Conservative Party: an inspiring conference and a vision for the future

The pictures couldn’t have contrasted more. On the one hand Conservatives young and old, smartly dressed, filed in to a packed venue in Manchester. On the other, a mob of spitting, bottle-throwing louts shouting “Tory scum!” One 18 year-old eruditely described on last night’s Question Time how she was called a “paedophile and child murderer” as she attempted to enter the conference. This is the last gasp of a political left that has truly and utterly taken leave of its senses.
In electing Jeremy Corbyn, it marked a switch to the secular equivalent of religious fundamentalism – a nostalgic countercultural response that can only appeal to a hardened core and flourish when swimming very much against the tide of mainstream opinion. So as the left hanged itself with the rope it had been given, and the bunch of amateur trots running Labour failed to condemn it, Tories could be forgiven for jubilantly celebrating. Not only had they won the election against all the odds, but these clowns were doing their very best to keep the left wedded to the marginalised, angry fringes for rather a long time.

Yet if anyone paid attention to the conference itself, they would have seen something completely different from the party. There was no smugness and no celebration. Instead, the party showed that it has an even more dignified, sensible response to the mad trots – serious politics. It’s rare that a political party could do almost anything and large numbers of people who dislike it will still vote for it anyway, but that’s the fortunate position the party finds itself in. But the Tory leadership knows that this won’t last for ever and, more importantly, if it did, that would be a response that sells the British people short.
The constant theme throughout the conference was progress. Gone was the boring yet compelling narrative of economic stability and financial security, and instead an upbeat call to pursue greater social justice. This, it seems, is what the ‘one nation’ government will be about. Whether it was Michael Gove’s rousing call for prison reforms, Nicky Morgan’s determined resolve to reverse the long-standing culture of low standards and acceptance of “coasting schools” in education, Priti Patel’s efforts combined with those of Ian Duncan-Smith to encourage and support people in to work, or David Cameron’s unapologetic critique of low social mobility, a clear call to action was in evidence from a fired-up government in a hurry.
Some argue that the party is trying to occupy the centre ground in a bid to squeeze Labour out and, I would suggest, to not leave a vacuum in the middle for a re-energised Liberal Democrat party under Tim Farron, who can only realistically expect an increase in its fortunes after a disastrous election result. Yet Corbyn’s utter lunacy, his party’s total lack of any consensus on serious policy areas and their failure to distance themselves from the spitting mob outside are themselves enough to ensure that the sensible British people don’t let Labour back in to power.
Farron, meanwhile, a man of questionable loyalty, seems determined to turn Lib Dems into Lib Dims, dragging his party leftwards in the hope of picking up some Corbynistas for whom the appeal of the sexpot trot is beginning to dwindle. No, there is absolutely no need for the Tories to sell out in order to win, or thwart any of its political enemies.

So just what are the Tories up to? In all honesty, the tone of this conference surprised only those who haven’t observed the party closely, or who view everything it does with suspicion and disdain. The ‘one nation’ term is no invention of David Cameron’s. It has a history going back to Disraeli. It broadly means a form of conservatism in which social institutions are seen to benefit society as a whole. Its proponents tend to be less hostile to public institutions such as the BBC and NHS. Historically, the old class system was seen to work because it was maintained by a form of paternalism: the rich could stay rich, so long as they gave with paternalistic generosity to the poor – think Downton Abbey, if you like.
Updated and modernised, it has been supportive of a welfare state that helps the needy and gives people a hand up, rather than a handout. The Thatcher era pushed it to the margins, but it didn’t die out. Thatcher was smart enough to realise that she couldn’t isolate a major ideological wing of her party completely, or that it would have been wise to do so if she could. Mrs Thatcher believed in an ideal where there was no social class, and where paternalism was replaced by a system that recognised and rewarded merit, in which everyone had a chance to succeed. The growth of the self-made man, the working-class shareholder and the city banker was all thanks to Mrs Thatcher’s reforms which brought the kind of economic prosperity that allowed the entrepreneurial, enterprising spirit to flourish.
I believe Cameronism, if there is such a thing, is a blend of these ideological factions which have shaped the party over its long history and made it a party with a proud and distinguished tradition of bringing about major social change. It was the party that ended slavery. It was the party that, in the nineteenth century, started to assert the role of the state in ensuring the welfare of the populace and paved the way for the liberals and subsequent Attlee government to create the welfare state. It was the party that expanded education and then introduced competition, and an assisted places scheme that allowed the brightest and best to go to private schools. If you want to know why politics (on both sides I might add) is dominated by the privately-educated and wealthy, it’s thanks to Labour first scrapping grammar schools and, decades later, abolishing assisted places.
It was Tories who gave women the vote in 1928. Rather like Corbyn’s cabinet, women were the poor relation in the workers’ struggle and their enfranchisement was never a prominent concern of the trade union movement. It was the Tories who opened Britain’s doors to refugees fleeing appalling persecution in Uganda. IT was Tories who introduced an allowance for disabled people. It’s now Tories that will reform our prisons, improve our schools and free them up from local authority control, and it’s Tories who will champion the cause of improving social mobility.
The conference signalled clearly how far the party still believes we need to go. We want, of course, a society where you are defined not by where you came from, but where you ended up. Everything must be structured toward allowing people to get on, to achieve, to fulfil their ambitions and to be able to say that, at the end of the day, they had the very best of chances. And if my brief history lesson made nothing else clear, I hope it’s proved that you would expect nothing else from a party that has held compassion, support for aspiring people, meritocracy, decency and fairness at the core of its values and everything it has always done, in all its incarnations.

So the Tories were acting consistent with their past, but what’s the contemporary political strategy behind all this? It is, I think, to break the left’s arrogantly self-proclaimed monopoly on compassion. With unbridled self-righteousness, the left has attacked every attempt to get public finances in to better shape. It has done so by emotionally-charged rhetoric and, ultimately the submission to fantasy politics. It did such a good job that, it would seem, so many people were apologetic about their support for the Tories that pollsters got it completely wrong back in May, as did most of us. They have cheaply insulted top Tory politicians over their backgrounds, despite most of their own great and good heralding from the same places. They have shouted louder, protested harder and appointed themselves as the guardians of a more virtuous politics (I expect the spitting and throwing of bottles at Tories attending conference was ‘civil disobedience’ that is justified because of the cuts).
Unfortunately for them, however, we all saw the Labour conference. We all saw that all they have to offer are attacks on the government and a relentless list of grievances. They never paused to give anyone any hope for something better. They never took the time to demonstrate how any alternative policies would work. I don’t honestly think that they ever thought they had to, because they have convinced themselves that they are the compassionate ones in British politics today. But if Cameron’s Tories can pull this off, the left will be floundering, for it will have to talk about aspiration, equality of opportunity (not outcome), enterprise and all those bourgeois ideas that it despises, and given that it sees government as a betrayal of principle rather than the greatest honour, that will be hard.
Once again, British people will seriously scrutinise them and, able to see that Tories stand up for better standards for children, the chance for the young to own a home of their own, rehabilitation for prisoners and a decent 7-day NHS for our old and sick, they’ll choose to give the party a chance once again. The Tories know that most of the 11 million who voted for them aren’t card-carrying party members, and that plenty of them probably don’t like the party very much and could easily switch their vote. They also know that the voice of the left is loud, angry and capable of destroying the party’s reputation.
The Conservative party has a golden opportunity to discredit Labour by showing itself to be a party that gets things done, whilst its rivals wrangle and squabble over everything. Tories also know that this golden opportunity won’t last forever. We don’t know who the credible opposition will be yet. Labour may come to its senses, perhaps after another drubbing in 2020, or Farron’s Lib Dims may finally be able to distinguish themselves as the sensible default alternative. The point is, it wouldn’t only be morally wrong for Tories to selfishly choose not to govern for and in the interests of all, but in the end it would be politically catastrophic not to, cementing an image of the Tories as a party that gloats and does whatever it wants just because it was a least worst option for enough people.
The party that held its conference this week looked and sounded the part: a party that recognises that it has been given a great honour, and that with it come serious duties and obligations. It looked and sounded like a party still able to think transformationally and that is responsive and dynamic enough to put Britain as a whole first. The party that’s winning it all, is governing for all. The party blasted by empty rhetoric, is responding with a vision for a better way forward and real, decisive action to make a better society behind that vision. The conference was inspiring, but the next 5 years of change will be too.