Tory leadership: the final two
Just before the general election I joined the Conservative Party so that I would have stake in who came after Rishi Sunak. I’ve had my eye on Robert Jenrick for a while and he seems like the obvious choice. He’s not quite as far to the right as I would like, but given my associations lately, it would be unrealistic to expect that much. I do, however, like the way he thinks. He’s given serious thought as to what conservatism should look like.
I’ve been saying for some time that no party can succeed without an intellectual foundation, and unlike Reform, Jenrick has actually bothered to set out ten basic principles. It’s not quite as coherent and robust as the National Conservatism principles upon which I base my manifesto but it’s in the right ballpark. Viewed alongside Jenrick’s CPS paper on immigration, it’s clear he has understood the issues.
Seemingly Jenrick is now making leaving the ECHR a confidence issue in much the same way Cameron staked his reputation on an in/out referendum. There will be a clear choice at the ballot box at the next general election, on an issue that could be transformative, and there will be a reason to go out and vote. I’ve not been able to do that since 2015.
Cynics are saying there is no reason to trust the Tories and even if Jenrick wins the leadership race, his party will obstruct him. That remains to be seen, but he’ll have his work cut out for sure. The Tory party is an unnatural coalition of metropolitan liberals and conservatives and his messaging will have to be precisely calibrated. It’s worth letting him try - especially if the alternative is Kemi Badenoch.
The more I see of Badenoch, the less impressed I am. For starters, her lobbying for more study visas tells us three things. She isn't serious about immigration. She doesn't see a problem with universities relying on income from foreign students. She doesn't see why that's symptomatic of a structural problem with higher education. She is a liberal, not a conservative, and she hasn’t done the thinking. She’s a lightweight.
Personally, I've gone from quite liking her to actively detesting her. Little by little she reveals who she truly is. She's like one of those Human Resources executives who takes credit for the work of the entire software development team, and gets promoted on the back of it despite not even knowing what the software does.
For some, though, it doesn’t matter either way. There are those on the right who are implacable after fourteen years of Tory incompetence, negligence and betrayal, and will not see their way to voting Tory ever again, no matter who is in charge. I certainly have a lot of sympathy with that view.
The problem there is that there just isn’t a viable alternative to the Tory party. I am more certain than ever that Reform isn’t going to shed its institutional amateurism, or put the work into serious, coherent policy. The populism game is their comfort zone, they’re good at it, and it’s all they actually want to do. Side by side, Jenrick just looks and sounds more serious than Farage.
The problem with Farage’s brand of populism is that it offers no real answers, just simplistic slogans. As such, Reform would struggle to get a grip on immigration. They simply don't understand the problem(s). It's not as simple as winning power and turning the immigration dial on a control panel. Every manifestation of problem immigration is a symptom of a broken system.
Mass illegal immigration is the culmination of several broken systems - from care homes to universities, the collapse of the administrative state, and the erosion of enforcement capability. Mass immigration is a second order effect of a fundamentally broken state apparatus that must be rebuilt from the ground up.
This is one of the reasons I set about writing a manifesto. Policy to get immigration under control has to look at everything from housing through to policing, courts, trade, aid, foreign policy, health and welfare. As such, my manifesto is an immigration manifesto. I have bowed to critics and put a table of contents in the manifesto, showing that there is an immigration chapter, but to understand the whole approach, it has to be read in full.
Unless you're prepared to analyse the problems and craft policies to address each of the root causes, you're never crack it. To date, Reform haven't produced a single policy, and nobody in Reform has shown the slightest interest in finding out why immigration is so badly out of control. They bleat about the dinghies, but that's only a fraction of problem immigration, and their approach does little to address the social problems of legacy immigration, not least rising sectarianism and Islamic extremism.
Were it that Reform ever could win an election, they wouldn't usefully affect immigration because they wouldn't know where to even begin. A party that shows no interest in policy and solutions is not one to be trusted. It says they're doing none of the necessary grunt work behind the scenes, preferring instead to trot out crowd-pleasing mantras.
Reform of all people should be the experts on the subject matter, but instead will continue to contradict each other and make fools of themselves. As such, they are complete timewasters. For a fuller picture on how to fix Britain, you have to put the work in. Something Reform simply will not do.
The question for both Tory leadership contenders is whether they can bridge the gap in side their own party while also doing enough to win back Reform voters. Unless that circle can be squared, there will be insufficient unity on the right to topple Labour, even on their current abysmal form. Perhaps, though, it turns not on winning back Reform voters, but on winning back voters who rejected both the Tories and Reform, and simply stayed at home instead.
To do that will require something radical that departs from the status quo, that gives voters a real choice alternative to Labour. Jenrick looks to be the man to do it. Leaving the ECHR implies a departure from rule by courts, and removing all the excuses for failure on immigration.
To a point I’m writing this to see if I can persuade myself if there is a future for the Tory party. I’m not wholly convinced because I’m old enough to know that the Tories are always conservative immediately following a defeat, but liberal in office. To volunteer to be burned yet again perhaps makes me part of the problem. But I maintain that there’s still no other option. Some of what we want is better than nothing, and our fight to take back control is a generational battle. Were it that Reform were a serious party with serious leadership, this would be a very different conversation, but I know all too well how this goes.
Complacency, ultimately, will kill Reform. I saw it all unfold for Ukip in the same way. They got cocky, then they got arrogant, then they became belligerent. They believed they were doing better than they actually were, and rather than taking criticism on board, they treated it as an attack. Consequently, they never professionalised, never grew out of their amateurism, never developed policy or plans, and flopped when it mattered. Reform is treading the exact same path for the exact same reasons. I still can't get my head round all the pushback I get for saying that political parties should have actual policies.
Perhaps in the mid-term something bold, new and interesting will step on to the scene, tapping into the anxieties of a younger demographic, but the populist politics of the boomer Brexit revolt are growing stale, and it cannot become more than it currently is.
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On a final note, I’ve added a couple of revisions to the manifesto, encompassing
’s tradable visa system. I’m toying with building a website for the manifesto, but for now, you can find it here…
Reform supporters when they talk about "The Tories" betray a need for a bogeyman or minds closed to reality.
After its defeats of 1974 the Tories underwent ideological transformation courtesy of Keith Joesph and Margaret Thatcher. "The Tories" were not the same Tories from 1979. As Charles Moore, Thatchers' biographer, points out Thatcher herself only became as conservative as she did after the 1974 defeats.
Robert Jenrick has undergone a similar transformation no less sincere than Lord Frost (who says he only recently became conservative). If he wins the leadeship then talk of "The Tories" is to be stuck with ghosts of the past, an attachment of narcissism to destructive vengeance.
It may be that MPs do not follow Jenrick and thereby bring about the party's destruction or, like Thatcher, Jenrick may persuade enough to stick by him and so transform the party.
As I wrote on your original manifesto piece there is a gaping hole which is a macro economic overview.
Your policy ideas are all micro in nature and fail to address the capital and current account issues as well as the clear problems in central banking.
It is abundantly clear after 2008 that the framework is not only broken but highly damaging to the economy. The real rise in property prices is only part immigration. The rest is QE and monetary policy.
The BoE needs huge reform and probably renationalization. Its ideas are unbelievably anachronistic. It has no control over CPI and hasn’t for decades. In an open trading globe it is pissing in the wind! But worse because it thinks it still can influence CPI it overlooks the clear fact that what it does influence hugely is asset prices. In fact asset price growth should be its target today, not CPI.
Indeed, it likely even generates some CPI via high assets prices. Ie: commercial property rents must feed in to higher output prices.
This is a huge subject and also the most important but no party, nor yourself has even begun to tackle it.