![Outgoing Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty leave Downing Street](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2024/07/13/TELEMMGLPICT000384555566_17208778182100_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqVnGZDHLVbaDWtLqzwQh5-VXf650NyGCxIUSN5QkxoTQ.jpeg?imwidth=680)
![Outgoing Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty leave Downing Street](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2024/07/13/TELEMMGLPICT000384555566_17208778182100_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqVnGZDHLVbaDWtLqzwQh5-VXf650NyGCxIUSN5QkxoTQ.jpeg?imwidth=680)
The long-anticipated moment of reckoning for the Conservative Party has arrived, and so commences the battle to explain why it has been so completely and utterly spurned by voters at the ballot box. The prize for winning this contest is enormous – no less than the opportunity to set the future direction of travel for the oldest political party in the world.
It has been said in the last week that the Conservatives’ loss had little to do with ideas and values, and much more to do with a failure to deliver.
Certainly, broken promises represent the core motif of the Tories’ catastrophic defeat. Over the past fourteen years, the Party has pledged to the public that it would reduce the size of the state, grip immigration, roll back identity politics, drive up productivity and secure better standards of living for everyone in our United Kingdom. It has failed on each one of these commitments.
But I think the manner in which the Party has been rejected and cast out by voters speaks to the fact that something more profound has gone wrong. For what has been broken over the last fourteen years is the promise that Conservatives have historically made of a good, prosperous and meaningful life to all who are willing to work hard and get on. We have disappointed that deeply-held desire of all aspirational people – particularly amongst younger generations – for a genuine stake in our country and economy.
That promise has, since the Conservative Party’s very inception, served as its basic moral mission. In the 19th Century, it translated into a zealous belief in the rightness of giving as many people as possible a stake in our democracy, by extending to them the vote. In the 20th Century, that mission meant giving far more people a stake in our economy, by widening property ownership to more and more individuals and households. The “property owning democracy”, in other words, was a logical succession to electoral democracy.
These efforts by Conservatives through the years have served a fundamentally stabilising role for the British body politic. They have ensured an ever-widening base of people with a sense of ownership for our country: a sense that it is in some meaningful way theirs; that Britain’s fortunes are somehow their own personal responsibility. As I’ve written for Policy Exchange, it is that sense of ownership which provides the foundations of a successful society – one that supports strong communities, and the moral development of individuals.
The pursuit of this mission has also helped to generate a body of people with conservative values in each successive generation. Cynics would say that to make someone a conservative, you simply have to give them something they can lose. But it is more correct that to be a conservative, one must have something to conserve – a home, a family, a way of life, a nation which one feels part of. The quest to provide people with something worth conserving has given Tories a moral compass, a purpose to hold on to, even when changing political circumstances have been difficult to navigate.
The Conservative Party is the party of opportunity, of property and of family. But historically, it has been the party of spreading those things to as many people as possible. For the last decade and a half, we have wholly failed to achieve this. Prosperity, property ownership, family life – such things long championed by conservatives – have ceased to be unifying, aspirational ideals. Instead, they have been transformed into privileges denied to a growing proportion of the population.
The upshot is a burgeoning cohort of people who feel unplugged from our society and economy. The shrinking base of people who feel enfranchised in this country is precipitating the current sense of instability, and it is compromising too the sense of order which conservatives are the professed guardians of.
A political party is not required to win on every area of policy to maintain the confidence of the people in government. Voters can trust the leadership of a group of men and women, even if they do not endorse the totality of their views and values. But to lose a basic association with aspiration, opportunity and ownership is to lose a sense of what at its core the Conservative Party stands for.
Those on the Right willing on the demise of the Conservative Party should be very careful what they wish for. All true conservatives know that institutions which stand the test of time contain some inner wisdom, and that anyone who ignores this is foolish indeed. You do not get a more conservative country by ditching the most successful vehicle for conservative policies to have existed.
But it is undeniable that in recent years, the Conservative Party has lost its way. The responsibility of all those who remain committed to its endurance is to help the party rediscover its driving sense of moral mission: its undertaking to give a greater proportion of the British people a stake in the country that they call their own. To give them something to conserve.
The great intellectual restoration on the Right must do three things: first, it must achieve clarity on what sort of stake in our society we wish to afford people: property ownership of all varieties, a family and a sense of belonging to a shared moral and cultural community. Secondly, and absolutely critically, it must rethink the ways in which we can extend these things to a greater number of people. And thirdly, it must accept that improving matters will require courage; the decisions required for a stronger, more prosperous, more cohesive country will not be easy, or else they would have already been taken.
It will be a historical exercise, as it will require us to look back to those enduring principles which have always guided conservatives. But it must be a forward looking one too, as we consider how we can make younger generations receptive to our values and beliefs.
Do this, and Conservatives will not only recover a sense of who they are, but of why their convictions remain so relevant. Fail, and the role of the Party will be reduced to serving as the representative of a permanent minority interest.
James Vitali is Head of Political Economy at Policy Exchange
Conservatives must rediscover their sense of historical mission
Those on the Right willing on the demise of the Tories should be very careful what they wish for