"If the party wants to send a credible signal to voters that it is learning from its failures, it has to pay the necessary price: defenestrate the liberal Tories who still don’t understand why they lost"
Telegraph: Leader writer and business columnist, Sam Ashworth Hayes, summarises where he thinks elements of the Conservative Party are getting it badly wrong.
"The most interesting response from a certain class of Conservatives looking on at Reform’s rise isn’t envy or sadness. It’s disdain for a party soiling itself with “populism” by promising policies Right-wing voters actually like.
Look across the Conservative commentariat and you can see the outrage writ large. Reform is flirting with dangerous, unconservative forces by attempting to tackle migration. Its proponents are adopting “inflammatory” language in their criticism of post 1997 liberalism. The Conservatives need to focus on winning back Lib Dem votes, not pivoting to the Right... This path was tried, and failed. The Tories had 14 years in office to unwind Blair’s project. They preserved it, retaining the new rights-based approach to law, ramping up migration, and failing to tackle the slow bleed of power from the government into the Blob...
The Tories saw it as their job to maintain the system that had increased the value of their housing, that provided them with cheap domestic labour. They were loath to risk “community tensions” by opening up potentially ugly conversations on migration and integration... Some One Nation sorts, in particular, talk about Israel, Ukraine... in ways that they rarely speak about Britain... their patriotism is projected outwards to a context where it can be safely indulged with no domestic consequences...
...You can criticise Reform for many things, but it is at least clear which group of people comes first in its list of priorities. The question for the Conservative Party is whether it will be able to say the same. With the electorate polarising to the Left and Right, there would seem to be little future in an outfit which wishes to be the Liberal Democrats in a blue coat...
If the party wants to send a credible signal to voters that it is learning from its failures, it has to pay the necessary price: defenestrate the liberal Tories who still don’t understand why they lost."