Over the coming weeks, CapX will be running a number of perspectives on the future of the Conservative Party. If you have an idea you would like to contribute, get in touch at [email protected].
After fourteen years in government, in which five different prime ministers imposed their own vision of politics onto the Conservative Party, the Tories’ values have become unclear. As Kemi Badenoch, one of the frontrunners to lead the party in opposition, recently put it: ‘the past decade saw us twist and turn in the wind, unsure of who we were, what we were for and how we could build a new country.’
Fixing this problem won’t be easy. Conservatism, more than any other political philosophy, is a tradition. There’s no foundational text or set of easy diagnoses and prescriptions that conservatives can hark back to or apply.
Instead, Conservatives have something which has, throughout the party’s long existence, proved much better: history. Specifically, the trial and error of the many people who have wrestled with the question of how to govern these islands over the centuries. As Rab Butler once put it, the Tory philosophy isn’t ‘a set of premises… but a mature and human tradition which is neither fixed nor finished.’ The party’s perennial challenge is to refresh and apply that tradition.
For more than half a century, that was part of the job of the Conservative Political Centre (CPC). Founded after the Second World War – when the Conservatives had been consigned to the opposition benches and Labour, as now, enjoyed a whopping majority well into three figures – the CPC was the party’s political education wing. Its role was to foster vibrant, intellectually curious and politically self-confident Conservatives by educating the grassroots, stimulating thinking about politics, discussing new policies, and promoting conservative views among the wider public.
Over the decades, the CPC played a major role in Conservative politics. It published pamphlets, hosted summer schools, held its own conferences and facilitated meetings around the country. As Lord Norton has written, the CPC lecture was widely recognised as the most important fringe meeting at the party’s annual conference. It was in giving one such lecture, in 1968, that Margaret Thatcher answered the question ‘What’s wrong with politics?’ and set out the principles that would, years later, develop into Thatcherism.
After decades of prominence, in the 1990s the CPC was the victim of internal party reform. Its function was partly converted into the Conservative Policy Forum (CPF), which is still going. But the CPF’s role – giving members a voice in policy-making – is much narrower and lacks the CPC’s focus on political education. A revived CPC could be just what the Tory party needs to rediscover its political tradition and regain confidence in its own ideas.
Take an issue like housing. The CPC could publish pamphlets on how Harold Macmillan, as post-war housing minister, not only met but exceeded the target of building 300,00 new homes per year. It could host talks on the role of Right to Buy in the 1980s in making Britain a ‘property-owning democracy’ and consider what it would mean to do that for a new generation of aspiring homeowners. And it could facilitate a genuinely national, intergenerational dialogue about what a Conservative policy on homeownership should look like in this Parliament. What’s more, by being distinct from the front bench, it could do it all without committing the party to any single policy.
A revived CPC could also help tackle the biggest problem for the Conservatives today: the fracturing of the Right. In Reform UK there is a party that is explicitly gunning for the Conservatives and has its sights set on usurping it. If they are to resist its advances, the Tories need to be the generator, articulator and promoter of the most thoughtful and effective critiques of this Labour government. That isn’t the task of any single leader, group of MPs or central office, but has to be the mission of the entire party – one a revived CPC would be well-placed to support.
After so long in power, this period of opposition is going to be difficult for the Conservatives. But it affords the country’s oldest and most successful political party the chance to rediscover its own tradition and apply conservative thinking afresh to the problems of today. A revived Conservative Political Centre could be the vehicle for doing so.
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