The Tory Modernisers Fight Back
Sunder Katwala examines the strength of the Tory modernisers against the traditional right.
4 Oct 2011, 08:41
Nick Boles - The ultimate moderniser
Those “Restating Values” around David Davis’ Blue Book – a fringe title which successfully evokes a “it can not be said often enough” mood – including Davis, the champion of Boot and Flogger Tory independence; staunch grammar school champion Graham Brady, tax cutter John Redwood and the pro-market creative destruction of Ruth Lea went up against just one of the crowded Eurosceptic fixtures, as the Taxpayers Alliance and Daily Express held the splendidly titled “We Need to Talk About Europe” fringe where Express political editor Patrick O’Flynn was joined, by Matthew Elliott of the Taxpayers Alliance, Conservative Home editor Tim Montgomerie and MPs Douglas Carswell, close ally of the party’s unofficial Eurosceptic chief whip Daniel Hannan MEP, and Priti Patel, who many believe is emerging as the most effective Eurosceptic voice of the Parliamentary class of2010.
Was the voice of the Tory modernisers being crowded out? In a couple of days in Manchester, I had heard a recurring refrain of Tories indulging in “what’s the point of being in government if we can’t do what we want” thinking, expressing their frustrations with the LibDems and the European Union in particular, and many fewer offering anything resembling the David Cameron, Steve Hilton or Andrew Cooper analysis of why the party had failed to secure enough trust to hold power on its own in the first place.
I did finally hear that argument, put impressively punchily by Nicholas Boles in the Midland Hotel late on Monday night.
Boles, MP for Grantham, birthplace of Margaret Thatcher, is the archest of arch-modernisers, having been central to founding the Policy Exchange think-tank to give the then embryonic pre-Cameron ProgCon argument an institutional foothold, and more recently coming just about as close as any elected Tory sensibly dare to uttering in public the Coalitionist heresy that the government may even be better for having the LibDems in it. Towering above a hot and crowded room of the Cameroonian vanguard, gathered to celebrate the existence of the “Bright Blue” liberal Tory network, Boles decided that the time had come for somebody to tell it how it was from the perspective of the keepers of the modernising flame.
The Tory party had failed to win a majority in May 2010. Why? “To put it bluntly, we were not liberal enough”, said Boles. The party therefore needed to become more liberal in government.
So Boles suggested there should be three political tests of every single thing that the Tory party considered doing politically.
Firstly, the party should look at everything through the eyes of Liberal Democrat and Labour voters who had thought of voting Tory in May 2010 and hadn’t. The government’s programme should prioritise persuadable opponents, not the core instincts of the Tory tribe.
Secondly, the party should target those on household incomes of £18,000 to £35,000. That is the real middle England when it comes to the income distribution, particularly those who are “doing all of the right things” – reading to their children was mentioned – and want to know how the government is helping them to get on.
“If it isn’t directed at them, it shouldn’t be a Coalition policy or a Tory policy”, said Boles.
Thirdly, the party needed to think much harder about a “chilling” statistic in Michael Ashcroft’s latest polling exercise. In the Labour-held marginals which the Tories needed to take if they were to win a majority, only 26% of voters perceived the Tories as “being on the side of ordinary people”. 46% of voters in those seats would say that of Labour. This suggests that the project of brand decontamination is far from over, and the failure to win a majority in May 2010 should have seen efforts redoubled.
So Boles is no fan of the 50p rate of tax on earnings over £150,000. He would prefer not to have it – yet he would never make it a priority for future resource if he could raise the income tax threshold, for example. But this was not just a question of resources; it was very much about what this would say about who the Tories were – and who they were for. To be publicly flirting with its abolition sent a dangerously powerful signal about where the Tory party’s instincts and priorities lay, Boles said, making him surely the most vocal Tory critic to date of cutting the top tax rate.
(Others in the party disagree. David Davis was sporting a badge of half of a 50p piece to protest the tax as he circulated around the late night parties).
“It doesn’t matter how good David Cameron is as Prime Minister over Ed Miliband, or how George Osborne runs the economy”, said Boles. If people don’t believe the Tory party are on the side of ordinary people, then the party would hit an electoral glass ceiling again.
This is a powerful argument – and one which both the Tory party’s conference messaging focused on leadership this week risks overlooking. Many commentators too are predicting that David Cameron has the next election in the bag, because he will be perceived as more Prime Ministerial than Ed Miliband, but have yet to provide a coherent explanation of why Cameron failed to secure a full victory in the last one despite his clear personal advantage over Gordon Brown.
“If we do all of that, we might win a majority. And we would deserve to win a majority”, said Boles, so as to set up one final heresy: the Tory party had not won a majority in May 2010 because it had not deserved one.
Creating a liberal Conservative platform and party identity was a question of “discipline” – the whole party needed to share responsibility for not reinforcing the negatives which kept it from power, he said.
This meant there was a mission for the modernising vanguard. They had to be “just as loud and obnoxious as some other parts of our party” in demanding that ministers listen to them (though the tone of this remark was very clearly good humoured, and even affectionate, rather than sincerely suggesting an all-out war of the factions)
Boles dealt fluently and impressively with quickfire questions from his audience. He was happy to again confront the National Trust, challenging the legitimacy of the charity’s take on the government’s planning reforms, because backing down on planning and housing would be an absolute betrayal of the legitimate aspirations of those voters he felt it right and necessary to target.
With Boles not ducking the difficult questions, I asked him whether he felt that the Eurosceptic right had been demonstrating the discipline which he had been calling for during the conference.
Here, he chose a less confrontational approach to the party’s Eurosceptic theologians.
“Look, I am a Eurosceptic too, but I just want to be practical about it”, he said, suggesting that the disagreements with prominent Eurosceptic activists like Tim Montgomerie and Stephan Shakespeare, with whom he is sharing a fringe platform today, were narrower than they had been for several years.
(I am not sure that this claim stands up. ConservativeHome and the Daily Express have joined forces with considerable effect on the party grassroots to push the referendum question much harder than last year. If the gap has closed, it is more likely to be because arch-modernisers like Steve Hilton are joining the Eurosceptic battalions, in response to the frustrations of office).
But Boles asked his audience to put the in or out referendum question to the tests which he had just set out for Tory advocacy.
“Do you really think an in or out referendum is what they are discussing in the pubs”, he asked.
That was a telling moment – about half of the audience vocally shouted “Yes” before the other half tried to challenge them. Even here, at the Bright Blue vanguard of the arch-modernising faction, there was a lot of interest in flirting with the issue of Britain being better off out.
Amidst a barrage of pretty good natured heckling, Boles managed to win his audience around with the bridging proposal that “the British public agree with us on the European Union, but it is their number 10 priority issue. Let’s deal with the other nine issues first”, a usefully ambiguous formula enabling the acceptance and endorsement of a good deal of a moderate Eurosceptic case while pledging to do pretty much nothing about it for another couple of terms at least.
The challenge for the forces of Cameronism is that their own account has often presented the project as a rather top-down one, understood by somewhere between a dozen and perhaps a hundred Tories. A large part of the point of Bright Blue, in exploring a progressive and liberal Tory approach to key policy issues, is to expand the modernising tent, and to help to ensure that it does become a more substantive project than one focused only on counter-intuitive imagery.
The arch-moderniser had decided that it is not only the right which can issue a trumpet call to the troops. The question may remain, just how many liberal conservative divisions does the Prime Minister have?
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