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It’s a fair question. Anything like a sustained period of political predictability is at best a very distant memory and the political landscape is extraordinarily and seemingly, irrevocably changed. The Liberal Democratic Party has over 70 parliamentary seats (something itself not seen in over a century) but in the recent Gorton and Denton bi-election, they could not even beat the Monster Raving Loony Party, but the Conservatives did not do much better, getting less than 2% of the vote. Recent opinion polls put the Tories on a par with Labour, behind both Reform and the Greens. Are the two ‘main parties’ in the process of being replaced with two new main parties? Is the oldest, most historically successful political party in Europe in the process of becoming consigned to the history books?
We’re not going to return to a pre-Brexit political scenario any time soon, and most probably never will. Both the Greens and Reform have memberships in excess of 200,000 and comparisons with the SDP in the 1980s (whose star extinguished itself after just three years) are misleading. The SDP and the Liberals were never at odds with each other, with the former having emerged out of the Labour party and the two parties’ respective policies were pretty much indistinguishable. Both Reform and the Greens are hell bent on respectively replacing the Conservatives and Labour. Both these ‘new’ parties have charismatic (if controversial) leaders and both parties are throwing out policy aspirations that are anathema to both the two old parties. The Conservatives would never support something as draconian as Reform’s plan to deport 600,000 people (with its echoes of Himmler’s Madagascar plan!). With 20% of UK manufacturing jobs in the automotive industry, it’s hard to imagine Labour supporting the Green’s plan to scrap all petrol and diesel cars within ten years. There are numerous other examples of key differences between the two legacy main parties and their would-be replacements.
But what of the Tories themselves, with only 25% of the number of seats they held just two years ago and only their leader Kemi Badenoch regularly making the news (and even then, only in reply to whatever the governing is proposing). It could be argued there is not much substance to today’s Conservatives, with only modest improvements in poll ratings and no policy proposals of which the general public has any awareness. If you scratch a little beneath the surface however, you start to see a different picture. The Conservative shadow cabinet, for the first time in the party’s entire history, has not a single Etonian in it (whose entitled arrogance caused the party many past-woes). The party boasts the country’s first black female political leader, who to her credit, never mentions race as an issue; both these factors are surely positives. But aside from window dressing and public presentation, what is there about today’s Conservative Party to makes it still appear relevant?
The first thing to note is that the big ideas of Reform and The Greens are typically not just controversial but utterly unworkable. For example, it may some sound like a good idea to deport 600,000 people, but when push comes to shove, how can it be achieved? Which country would accept them for a start and if so, at what cost? A similar thing can be seen happening across the country at local level. Several Reform County Councils got elected promising to cut waste and cut Council tax bills. Once reality set in, all of them have had to increase council tax, in a world of increasing needs and rising costs. As for the practicalities of putting key Green Party policies into place, if you’ve read this far, you surely already realise how unworkable their policies are!
Then there is the Labour Party, whose high taxation policies have made themselves incredibly unpopular whilst making running a business and employing people increasingly difficult with unrealistic protection laws for new employees amongst a host of other measures that will reduce any realistic chance of growth in the economy. Labour is not the answer.
Then we come to the Conservative Party. Over a fourteen-year period, starting with crippling debts following the 2008 worldwide crash, the Conservatives had to steer the country through a series of unenviable crises including Covid, the Gulf War and (like it or not), the divisions caused by Brexit. It’s no good saying that the Conservatives brought about Brexit because the divisions were already there, with Ukip getting an astonishing 4,000,000 votes in 2015. This was a long-standing and growing national issue which the Brexit referendum was meant to resolve. Those who criticise the decision to hold it seldom have any practical alternative ideas.
The Conservative Party is in a process of re-invention, breaking away from the traditional hold of entitled public schoolboys as it adjusts to a dynamic new political (and world!) order. If you don’t think Labour is the answer and can see how both Reform and the Greens are setting themselves up to disappoint the electorate, the Conservative Party are the only realistic alternative and now is a perfect time to join it as the party forges a new identity with workable policies for today’s world.
John Waterhouse
