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].
I am writing this from Ukraine, a nation in arms against President Vladimir Putin’s brutal invading forces. Three hours flying time from here, Israel is at war with Iran’s proxies, while over the Taiwan Straits, China is developing its military forces to be able to take Taiwan by force by 2027.
Whether it is Eastern Europe, the Middle East or the Far East, our world is becoming much more dangerous and politically unstable. The international order that made our world safer and more prosperous is being undermined. Our adversaries are building up their conventional armed forces and finding novel and unconventional ways to undermine the West.
And let’s be clear, we are the target. Russians are being told by their leaders that they are fighting Nato – us – in Ukraine. It often threatens nuclear war. China’s youth is being told that democracy and a free press are dangers to their civilisation.
This century will be about the battle between democracies and authoritarian states.
Therefore, the Conservative leader we pick is an important choice. We need someone not only who will renew the Conservative Party at home, but also to project our national values and interests to the world.
I believe that the stand-out candidate for the Conservative leadership election is Kemi Badenoch.
While all candidates have their strengths, Kemi has been a conviction conservative from day one. I was from the same intake as her. I saw this with my own eyes. She wasn’t there to make up the numbers, or just to be an MP. She wanted to contribute, to articulate her conservative beliefs.
At the root of this is believing in Britain as a nation state. How can we control immigration if we don’t believe a nation should have borders? And how can we champion our nation, our people and our values to the world if we don’t believe in them ourselves?
Sometimes it takes an outsider to see our strengths. Kemi came to Britain as a teenager, worked in McDonald’s flipping burgers to pay her way thorough university. She saw the virtues of our society – and our Conservative Party – because it was us as much as anybody that gave her the chance to thrive. Seeing things at a distance sometimes help one appreciate something all the more. I know the feeling. I went to live in the USSR in its dying days. Seeing that ideological empire collapse helped me value Britain even more, and to be grateful to those who stood firm for our values, when socialist chattering class elites in the UK and elsewhere painted an ugly false equivalence between socialism and freedom.
And let’s remember the extraordinary things that our nation achieved. We destroyed the global slave trade, had the world’s greatest and most benign empire, provided the foundations for modern law and parliamentary democracy in many nations throughout the world, defeated Nazism in World War II and totalitarian socialism in the Cold War. The world is a better place with our nation in it. We need to rediscover our confidence. We need to counter the lies about it told by the ideological Left and their ally, the Labour Party.
We don’t need a long-list of policies now. But what we do need is someone who will, with leadership, care and thought, guide the process of asking how to rebuild our party and country using conservative ideas to make us strong for the struggle between democracies and authoritarianism.
We face a world in conflict. Rather than letting Labour spend £11 billion on climate aid, or balloon the DWP budgets still further, shouldn’t we be supporting and rebuilding our armed forces as a matter of urgency? I do not know if Russia will turn its guns on us, so to speak, after the Ukraine war, but I know that fascism, like totalitarian socialism, is deterred by strong defence, not weak words uttered by unconvincing politicians such as Keir Starmer.
We need to ask ourselves, why are we making our own people poorer by shutting down industry in our own country, only to see that industry go to China or other countries to be powered by dirty forms of electricity that pollute the planet more? We are devising policies to make us poor, make our potential adversaries rich and pollute the globe. This is the definition of political self-sabotage. Labour will turbo-charge this idiocy, but why did we not do more to question it?
Do we really need to try to spend 0.7% of GDP on aid in countries that are becoming richer than we are? Too much of this money seems to be spent to either launder reputations or indulging a misplaced sense of imperial guilt.
I have no doubt that there is not a single problem that Labour will not make worse. I have no doubt that Reform are little more than a one-trick pony, but to their credit, they exposed the political classes’ refusal to talk about immigration.
Given the state of the world, we have a moral duty, a political duty and frankly a national duty to pick the best leader we can, to spend time thinking about what we got wrong, what we got right, and then to go back to basics. It may ruffle some feathers, fair enough, but knocking on thousands of doors in the past year, what I know is this. Most voters are proud of our nation, are fed up of those in the elite classes who spend their time trashing it and apologising for it. Most voters accept that we have responsibilities to others but are fed up of politicians who throw aid at others to burnish their own reputations. Most voters want more support for our armed forces. They realise we live in a dangerous world. Most of our voters – indeed most voters full stop – are small ‘c’ conservatives. We need a conservative leader for the Conservative Party.
Parties that lose badly are destined to spend years in opposition. While our own showing in the last election was dire, thanks to the conservative vote splitting with Reform, let’s remember Labour won less than 34% of the national vote. This was a landslide built on our failings. No one knew what Labour really stood for. We are now sadly going to find out. They are the opposite of what Britain needs and bizarrely, the opposite of what most of the voting public want. We should hang our heads in shame that we allowed this to happen.
However, although things are bad for us now, we need to be positive. With the right leader, there is nothing that says we cannot recover quickly. Given what is going to happen to our nation and in the wider world, we urgently need to provide a conservative opposition to Labour’s destructive government. This means taking the British people with us as we rebuild and rediscover our strength as conservatives who believe in our people, our values and our nation.
But that all takes the right leader. Our best chance by far is with Kemi.
Click here to subscribe to our daily briefing – the best pieces from CapX and across the web.
CapX depends on the generosity of its readers. If you value what we do, please consider making a donation.
