Dominic Ramsay is a Crawley Borough Councillor, and Chair of the Crawley Conservative Policy Forum, elected to the Borough Council for the first time in May this year.
As a party, we stand on the precipice of being locked out of power permanently in a crisis ultimately of our own making.
In Crawley, a classic swing seat we have held since 2010, I’ve been to multiple post-election debriefs and people are realising that the party we most need to take on is not Labour, a party which even under the most favourable conditions has managed to lose votes election on election, but instead Nigel Farage’s new insurgents.
In Crawley, if we had won less than two-thirds of Reform’s, we would have snuck an unlikely victory. This story was repeated up and down the country. A huge number of our 2019 coalition of voters at this election threw their lot in with Reform and these voters, just like the voters who stuck with us, want less immigration, less crime, and less radical social progressivism.
They looked at our record on these issues and found us completely wanting and, rightly or wrongly, thought our record meant there was no harm in splitting the small-c conservative vote.
In some circles, it’s fashionable to say that we should move left on these issues and get back to the fabled ‘centre ground’ which in practice almost always seems to be far to the left of the general public on gender, crime, and immigration. They say it’s not worth ‘fighting Reform at their own game’ so to speak and, rather than win these voters back, we should instead be trying to win over the people who voted Labour and Liberal Democrat, even though for the most part these voters have never shown any interest in voting Conservative before.
The issues with that line of argument are obvious to see: namely that we shouldn’t be aiming for the votes of people who would never vote for us, when the 2019 voter coalition is still patently large enough to win the next election if we can get it to turn back out for us. But fleshing out that argument is for another article.
There is no way back for the Conservatives if we don’t first make ourselves a party that Reform voters can feel comfortable voting for. But alongside this we do need to find the wedge issues where Reform’s new voters disagree with their party elite to convince them to ditch Reform in the first place. Reform’s big ‘X’ (best known as Twitter) personalities will give you a certain view of what Reform’s voters must be like, but below I hope to outline the areas where the average Reform voter is well at odds with their X representatives and indeed Farage himself.
Ukraine
In mid-June, polls were beginning to show that the fabled crossover point, at which the Conservatives would be relegated to the third most popular party, had finally come. Fortunately, Nick Robinson saved our bacon by luring Farage into the trap of claiming the Russians had been provoked, thus forcing Farage to fumble the issue over the following weeks just as they had begun to gain momentum.
While it’s true Reform’s voters are more likely than the general public to take Farage’s view, ultimately YouGov polls during the campaign showed that 57 per cent of their voters agreed that Russia was either more responsible or completely responsible for the war in Ukraine.
Here we can see why this represented the first chink in Reform’s armour, and why Farage so awkwardly stumbled over the issue in those weeks of the campaign. Going forward, so long as we can make our 2019 voters more and more aware of Farage’s views here, we can make the Conservative party the home of right-wingers who also happen to think Ukraine should be allowed to operate as an independent nation and join international organisations as it pleases.
Climate Change Scepticism
There was a lot in the Reform ‘contract’ that many of our voters would love to have seen in our manifesto; leaving the ECHR and abolishing IR35 rules well among them, but one line that would have caused most voters to grimace is ‘we must not impoverish ourselves in pursuit of unaffordable, unachievable global CO2 targets’.
Survey after survey shows that Reform’s climate change scepticism is a fringe position among the public at large.Two-thirds of Reform’s own voters think it’s important that the government cares about tackling climate change. Our success in 2019, and Ben Houchen’s more recently, shows that environmentalism is not a turn-off for our 2019 voter coalition in the way that our extremely liberal governance on immigration has been, and it’s wrong of us to think that Reform’s voters are much different to the average voter on this issue.
Here we see yet another Achilles’ Heel for Reform, as we can make the positive case for right-wing environmentalism while also highlighting Reform’s record of climate change scepticism.
A Libertarian Economy
Frankly this final point will be the toughest to swallow for Conservative politicians and activists across the country. It cuts against our instincts, but we are seeing across the world that right wing parties either learn this lesson or are replaced by a right wing party that learns it first. Socially Conservative voters remember Margaret Thatcher very fondly, but ultimately don’t think libertarian economics are suitable for a modern economy which is leaving non-London communities completely hollowed out.
Les Republicans in France have now been replaced by the much more protectionist and economically left-wing National Rally, and the Republican Party in the USA has morphed into an anti-free trade party to match what their voters now want.
Again the surveys show that, in contrast to Reform’s classically Thatcherite manifesto, their voters are actually on the left of the economic spectrum and it’s in this arena that a ‘move to the centre’ would allow us to undercut Reform. This wouldn’t mean blindly accepting our historically huge tax burden, or wholesale nationalisation, but it does mean a revival of the ‘levelling up’ agenda that has been so left in the cold post-Covid.
Where in the past it has been so natural for us as Conservative activists to evangelise for market forces and free trade, we may need to start making the case for strategic government intervention and some targeted protectionism.
Conclusion
First and foremost, we need to make sure we’ve listened to what Reform’s voters have told us on immigration, crime, and radical social progressivism. In short, they want less of it. But once we’ve made ourselves into a party they might even consider coming back to, we need to go in hard for Reform’s Achilles’ heels and identify the areas where their voters are less ‘right-wing’ than their online supporters would have you assume.
The 2029 election has the potential to prevent a decade in power for Labour, but only if the right unites and as long as we follow this strategy, or something like it, we as Conservatives can make sure the right unites behind us.