PopCon Director, Mark Littlewood, looks back at the Margaret Thatcher Centre's Freedom Festival held last weekend. "I left Buckingham reinforced in my view that any attempt to “unite the right” is, at least for now, an intellectual exercise rather than an electoral one."
Last weekend, along with a good number of PopConners, I attended the Freedom Festival in Buckingham, organised by the Margaret Thatcher Centre. This annual event has become a “must-attend” diary commitment and this year’s gathering was the best yet.
Around 200 or so folk of right-of-centre leanings – journalists, activists, academics, students, think tankers and Parliamentarians – assembled to consider the many opportunities and challenges facing Britain today and how we might work together to develop some compelling solutions.
At a very rough guess, I’d say the partisan inclinations of the attendees split about one third Conservative, one third Reform and one third “Other” or non-aligned. But the truly encouraging features of the event were a unity of purpose and a genuine sense of camaraderie irrespective of individuals’ party allegiances.
I left Buckingham reinforced in my view that any attempt to “unite the right” is, at least for now, an intellectual exercise rather than an electoral one. Sure, all sorts of views were expressed about possible movements in the opinion polls in the months and years to come and whether a rapprochement of the various parties and groups on the centre-right would ever be possible or even desirable.
However, despite all of these disparate views about tactics and electoral machinery, I genuinely believe I can detect a growing consensus around the underlying causes of the UK’s problems and the policy response required to fix it.
Most of you will be familiar with my analysis and prescription. Whilst criticising the behaviour of the current government is akin to shooting fish in a barrel, a change of personnel is not going to be enough to rescue Britain from its current predicament.
The list of day-to-day problems in the UK today is lengthy and increasing. My father asked me earlier this week which public service I thought was performing even remotely well. I struggled for an answer and then dimly remembered that I thought I’d read somewhere that the UK Passport Office was a bit more efficient than it was a few years ago. That was about the only example I could muster and even in that (rather minor) case I wasn’t especially confident.
On the wider economic front, we have flatlining growth, miserable productivity, grossly inefficient (and increasing) state spending, a debt mountain, rising unemployment and eye-watering long-term liabilities.
However, we will not be able to confront these problems efficiently if we simply approach them one at a time. Our entire constitutional, governmental and legal system is now geared in the wrong direction and we will need to grapple with this “upstream” problem in order to tackle all the “downstream” effects. This means – in simple terms - that we need to restore our state machinery to its pre-Blair era settings.
If those on the centre-right can agree to this overarching vision, there remains a vast amount of technical work to be done on working out the sequencing, the legislation and the clearing of many hurdles.
I remain convinced that if we can find intellectual unity around policy, the electoral vehicle needed to achieve a mandate will become fairly obvious. That was the case that I put in Buckingham last weekend (click HERE to watch my speech) and I’d welcome your thoughts on whether I’m right, or if there is anything you think I missed.
Keep the flag of freedom flying!