign.
Where they are should in theory mean that Cons returned to power with an overall majority.
Problem is the changing landscape, both parties losing votes to UKIP, Cons possibly suffering more than Labour, especially when considering the collapse of the LD vote. Labour will benefit from that mostly, Greens next and UKIP will even gain some votes. Cons will not gain much imo.
Which leaves with a no overall majority and whoever can cobble a coalition together.
In the old scheme of things that would predict a fairly short term and a snap election called if circumstances are favourable or if a vote of no confidence goes against the government. But we're in fixed term territory.
Who knows what the hell will happen tbh.
Where they are should in theory mean that Cons returned to power with an overall majority.
Problem is the changing landscape, both parties losing votes to UKIP, Cons possibly suffering more than Labour, especially when considering the collapse of the LD vote. Labour will benefit from that mostly, Greens next and UKIP will even gain some votes. Cons will not gain much imo.
Which leaves with a no overall majority and whoever can cobble a coalition together.
In the old scheme of things that would predict a fairly short term and a snap election called if circumstances are favourable or if a vote of no confidence goes against the government. But we're in fixed term territory.
Who knows what the hell will happen tbh.
Well this thread seems to be dying, much like the Tory party
Conservative party becomes a broad coalition again or it dies
http://www.conservativehome.com/thetorydiary/2014/...
Conservative party becomes a broad coalition again or it dies
http://www.conservativehome.com/thetorydiary/2014/...
Tim Montgomerie said:
The differences I have with Matthew Parris are strategic rather than personal, but they’re certainly not trivial. Matthew and I are, on the face of it, supporters of the same party, but I have read some of Matthew’s recent articles and have disagreed more with them than with many pieces written by people in other political parties.
I don’t want to start with now, however, and our parochial differences. Instead, I want to transport us back to another time. A time so far away that no one had even heard of David Beckham. The great Manchester United player hadn’t even got one tattoo. It’s 1992. Charles and Diana are still married – if not happily. No ordinary family has internet in their homes. Not a single ball has been kicked in the premiership. It was the last year in which the Conservatives won a parliamentary majority. And perhaps the last year they ever will. 22 years ago. The party that was the most successful of its kind in the 20th century has ceased to be successful.
When David Cameron became Tory leader in 2005 he was not wrong to argue that the Conservative Party needed to change. It clearly did. But he went about changing the party in the wrong way.
Remember how he started his leadership? Talk about Europe and immigration was banned. There were to be no unfunded tax cuts. He and George Osborne were promising to match Gordon Brown’s spend-a-thon juggernaut – matching borrowed pound for borrowed pound. Cameron and Osborne rejected the tax commission led by Lord Forsyth that they had established and which had advocated a higher starting threshold for income tax. The Liberal Democrats were not first with the policy which has become one of this coalition government’s flagship policies. General Well-Being was In; old-fashioned ideas such as GDP were out. There was not going to be a reorganisation of the NHS. It was NHYes and No to grammar schools? Green was, for a while, the new blue.
One year into this extraordinary experiment in centre right politics, I met the greatest living conservative leader – John Howard – at his prime ministerial offices in Sydney. Although it was 2006, I can still vividly remember the fear he shared with me. If David Cameron carries on like this, he said, ignoring traditional Tory concerns, he’ll split the Conservative Party in two. You don’t take your wife to a dance, he said, and then dance with other women all night. Not if you want your marriage to survive.
And, of course, Howard was right. The Conservative Party is now split in a way that it has never been split before. Over half of the voters that the Conservative Party has lost since the last election have defected to UKIP. The MPs and councillors defecting to UKIP are nearly all Tory. Nigel Farage’s policies on tax, Europe, immigration and crime are all recognisably right-of-centre. This is, as a book has documented, a Revolt on the Right – a revolt against a leadership of the Conservative Party that took for granted the voters Mrs Thatcher wooed so assiduously.
No successful conservative leader anywhere in the world can win without what was called Essex Man by Maggie. Reagan Democrats in the USA. Timothy Horton voters by Canada’s Stephen Harper. Battlers by John Howard. Every successful conservative leader needs culturally conservative, economically disadvantaged voters to form a majority. Cameron tried to replace what we might call Sun readers with Guardian readers – or at least Times readers. But there simply aren’t enough people like Matthew Parris in this world for such a strategy to work! It was a project doomed to fail, and if it wasn’t for the greatest gift to conservatism of modern times – yes, I’m talking about Ed Miliband – it would be a project that would very clearly be heading for catastrophic defeat next May.
Let me be clear at this point. I’ll be voting Tory at the next election. I couldn’t support UKIP. I worry about its isolationism, its refusal to fight ISIS and Nigel Farage’s warm words about Vladimir Putin. His opposition to the foreign aid budget and gay marriage. At the Eastleigh by-election UKIP simultaneously promised to spend a lot more and tax a lot less. Even Ed Balls has a more responsible fiscal policy! Now, in reaching out to Labour voters, UKIP has become anti-reformist on the NHS, but it still promises to cut tax for the rich. Contradictions don’t always matter in opposition. The Liberal Democrats who played left in the north and right in the south were only found out in government, but UKIP is not only an incoherent political force. Its ambitions to win in Labour as well as Tory backyards are resulting in greater and greater incoherence, not less. Anyone joins this moving vehicle at their own risk. Its destination is unknown.
But to the nub of the exam question we’ve been set tonight. Should Conservatives woo UKIP’s voters or should we turn our back on them and look to the rising classes of Cambridge and Canary Wharf? We might call it “the Go Away Clacton” strategy. Of course not. The Tory modernisation that still needs to take place is one that challenges the biggest obstacle to people voting Conservative: that it is a party of the rich. On this the opinion polling is absolutely clear. Floating voters don’t see racism, sexism or homophobia as the reason they won’t vote Tory, as distasteful as these things are. It’s the idea that Tories would leave them alone in tough times. They want a right-wing party but they want that right-wing party to have a heart.
What we can learn from UKIP is that:
We shouldn’t be embarrassed at wanting to govern ourselves, rather than give ever more power to the people who devised the Eurozone, the Common Agricultural Policy and an environmental policy that has accelerated this continent’s deindustrialisation (without cutting global emissions).
That immigration – while welcome in many respects – does have consequences for house prices, wages and piles pressure on public services.
That people want authenticity from their politicians rather than endlessly focus grouped messages.
When many in his own party warned Cameron on all of these matters, the small, isolated clique of advisers and pollsters that he surrounded himself with blocked their ears. It has taken UKIP to put all of these important issues on to the political agenda.
A final thought before I sit down. The best politicians don’t focus on winning elections – they focus on doing the right thing for the country. And actually doing the right thing is the most sensible electoral thing to do, too. Look after the country, its economy and its security, and the opinion polls will take care of themselves. Focus on the opinion polls, and you don’t fix the country and ultimately voters won’t thank you.
It’s the danger that Cameron fell into when in the last reshuffle he moved so many of his most reforming ministers – notably Michael Gove, Owen Paterson and Nicholas Boles. Moving one or two of them might have been understandable. Moving all of them – at the same time as effectively abandoning deficit reduction – looks like a retreat from the position which gave the Conservative party its best hope: being the party of serious, patriotic reform rather than the position that Ed Miliband and Nigel Farage share – of empty populism.
And guess what? The person who has best articulated this position is my friend Matthew Parris. I think his columns on Clacton and immigration and Douglas Carswell were stinkers. But in a column from last November he wrote this:
“Futurism should lie at the heart of a 21st-century Conservative appeal. Futurism in which people can believe, futurism without science fiction, futurism shorn of the purple prose of hack speechwriters .?.?. a strong, imaginative, optimistic story about the projects we can begin now, the forests we can plant now, the flood-defences we can build now, the plans our draughtsmen can start working on now, all to create for the future a place where some of us may never even ourselves set foot.”
Matthew concluded:
“Some time ago I visited Michael Heseltine’s arboretum in Northamptonshire. Passion undimmed, he is still planning for his arboretum, planting saplings he will never see as trees. If you want a metaphor for Conservative futurism, I can offer no better.”
Nor can I – but the Tory arboretum can’t just contain trees that Matthew likes.
Matthew worries that some in UKIP want a country where everyone looks the same. I worry that Matthew wants a party where we all think as he does. He is that very modern phenomenon that is very powerful in the Liberal Democrats – an illiberal liberal who will tolerate anyone as long as they agree with him. Just as some in UKIP hate the diversity of modern Britain, Matthew Parris and certain modernisers are in danger of becoming haters, too. Hating the politics of places like Clacton. Accusing all people who worry about immigration of being racist. Deciding that anyone who questions David Cameron is an extremist.
Hate has no place in a successful political party. The best politicians love their country and the people in it. It’s true of Boris Johnson today and it was true of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Their open arms conservatism is infectious. Conservatives must be a broad church – an arboretum of many trees. One where we can disagree without regarding people who have concerns about immigration as racist and where principled people who disagree with gay marriage aren’t seen as bigots. When voters with legitimate concerns look at the Conservative Party and perceive a party that doesn’t even try to understand them we can’t be surprised when they vote UKIP or vote for another party.
The Conservative Party becomes a broad church again – or, quite simply, it ceases to be the great electoral force that it once was. Forever.
I don’t want to start with now, however, and our parochial differences. Instead, I want to transport us back to another time. A time so far away that no one had even heard of David Beckham. The great Manchester United player hadn’t even got one tattoo. It’s 1992. Charles and Diana are still married – if not happily. No ordinary family has internet in their homes. Not a single ball has been kicked in the premiership. It was the last year in which the Conservatives won a parliamentary majority. And perhaps the last year they ever will. 22 years ago. The party that was the most successful of its kind in the 20th century has ceased to be successful.
When David Cameron became Tory leader in 2005 he was not wrong to argue that the Conservative Party needed to change. It clearly did. But he went about changing the party in the wrong way.
Remember how he started his leadership? Talk about Europe and immigration was banned. There were to be no unfunded tax cuts. He and George Osborne were promising to match Gordon Brown’s spend-a-thon juggernaut – matching borrowed pound for borrowed pound. Cameron and Osborne rejected the tax commission led by Lord Forsyth that they had established and which had advocated a higher starting threshold for income tax. The Liberal Democrats were not first with the policy which has become one of this coalition government’s flagship policies. General Well-Being was In; old-fashioned ideas such as GDP were out. There was not going to be a reorganisation of the NHS. It was NHYes and No to grammar schools? Green was, for a while, the new blue.
One year into this extraordinary experiment in centre right politics, I met the greatest living conservative leader – John Howard – at his prime ministerial offices in Sydney. Although it was 2006, I can still vividly remember the fear he shared with me. If David Cameron carries on like this, he said, ignoring traditional Tory concerns, he’ll split the Conservative Party in two. You don’t take your wife to a dance, he said, and then dance with other women all night. Not if you want your marriage to survive.
And, of course, Howard was right. The Conservative Party is now split in a way that it has never been split before. Over half of the voters that the Conservative Party has lost since the last election have defected to UKIP. The MPs and councillors defecting to UKIP are nearly all Tory. Nigel Farage’s policies on tax, Europe, immigration and crime are all recognisably right-of-centre. This is, as a book has documented, a Revolt on the Right – a revolt against a leadership of the Conservative Party that took for granted the voters Mrs Thatcher wooed so assiduously.
No successful conservative leader anywhere in the world can win without what was called Essex Man by Maggie. Reagan Democrats in the USA. Timothy Horton voters by Canada’s Stephen Harper. Battlers by John Howard. Every successful conservative leader needs culturally conservative, economically disadvantaged voters to form a majority. Cameron tried to replace what we might call Sun readers with Guardian readers – or at least Times readers. But there simply aren’t enough people like Matthew Parris in this world for such a strategy to work! It was a project doomed to fail, and if it wasn’t for the greatest gift to conservatism of modern times – yes, I’m talking about Ed Miliband – it would be a project that would very clearly be heading for catastrophic defeat next May.
Let me be clear at this point. I’ll be voting Tory at the next election. I couldn’t support UKIP. I worry about its isolationism, its refusal to fight ISIS and Nigel Farage’s warm words about Vladimir Putin. His opposition to the foreign aid budget and gay marriage. At the Eastleigh by-election UKIP simultaneously promised to spend a lot more and tax a lot less. Even Ed Balls has a more responsible fiscal policy! Now, in reaching out to Labour voters, UKIP has become anti-reformist on the NHS, but it still promises to cut tax for the rich. Contradictions don’t always matter in opposition. The Liberal Democrats who played left in the north and right in the south were only found out in government, but UKIP is not only an incoherent political force. Its ambitions to win in Labour as well as Tory backyards are resulting in greater and greater incoherence, not less. Anyone joins this moving vehicle at their own risk. Its destination is unknown.
But to the nub of the exam question we’ve been set tonight. Should Conservatives woo UKIP’s voters or should we turn our back on them and look to the rising classes of Cambridge and Canary Wharf? We might call it “the Go Away Clacton” strategy. Of course not. The Tory modernisation that still needs to take place is one that challenges the biggest obstacle to people voting Conservative: that it is a party of the rich. On this the opinion polling is absolutely clear. Floating voters don’t see racism, sexism or homophobia as the reason they won’t vote Tory, as distasteful as these things are. It’s the idea that Tories would leave them alone in tough times. They want a right-wing party but they want that right-wing party to have a heart.
What we can learn from UKIP is that:
We shouldn’t be embarrassed at wanting to govern ourselves, rather than give ever more power to the people who devised the Eurozone, the Common Agricultural Policy and an environmental policy that has accelerated this continent’s deindustrialisation (without cutting global emissions).
That immigration – while welcome in many respects – does have consequences for house prices, wages and piles pressure on public services.
That people want authenticity from their politicians rather than endlessly focus grouped messages.
When many in his own party warned Cameron on all of these matters, the small, isolated clique of advisers and pollsters that he surrounded himself with blocked their ears. It has taken UKIP to put all of these important issues on to the political agenda.
A final thought before I sit down. The best politicians don’t focus on winning elections – they focus on doing the right thing for the country. And actually doing the right thing is the most sensible electoral thing to do, too. Look after the country, its economy and its security, and the opinion polls will take care of themselves. Focus on the opinion polls, and you don’t fix the country and ultimately voters won’t thank you.
It’s the danger that Cameron fell into when in the last reshuffle he moved so many of his most reforming ministers – notably Michael Gove, Owen Paterson and Nicholas Boles. Moving one or two of them might have been understandable. Moving all of them – at the same time as effectively abandoning deficit reduction – looks like a retreat from the position which gave the Conservative party its best hope: being the party of serious, patriotic reform rather than the position that Ed Miliband and Nigel Farage share – of empty populism.
And guess what? The person who has best articulated this position is my friend Matthew Parris. I think his columns on Clacton and immigration and Douglas Carswell were stinkers. But in a column from last November he wrote this:
“Futurism should lie at the heart of a 21st-century Conservative appeal. Futurism in which people can believe, futurism without science fiction, futurism shorn of the purple prose of hack speechwriters .?.?. a strong, imaginative, optimistic story about the projects we can begin now, the forests we can plant now, the flood-defences we can build now, the plans our draughtsmen can start working on now, all to create for the future a place where some of us may never even ourselves set foot.”
Matthew concluded:
“Some time ago I visited Michael Heseltine’s arboretum in Northamptonshire. Passion undimmed, he is still planning for his arboretum, planting saplings he will never see as trees. If you want a metaphor for Conservative futurism, I can offer no better.”
Nor can I – but the Tory arboretum can’t just contain trees that Matthew likes.
Matthew worries that some in UKIP want a country where everyone looks the same. I worry that Matthew wants a party where we all think as he does. He is that very modern phenomenon that is very powerful in the Liberal Democrats – an illiberal liberal who will tolerate anyone as long as they agree with him. Just as some in UKIP hate the diversity of modern Britain, Matthew Parris and certain modernisers are in danger of becoming haters, too. Hating the politics of places like Clacton. Accusing all people who worry about immigration of being racist. Deciding that anyone who questions David Cameron is an extremist.
Hate has no place in a successful political party. The best politicians love their country and the people in it. It’s true of Boris Johnson today and it was true of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Their open arms conservatism is infectious. Conservatives must be a broad church – an arboretum of many trees. One where we can disagree without regarding people who have concerns about immigration as racist and where principled people who disagree with gay marriage aren’t seen as bigots. When voters with legitimate concerns look at the Conservative Party and perceive a party that doesn’t even try to understand them we can’t be surprised when they vote UKIP or vote for another party.
The Conservative Party becomes a broad church again – or, quite simply, it ceases to be the great electoral force that it once was. Forever.
FiF said:
Well this thread seems to be dying, much like the Tory party
Conservative party becomes a broad coalition again or it dies
http://www.conservativehome.com/thetorydiary/2014/...
Things not looking too good for the Cons in Rochester.Conservative party becomes a broad coalition again or it dies
http://www.conservativehome.com/thetorydiary/2014/...
Tim Montgomerie said:
The differences I have with Matthew Parris are strategic rather than personal, but they’re certainly not trivial. Matthew and I are, on the face of it, supporters of the same party, but I have read some of Matthew’s recent articles and have disagreed more with them than with many pieces written by people in other political parties.
I don’t want to start with now, however, and our parochial differences. Instead, I want to transport us back to another time. A time so far away that no one had even heard of David Beckham. The great Manchester United player hadn’t even got one tattoo. It’s 1992. Charles and Diana are still married – if not happily. No ordinary family has internet in their homes. Not a single ball has been kicked in the premiership. It was the last year in which the Conservatives won a parliamentary majority. And perhaps the last year they ever will. 22 years ago. The party that was the most successful of its kind in the 20th century has ceased to be successful.
When David Cameron became Tory leader in 2005 he was not wrong to argue that the Conservative Party needed to change. It clearly did. But he went about changing the party in the wrong way.
Remember how he started his leadership? Talk about Europe and immigration was banned. There were to be no unfunded tax cuts. He and George Osborne were promising to match Gordon Brown’s spend-a-thon juggernaut – matching borrowed pound for borrowed pound. Cameron and Osborne rejected the tax commission led by Lord Forsyth that they had established and which had advocated a higher starting threshold for income tax. The Liberal Democrats were not first with the policy which has become one of this coalition government’s flagship policies. General Well-Being was In; old-fashioned ideas such as GDP were out. There was not going to be a reorganisation of the NHS. It was NHYes and No to grammar schools? Green was, for a while, the new blue.
One year into this extraordinary experiment in centre right politics, I met the greatest living conservative leader – John Howard – at his prime ministerial offices in Sydney. Although it was 2006, I can still vividly remember the fear he shared with me. If David Cameron carries on like this, he said, ignoring traditional Tory concerns, he’ll split the Conservative Party in two. You don’t take your wife to a dance, he said, and then dance with other women all night. Not if you want your marriage to survive.
And, of course, Howard was right. The Conservative Party is now split in a way that it has never been split before. Over half of the voters that the Conservative Party has lost since the last election have defected to UKIP. The MPs and councillors defecting to UKIP are nearly all Tory. Nigel Farage’s policies on tax, Europe, immigration and crime are all recognisably right-of-centre. This is, as a book has documented, a Revolt on the Right – a revolt against a leadership of the Conservative Party that took for granted the voters Mrs Thatcher wooed so assiduously.
No successful conservative leader anywhere in the world can win without what was called Essex Man by Maggie. Reagan Democrats in the USA. Timothy Horton voters by Canada’s Stephen Harper. Battlers by John Howard. Every successful conservative leader needs culturally conservative, economically disadvantaged voters to form a majority. Cameron tried to replace what we might call Sun readers with Guardian readers – or at least Times readers. But there simply aren’t enough people like Matthew Parris in this world for such a strategy to work! It was a project doomed to fail, and if it wasn’t for the greatest gift to conservatism of modern times – yes, I’m talking about Ed Miliband – it would be a project that would very clearly be heading for catastrophic defeat next May.
Let me be clear at this point. I’ll be voting Tory at the next election. I couldn’t support UKIP. I worry about its isolationism, its refusal to fight ISIS and Nigel Farage’s warm words about Vladimir Putin. His opposition to the foreign aid budget and gay marriage. At the Eastleigh by-election UKIP simultaneously promised to spend a lot more and tax a lot less. Even Ed Balls has a more responsible fiscal policy! Now, in reaching out to Labour voters, UKIP has become anti-reformist on the NHS, but it still promises to cut tax for the rich. Contradictions don’t always matter in opposition. The Liberal Democrats who played left in the north and right in the south were only found out in government, but UKIP is not only an incoherent political force. Its ambitions to win in Labour as well as Tory backyards are resulting in greater and greater incoherence, not less. Anyone joins this moving vehicle at their own risk. Its destination is unknown.
But to the nub of the exam question we’ve been set tonight. Should Conservatives woo UKIP’s voters or should we turn our back on them and look to the rising classes of Cambridge and Canary Wharf? We might call it “the Go Away Clacton” strategy. Of course not. The Tory modernisation that still needs to take place is one that challenges the biggest obstacle to people voting Conservative: that it is a party of the rich. On this the opinion polling is absolutely clear. Floating voters don’t see racism, sexism or homophobia as the reason they won’t vote Tory, as distasteful as these things are. It’s the idea that Tories would leave them alone in tough times. They want a right-wing party but they want that right-wing party to have a heart.
What we can learn from UKIP is that:
We shouldn’t be embarrassed at wanting to govern ourselves, rather than give ever more power to the people who devised the Eurozone, the Common Agricultural Policy and an environmental policy that has accelerated this continent’s deindustrialisation (without cutting global emissions).
That immigration – while welcome in many respects – does have consequences for house prices, wages and piles pressure on public services.
That people want authenticity from their politicians rather than endlessly focus grouped messages.
When many in his own party warned Cameron on all of these matters, the small, isolated clique of advisers and pollsters that he surrounded himself with blocked their ears. It has taken UKIP to put all of these important issues on to the political agenda.
A final thought before I sit down. The best politicians don’t focus on winning elections – they focus on doing the right thing for the country. And actually doing the right thing is the most sensible electoral thing to do, too. Look after the country, its economy and its security, and the opinion polls will take care of themselves. Focus on the opinion polls, and you don’t fix the country and ultimately voters won’t thank you.
It’s the danger that Cameron fell into when in the last reshuffle he moved so many of his most reforming ministers – notably Michael Gove, Owen Paterson and Nicholas Boles. Moving one or two of them might have been understandable. Moving all of them – at the same time as effectively abandoning deficit reduction – looks like a retreat from the position which gave the Conservative party its best hope: being the party of serious, patriotic reform rather than the position that Ed Miliband and Nigel Farage share – of empty populism.
And guess what? The person who has best articulated this position is my friend Matthew Parris. I think his columns on Clacton and immigration and Douglas Carswell were stinkers. But in a column from last November he wrote this:
“Futurism should lie at the heart of a 21st-century Conservative appeal. Futurism in which people can believe, futurism without science fiction, futurism shorn of the purple prose of hack speechwriters .?.?. a strong, imaginative, optimistic story about the projects we can begin now, the forests we can plant now, the flood-defences we can build now, the plans our draughtsmen can start working on now, all to create for the future a place where some of us may never even ourselves set foot.”
Matthew concluded:
“Some time ago I visited Michael Heseltine’s arboretum in Northamptonshire. Passion undimmed, he is still planning for his arboretum, planting saplings he will never see as trees. If you want a metaphor for Conservative futurism, I can offer no better.”
Nor can I – but the Tory arboretum can’t just contain trees that Matthew likes.
Matthew worries that some in UKIP want a country where everyone looks the same. I worry that Matthew wants a party where we all think as he does. He is that very modern phenomenon that is very powerful in the Liberal Democrats – an illiberal liberal who will tolerate anyone as long as they agree with him. Just as some in UKIP hate the diversity of modern Britain, Matthew Parris and certain modernisers are in danger of becoming haters, too. Hating the politics of places like Clacton. Accusing all people who worry about immigration of being racist. Deciding that anyone who questions David Cameron is an extremist.
Hate has no place in a successful political party. The best politicians love their country and the people in it. It’s true of Boris Johnson today and it was true of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Their open arms conservatism is infectious. Conservatives must be a broad church – an arboretum of many trees. One where we can disagree without regarding people who have concerns about immigration as racist and where principled people who disagree with gay marriage aren’t seen as bigots. When voters with legitimate concerns look at the Conservative Party and perceive a party that doesn’t even try to understand them we can’t be surprised when they vote UKIP or vote for another party.
The Conservative Party becomes a broad church again – or, quite simply, it ceases to be the great electoral force that it once was. Forever.
I don’t want to start with now, however, and our parochial differences. Instead, I want to transport us back to another time. A time so far away that no one had even heard of David Beckham. The great Manchester United player hadn’t even got one tattoo. It’s 1992. Charles and Diana are still married – if not happily. No ordinary family has internet in their homes. Not a single ball has been kicked in the premiership. It was the last year in which the Conservatives won a parliamentary majority. And perhaps the last year they ever will. 22 years ago. The party that was the most successful of its kind in the 20th century has ceased to be successful.
When David Cameron became Tory leader in 2005 he was not wrong to argue that the Conservative Party needed to change. It clearly did. But he went about changing the party in the wrong way.
Remember how he started his leadership? Talk about Europe and immigration was banned. There were to be no unfunded tax cuts. He and George Osborne were promising to match Gordon Brown’s spend-a-thon juggernaut – matching borrowed pound for borrowed pound. Cameron and Osborne rejected the tax commission led by Lord Forsyth that they had established and which had advocated a higher starting threshold for income tax. The Liberal Democrats were not first with the policy which has become one of this coalition government’s flagship policies. General Well-Being was In; old-fashioned ideas such as GDP were out. There was not going to be a reorganisation of the NHS. It was NHYes and No to grammar schools? Green was, for a while, the new blue.
One year into this extraordinary experiment in centre right politics, I met the greatest living conservative leader – John Howard – at his prime ministerial offices in Sydney. Although it was 2006, I can still vividly remember the fear he shared with me. If David Cameron carries on like this, he said, ignoring traditional Tory concerns, he’ll split the Conservative Party in two. You don’t take your wife to a dance, he said, and then dance with other women all night. Not if you want your marriage to survive.
And, of course, Howard was right. The Conservative Party is now split in a way that it has never been split before. Over half of the voters that the Conservative Party has lost since the last election have defected to UKIP. The MPs and councillors defecting to UKIP are nearly all Tory. Nigel Farage’s policies on tax, Europe, immigration and crime are all recognisably right-of-centre. This is, as a book has documented, a Revolt on the Right – a revolt against a leadership of the Conservative Party that took for granted the voters Mrs Thatcher wooed so assiduously.
No successful conservative leader anywhere in the world can win without what was called Essex Man by Maggie. Reagan Democrats in the USA. Timothy Horton voters by Canada’s Stephen Harper. Battlers by John Howard. Every successful conservative leader needs culturally conservative, economically disadvantaged voters to form a majority. Cameron tried to replace what we might call Sun readers with Guardian readers – or at least Times readers. But there simply aren’t enough people like Matthew Parris in this world for such a strategy to work! It was a project doomed to fail, and if it wasn’t for the greatest gift to conservatism of modern times – yes, I’m talking about Ed Miliband – it would be a project that would very clearly be heading for catastrophic defeat next May.
Let me be clear at this point. I’ll be voting Tory at the next election. I couldn’t support UKIP. I worry about its isolationism, its refusal to fight ISIS and Nigel Farage’s warm words about Vladimir Putin. His opposition to the foreign aid budget and gay marriage. At the Eastleigh by-election UKIP simultaneously promised to spend a lot more and tax a lot less. Even Ed Balls has a more responsible fiscal policy! Now, in reaching out to Labour voters, UKIP has become anti-reformist on the NHS, but it still promises to cut tax for the rich. Contradictions don’t always matter in opposition. The Liberal Democrats who played left in the north and right in the south were only found out in government, but UKIP is not only an incoherent political force. Its ambitions to win in Labour as well as Tory backyards are resulting in greater and greater incoherence, not less. Anyone joins this moving vehicle at their own risk. Its destination is unknown.
But to the nub of the exam question we’ve been set tonight. Should Conservatives woo UKIP’s voters or should we turn our back on them and look to the rising classes of Cambridge and Canary Wharf? We might call it “the Go Away Clacton” strategy. Of course not. The Tory modernisation that still needs to take place is one that challenges the biggest obstacle to people voting Conservative: that it is a party of the rich. On this the opinion polling is absolutely clear. Floating voters don’t see racism, sexism or homophobia as the reason they won’t vote Tory, as distasteful as these things are. It’s the idea that Tories would leave them alone in tough times. They want a right-wing party but they want that right-wing party to have a heart.
What we can learn from UKIP is that:
We shouldn’t be embarrassed at wanting to govern ourselves, rather than give ever more power to the people who devised the Eurozone, the Common Agricultural Policy and an environmental policy that has accelerated this continent’s deindustrialisation (without cutting global emissions).
That immigration – while welcome in many respects – does have consequences for house prices, wages and piles pressure on public services.
That people want authenticity from their politicians rather than endlessly focus grouped messages.
When many in his own party warned Cameron on all of these matters, the small, isolated clique of advisers and pollsters that he surrounded himself with blocked their ears. It has taken UKIP to put all of these important issues on to the political agenda.
A final thought before I sit down. The best politicians don’t focus on winning elections – they focus on doing the right thing for the country. And actually doing the right thing is the most sensible electoral thing to do, too. Look after the country, its economy and its security, and the opinion polls will take care of themselves. Focus on the opinion polls, and you don’t fix the country and ultimately voters won’t thank you.
It’s the danger that Cameron fell into when in the last reshuffle he moved so many of his most reforming ministers – notably Michael Gove, Owen Paterson and Nicholas Boles. Moving one or two of them might have been understandable. Moving all of them – at the same time as effectively abandoning deficit reduction – looks like a retreat from the position which gave the Conservative party its best hope: being the party of serious, patriotic reform rather than the position that Ed Miliband and Nigel Farage share – of empty populism.
And guess what? The person who has best articulated this position is my friend Matthew Parris. I think his columns on Clacton and immigration and Douglas Carswell were stinkers. But in a column from last November he wrote this:
“Futurism should lie at the heart of a 21st-century Conservative appeal. Futurism in which people can believe, futurism without science fiction, futurism shorn of the purple prose of hack speechwriters .?.?. a strong, imaginative, optimistic story about the projects we can begin now, the forests we can plant now, the flood-defences we can build now, the plans our draughtsmen can start working on now, all to create for the future a place where some of us may never even ourselves set foot.”
Matthew concluded:
“Some time ago I visited Michael Heseltine’s arboretum in Northamptonshire. Passion undimmed, he is still planning for his arboretum, planting saplings he will never see as trees. If you want a metaphor for Conservative futurism, I can offer no better.”
Nor can I – but the Tory arboretum can’t just contain trees that Matthew likes.
Matthew worries that some in UKIP want a country where everyone looks the same. I worry that Matthew wants a party where we all think as he does. He is that very modern phenomenon that is very powerful in the Liberal Democrats – an illiberal liberal who will tolerate anyone as long as they agree with him. Just as some in UKIP hate the diversity of modern Britain, Matthew Parris and certain modernisers are in danger of becoming haters, too. Hating the politics of places like Clacton. Accusing all people who worry about immigration of being racist. Deciding that anyone who questions David Cameron is an extremist.
Hate has no place in a successful political party. The best politicians love their country and the people in it. It’s true of Boris Johnson today and it was true of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Their open arms conservatism is infectious. Conservatives must be a broad church – an arboretum of many trees. One where we can disagree without regarding people who have concerns about immigration as racist and where principled people who disagree with gay marriage aren’t seen as bigots. When voters with legitimate concerns look at the Conservative Party and perceive a party that doesn’t even try to understand them we can’t be surprised when they vote UKIP or vote for another party.
The Conservative Party becomes a broad church again – or, quite simply, it ceases to be the great electoral force that it once was. Forever.
Edited by mrpurple on Friday 31st October 18:58
Well there have been aa few accusations over on the UKIP thread that people posting on it must be kippers.
The retort has often been the lack of threads for other parties and that if people would start them then we would comment but the problem was that there was only one active thread.
The LibDem thread was active for a bit then died the death.
This thread is rapidly dying for lack of ideas on persuading people and giving them reasons to vote Tory.
It's dying a death just like the Tory party. Although it's difficult to blame Dave for the thread demise. Seems as if his supporters are only interested in haranguing kippers and people who aren't actually kippers but interested in what's going on.
Vacuous empty vessels devoid of decent vote worthy ideas.
Meanwhile the Labour postal vote machine quietly trundles on.
The retort has often been the lack of threads for other parties and that if people would start them then we would comment but the problem was that there was only one active thread.
The LibDem thread was active for a bit then died the death.
This thread is rapidly dying for lack of ideas on persuading people and giving them reasons to vote Tory.
It's dying a death just like the Tory party. Although it's difficult to blame Dave for the thread demise. Seems as if his supporters are only interested in haranguing kippers and people who aren't actually kippers but interested in what's going on.
Vacuous empty vessels devoid of decent vote worthy ideas.
Meanwhile the Labour postal vote machine quietly trundles on.
FiF said:
Well there have been aa few accusations over on the UKIP thread that people posting on it must be kippers.
The retort has often been the lack of threads for other parties and that if people would start them then we would comment but the problem was that there was only one active thread.
The LibDem thread was active for a bit then died the death.
This thread is rapidly dying for lack of ideas on persuading people and giving them reasons to vote Tory.
It's dying a death just like the Tory party. Although it's difficult to blame Dave for the thread demise. Seems as if his supporters are only interested in haranguing kippers and people who aren't actually kippers but interested in what's going on.
Vacuous empty vessels devoid of decent vote worthy ideas.
Meanwhile the Labour postal vote machine quietly trundles on.
Couldn't agree more.... so much for it being kippers that are against everything. You have to wonder why the anti-kippers are so vociferous on the UKIP thread yet silent on this, or the LibDem thread.The retort has often been the lack of threads for other parties and that if people would start them then we would comment but the problem was that there was only one active thread.
The LibDem thread was active for a bit then died the death.
This thread is rapidly dying for lack of ideas on persuading people and giving them reasons to vote Tory.
It's dying a death just like the Tory party. Although it's difficult to blame Dave for the thread demise. Seems as if his supporters are only interested in haranguing kippers and people who aren't actually kippers but interested in what's going on.
Vacuous empty vessels devoid of decent vote worthy ideas.
Meanwhile the Labour postal vote machine quietly trundles on.
I have tried to engage with my local conservative parliamentary candidate for Telford and Wrekin.
I have asked direct and polite questions about her views on ring fencing foreign aid whilst cutting budgets for public services like the Police, I've also queried her statements about fighting gypsy camps and building developments. I have had no answers, all her responses are deflections. The candidate is an attractive, photogenic lady who had no connection to the area before moving from London on selection, her campaign is very glossy but has no substance, If the conservatives think this is how to win over voters they have little future.
I have asked direct and polite questions about her views on ring fencing foreign aid whilst cutting budgets for public services like the Police, I've also queried her statements about fighting gypsy camps and building developments. I have had no answers, all her responses are deflections. The candidate is an attractive, photogenic lady who had no connection to the area before moving from London on selection, her campaign is very glossy but has no substance, If the conservatives think this is how to win over voters they have little future.
Tories the past - A video that says it all really 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ukip/1121...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ukip/1121...
Edited by Yazar on Thursday 6th November 18:46
Yazar said:
Tories the past - A video that says it all really
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ukip/1121...
Very much so. As your average middle class traditional Tory supporter suddenly wakes up to the fact their children will struggle to ever own their own place let alone afford to send their grandkids to a decent public school more and more will see the light. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ukip/1121...
Edited by Yazar on Thursday 6th November 18:46
brenflys777 said:
AJS- said:
William Rees Mogg - the honourable member for 1952.
I actually like Rees Mogg, when he talks seriously about things he is often very perceptive and thoughtful.... I can only put that video down to his dry sense of self deprecating humour 
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