The New Conservatives: an unwanted arrival
The creation of another pressure group within the party adds no new thinking and reaches out to no new constituency, instead just adding to a cacophony of voices
There are times when it seems like you need an illustrated guide to keep track of Conservative groups. Today we saw the unveiling of the New Conservatives, a claque of 25 MPs from the 2017 and 2019 intakes. At the back of the room, observing quietly, was the right-wing Sir John Hayes, chair of the Common Sense Group, which is the spiritual successor of the now-defunct Cornerstone Group, but was inspired by the Brexit-supporting European Research Group. Also modelled closely on the ERG are the self-explanatory Covid Recovery Group and the Northern Research Group, while equally doing-what-it-says-on-the-tin is the Net Zero Scrutiny Group. Championing working-class Tory voters is Blue Collar Conservatism, formed in 2012 but relaunched in 2019 in response to the creation of the (now seemingly dormant) One Nation Conservatives. Not quite a caucus nor a think tank, but with a substantial list of “parliamentary supporters”, is the Free Market Forum, though this seems to have gone into hiding since Liz Truss left Downing Street. Impressively organised if narrow in focus is the China Research Group, while holding a candle and a photograph like the family of a prisoner of war is the Conservative Growth Group, established to keep the ideology of Liz Truss alive and relevant (yes, you read that correctly). Finally, poised somewhere on the fringes, is the Conservative Democratic Organisation, the brainchild of Lord Cruddas and a safe space for Boris Johnson cultists everywhere.
Still with me?
It is vital to understand that not all groups are the same. There are crossovers in terms of membership and policy platforms, and the efficiency and organisation of these factions vary, as do the ambitions and the levels of funding. The One Nation Conservatives, for example, draw on a tradition of conservatism developed in the middle of the 19th century by Benjamin Disraeli, and are a conscious successor to the One Nation Group formed by members of the 1950 Conservative intake which included Edward Heath, Reginald Maudling, Iain Macleod and Enoch Powell. I charted the rise and fall of the One Nation tendency some months ago; its time has, I think, passed. Conversely, the Covid Recovery Group was set up only at the end of 2020, and, with even the World Health Organization having declared the pandemic at an end, it is difficult to see exactly what its purpose is; this is doubly true since the expulsion from the Conservative Party in April of easily its most unbalanced member, Andrew Bridgen, MP for North West Leicestershire, who now sits for Laurence Fox’s pub-bore fringe Reclaim Party and wears a giant paperclip in his lapel (he says it was a symbol of resistance to the Nazis in wartime Norway).
So why was our Monday morning graced with the unveiling of this new collection of Conservative MPs, who are they and what do they want? The co-chairs of the New Conservatives are Danny Kruger (Devizes) and Miriam Cates (Penistone and Stockbridge), both elected in 2019, while the president is Sir John Hayes, of much older vintage.
Kruger is an insider, educated at Eton and the University of Edinburgh before completing a DPhil at Oxford entitled Edmund Burke and the constitutional crisis, 1778-84. He became an evangelical Christian in his late 20s after meeting his wife, Emma, and reading C.S. Lewis’s collection of wartime radio broadcasts, Mere Christianity. He was a speechwriter for Iain Duncan Smith and David Cameron in opposition (responsible for Cameron’s speech which became known as “hug a hoodie”), and Boris Johnson’s political secretary in Downing Street in 2019. Kruger was due to be electoral cannon fodder standing against then-prime minister Tony Blair in Sedgefield in 2005, but he was removed as the candidate by Michael Howard, then the Conservative leader, for saying that the party intended “to introduce a period of creative destruction in the public services”. His mother is the restaurateur and broadcaster Dame Prue Leith.
Miriam Cates was educated at a state school with a strong tradition of Oxbridge entrance, King Edward VII School in Sheffield, and followed that path to Cambridge where she read genetics. She then obtained a postgraduate certificate in education at Sheffield Hallam University and became a chemistry and biology teacher. Cates then moved into the private sector, becoming finance director of Redemption Media, the technology consultancy she founded with her husband David. Like Kruger, she is an evangelical Christian (she met her husband through the church) and together in 2021 they founded the New Social Covenant Unit, a group created to promote families, communities and the nation, based on 12 propositions written by Kruger.
The ideas which underlie Kruger’s and Cates’s work are a mixed ideological bag: they run from the socially conservative (the state should defend customs and traditions, the household is an economic institution, marriage is essential to society) to the centrist/communitarian (private capital should serve public good, communities should have more power over their neighbourhoods) via libertarianism (a smaller, leaner state) and what I can only describe as a strange sort of retrospective Merrie-England-ism (environmental nationalism to save the planet and reduce mass migration into Europe, a new recognition of England’s place in the Union, the economics of place rather than economic mobility).
We’re all familiar with the demographic avatars that politicians, strategists and pollsters like to devise to identify key support which a party wants or needs to win: Essex Man, Mondeo Man, Worcester Woman, Holby City Woman, Stevenage Woman, Workington Man. Often they are inaccurate or misleading, and political parties can waste time and energy pursuing a demographic slice that doesn’t exist in any meaningful sense. Nevertheless, looking at the New Social Covenant Unit’s 12 propositions, I would find it hard to construct a stereotype from its combination of policies, unless it is Kruger Man and Cates Woman.
So much for the New Conservatives’ intellectual genealogy. The priority of the new group is to cut immigration—I know, a new Tory pressure group on immigration, extraordinary—to below 226,000 a year in net terms, a pledge contained in the 2019 manifesto. Net immigration between June 2021 and June 2022 was 504,000, so there is some way to go, though it should be pointed out that last year’s figures were unusually high because of factors like refugees from Ukraine and the admission of Hong Kong British National Overseas status holders.
It’s worth noting that the UK is unusual in using net immigration as the measure on which policy and debate are based. It is flawed as a measure in a number of ways: it tells us nothing about who is coming and going, and what impact that will have; it takes no account of how long people intend to stay; and it is easily distorted by short-term surges or drops in migration. Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain, for example, base their migration figures on population registers, while Canada distinguishes clearly between “immigrants” and “non-permanent residents”. New Zealand collects data from landing cards and adds the number of people holding “migrant status” to the resident population.
You can see the potential pitfalls of the UK system. We would have no way of distinguishing between, say, 50,000 people who were seeking to stay indefinitely from 50,000 people who were here to study and university and would mostly return to their own countries after three or four years, yet the effect of that group of 50,000 people would be wildly different depending on their status.
Lest anyone be fearful that all this talk of slashing immigration numbers is merely windy rhetoric, the New Conservatives do have a plan: a 12-point plan, as it happens, which is only two fewer than President Woodrow Wilson thought were required to end the First World War. There is an element of negativity about some of the proposals: scrap visas for care workers, stop students on one-year master’s degree courses being eligible for the student dependent route which allows access to the labour market, remove the entitlement for graduates to remain in the UK for up to two years after gaining their degree, exclude the poorest performing universities from the student visa eligibility, cap refugees at 20,000 a year.
It is not wholly clear that this is tied to economic logic rather than an examination of where the immigration statistics are highest and seeking to chip away at those numbers. For example, there is a shortage of around 100,000 care workers, and the workforce already consists of 16 per cent foreign nationals, so cutting the number of migrant workers available would likely exacerbate one problem while (possibly) addressing another.
Not all of the proposals involve cutting or restricting or denying. The New Conservatives want to reframe the debate about immigration by requiring the Migration Advisory Committee to report on the effect of population movement not only on jobs but also on housing and public services. This would certainly give richer detail on which policy-makers could base their decisions; but at the same time the New Conservatives seem already to have reached their conclusions, and one is forced to wonder whether they simply believe that new analysis from the MAC will support their overall approach.
One proposal which will have cheered hearts in the Braverman household is that the government should “rapidly pass and implement the provisions of the illegal migration bill”. To the government’s credit, it is trying to hustle this controversial legislation through Parliament, but as it was defeated 11 times in the House of Lords on Monday, it is clear there is substantial opposition. Nor is the overall programme helped by the Court of Appeal’s recent judgement that Rwanda, to which the government wants to relocate some asylum seekers, is not a safe third country and therefore the policy is unlawful. It is not the case, therefore, the government is being laggardly or lacking in enthusiasm.
For those who can bear to remember further back than the beginning of the week, the overall approach of the New Conservatives towards immigration and immigrants seems to have a whiff of Theresa May’s “hostile environment” about it; make the UK less pleasant, less supportive to newcomers, less welcoming financially, societally and in terms of services and infrastructure, and then people will stop want to come here. This seems a particularly hard and Gradgrindian towards the six per cent of immigrants who are seeking asylum, but it also risks, surely, deterring some of the higher value immigrants the economy needs and who contribute to the UK’s success and prosperity.
Who are the New Conservatives? We are told it is a group of 25 MPs, but the only names revealed, apart from those of Kruger and Cates, are Tom Hunt, Jonathan Gullis, Gareth Bacon, Duncan Kaker, Paul Bristow, Brendan Clarke-Smith, James Daly, Anna Firth, Nick Fletcher, Chris Green, Eddie Hughes, Mark Jenkinson, Andrew Lewer, Marco Longhi, Robin Millar, and Lia Nici. Lee Anderson has also been associated with the group and was due to speak at its launch but was “unwell in bed”, according to Kruger, and may suddenly have remembered that as deputy chairman of the Conservative Party he is not entirely a free agent. Kruger noted that Anderson did not officially endorse the ideas and stance of the group. That leaves the precise nature of his association with them unclear, but he is surely the sort of man of whom many of the New Conservatives have a poster on their bedroom wall.
While the focus is initially on immigration, it is a stark message. Cates said at the launch that the alternative to achieving the manifesto commitment of 226,000 net migrants a year would be to lose next year’s general election and resign ourselves to the UK becoming a low-wage, low-growth, labour-intensive service economy and a population increase of 20 million over the next 25 years. The problem with this kind of Jeremiah-like warning is that you heighten the contrast between the possible outcomes, always dangerous in an uncertain political world. Cates’s depiction of an economic and social hellscape if immigration is not halved in a year may not come back to haunt her, but it could well rebound on the prime minister and the party more generally.
The other two issues which seem to loom large in the New Conservatives’ priorities are law and order, which might as well be twinned with immigration in the Conservative Party’s mind, and the danger of “woke” ideology. We must waited with bated breath for their solid policy proposals on these matters, but it is fair to make some guesses: more police, less paperwork, stiffer sentences, greater focus on the victim. Michael Howard, home secretary from 1993 to 1997, had faults as well as virtues, but he knew how to delight Conservative Party conference audiences, and there are eternal themes which will always land well. From Willie Whitelaw’s “short, sharp shock” (the only government policy ever to take its name from a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta?), through Howard’s “prison works” to Theresa May’s “crime fighters not form writers”, toughness has an eternal popularity with the faithful. Even Sir Tony Blair understood the power of robust rhetoric when he pledged that New Labour would be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”.
The difficulty is that there are basic issues of law and order which require spending. Putting police officers into the front line costs money, as does maintaining facilities like police stations and prisons. The policing budget for England and Wales has fallen and risen but is now more or less back to where it was when the Conservatives took office in 2010 (when inflation was much lower). Spending on prisons has increased by a few hundred million pounds but is offset by the fact that England and Wales have the highest level of incarceration in Western Europe, significant overcrowding (affecting around 20,000 prisoners, a quarter of the population) and a prison service which has lost huge numbers of experienced officers and a collapse in morale and professional standards. All of this is exacerbated by the fact that there is a great deal of research to suggest that prison does not significantly reduce crime or rehabilitate offenders, while forming an enormous drain on the public purse, each prison place costing around £47,000. It will be interesting, therefore, to see what kind of measures the New Conservatives propose to get a grip on crime, make communities feel safer, reduce recidivism and restore the Conservative Party’s reputation as the party of law and order.
Here is not the place to dwell too much on “wokeness”. One can anticipate the kind of areas on which the New Conservatives will seek to campaign: sex education, gender identity, racial issues, especially the interpretation of history, and the acceptance of and openness to differing views, especially in universities. It is an area which provokes a great deal of passion in some people. But the jury is out on whether it is a slam-dunk vote-winner. A YouGov survey last September revealed that only 57 per cent of respondents felt they knew what “woke” meant, and of those only a third actually used the term themselves, overwhelmingly (73 per cent) in a negative way. Yet only 37 per cent of those who were familiar with the description thought it was “a bad thing”.
Earlier this year, author and screenwriter Gareth Roberts pointed out in The Spectator that the number of genuine “woke” activists is very small, and that some of the most bitter confrontations, such as over the computer game Hogwarts Legacy, have been fought out largely in the small but fierce online community of Twitter and other social media platforms. Remember that there may be 16 million Twitter users in the UK, of whom many will have only a handful of followers, but the electorate numbers 46.5 million. Everything that happens online has to be kept in proportion and in context.
The New Conservatives believes that this approach, which might broadly be characterised as right-wing, will strike a chord with working-class voters in the Midlands and North of England, especially in the “Red Wall” seats which the party won in 2019. These seats are seen as particularly vulnerable at the next election, and the New Conservatives’ logic, which is simple if understandable, is that these voters endorsed the Conservative Party under the aegis of the 2019 manifesto, Get Brexit Done: Unleash Britain’s Potential, and therefore it is that manifesto which holds the key to retaining their support. (For some Conservative MPs, this cleaves closely to the view that Boris Johnson’s leadership was the “special sauce” which achieved victory, a contention thoroughly debunked by polling guru Professor Sir John Curtice, but which leads a frustrating number to agitate for his restoration as party leader.)
I am not so sure. I’m persuadable that this common-sense, I-speak-as-I-find, no-frills kind of populist conservatism might enthuse existing Conservative voters; it might even cause some waverers to vote for the party rather than abstain or even lend their vote elsewhere (though it is hard to see where). But I have yet to see any hard statistical evidence that it is a broader vote-winner, something which can make a serious dent in the Conservatives’ considerable deficit to Labour (the latest poll of polls by Politico puts the gap at 19 per cent). YouGov polling last month ranked the voters’ priorities as these: the economy (66 per cent), health (41 per cent), immigration and asylum (35 per cent) and housing (21 per cent). It is not easy to see the New Conservatives’ programme of action as tackling any of these in any substantial way except immigration, which is the primary concern of only a third of voters. Moreover, while their measures to address immigration are detailed, it is highly contestable that they are simultaneously effective, desirable and without negative effects.
Everyone at the launch was keen to emphasise their support for the prime minister. But they must realise that Rishi Sunak can hardly have enjoyed his beginning to Monday. Stopping the small boats carrying immigrants across the Channel is one of his five key priorities for 2023, and with a home secretary in Suella Braverman who sometimes seems as if she take to the water in a torpedo boat herself if it would stop the boats, he is acutely aware that he will be held to that promise. He hardly needed a new group of his own MPs highlighting the issue in a stark and demanding way.
More broadly, in my view, the question mark over the New Conservatives is the question I always put: what next? What do they hope to achieve? They have said they hope to see at least some of their proposals adopted by the government by the time of the party conference in October, but the chances of this seem very slender: the response of the prime minister’s spokesman yesterday was that the government has to balance reducing immigration with getting “the people we need”, that was currently being achieved and there were no plans to change policy. So prima facie (to borrow the Cabinet Office’s new favourite phrase) this will not be a quick win for the new group.
They may also be self-defeating. There are times in politics when to make a public stand and expect your own party to trim towards your own views achieves only one thing, which is that any change of policy becomes, for presentational reasons, absolutely impossible. Imagine the media reaction, and the criticism of other parties, if the prime minister announced major changes to immigration policy which coincidentally matched the proposals of the New Conservatives. It would be the spin doctor’s equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.
It worries me more that the New Conservatives are focusing less on the general election and more on a potential power struggle after a Conservative defeat. At Monday’s launch, Miriam Cates told the audience:
We want to win, of course we do, but it’s more than that. It’s because we believe that we still have, despite everything, the best chance of delivering for the British people.
She went on to stress again the centrality of the 2019 manifesto. “The demand for that offer is still there. We want to fulfil it.” I acknowledge the argument, presented ably by the very sound John Oxley, that limping across the line to win an astonishing fifth election victory, would not magically resolve the ideological debates and rivalries within the Conservative Party. On the other hand, I am old enough to remember, wincingly, the grim years of the mid-1990s, and I draw perhaps a slightly different lesson from it than John does. When you start planning for defeat, or planning for the rebuilding you hope to carry out in its aftermath, you create an expectation which is much more likely to be realised.
I don’t want to suggest that the New Conservatives are saboteurs who dream of election defeat and then a coup to impose their agenda on the party. I do suggest that they have not thought this through, nor have they calculated (or else they have miscalculated) the likely effect on the current political situation. I may be accused of Pollyanna-ism, but I still believe the Conservative Party can win the next election, given a particular set of circumstances: but time is running out, and the window to create those circumstances is closing. In the most sympathetic and collegiate way, I would simply ask the New Conservatives whether they really have reason to believe that their group makes victory more, rather than less, likely.