ACCESS ALL AREAS Building a Majority
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ACCESS ALL AREAS Building a majority Edited by David Skelton 1 CONTENTS Acknowledgements 2 Foreword, Patrick McLoughlin MP 3 Broadening Conservative appeal Beyond the party of the rich, David Skelton 6 White van conservatism, Robert Halfon MP 23 Thinking brave and big to win over ethnic minority voters, Nadhim Zahawi MP 29 Winning over ethnic minority voters, Paul Uppal MP 33 Winning in the cities, Greg Clark MP 38 Engaging with Ordinary Working People, Shaun Bailey 42 Conservatism for the people Conservatism for the consumer, Laura Sandys MP 50 Conservatism for the low paid, Matthew Hancock MP 54 Conservatism for social mobility, Damian Hinds MP 58 Conservatism for every part of the country Winning in the North, Guy Opperman MP 66 The North in retrospective, Lord Bates 74 Winning in the Midlands, Rachel Maclean 80 Winning in Wales, Stephen Crabb MP 84 Reforming the party Transforming the Conservative Party’s Organisation, Gavin Barwell MP 92 Watering the desert – a forty for the North, Paul Maynard MP 98 iDemocracy and the new model party, Douglas Carswell MP 104 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Renewal would like to thank Colm Reilly, James Kanagasooriaam, Charlie Campbell, Michael Stott, Simon Cawte, Owen Ross, Maria Agnese Strizollo, Tim Chilvers, Shane Fitzgerald, Mary-Jay East, Peter Franklin, Luke Maynard, Matthew Harley, Victoria Cavolina, Aidan Corley, William Hensher, James Jeffreys, Mario Creatura and Ben Furnival for their assistance with the project. 3 FOREWORD PATRICK McLOUGHLIN MP There should be no such thing as a ‘traditional Conservative’ background. Our party should give no quarter to media stereotypes of leafy suburbs, gravel drives and the ‘Tory heartland’. Ours is a party for all parts of Britain and for all types of people, brought together not by background or wealth but by a shared understanding of the power of freedom, the potential of people and the great things that come from effort, enterprise and ambition. In short, ours is a party which helps people up not holds them down. I grew up in Staffordshire. My father was a miner and so was his father. I worked on a farm and in a coal mine and I joined the Conservative party because it represented me and stood for the things I believed in. What was true in the 1970s and 80s is true again today. As we prepare to win a majority in 2015 the fight has rarely mattered more. To win outright we must not only persuade people already drawn to our cause. We must win the active support of those who share our beliefs but until now have not been drawn to our party. People in cities and minority groups, away from the south-east of England. People who have been let down most of all by the bloated state and debts Labour left behind. So I welcome this new collection of essays and I welcome the campaign of which it is a part. By widening the Conservative cause we will win. PATRICK MCLOUGHLIN is Secretary of State for Transport and is the Member of Parliament for Derbyshire Dales 5 BROADENING CONSERVATIVE APPEAL 6 BEYOND THE PARTY OF THE RICH DAVID SKELTON The Conservative Party has a huge opportunity to become the party of choice for ordinary working people. As the Labour Party becomes ‘lattefied’ and ever more out of touch with its traditional, working class support base, the Conservatives can fill the gap to become the new ‘worker’s party’. For the first time in decades the votes of millions of traditionally Labour voters are up for grabs if the Conservatives are bold enough to take advantage. To make the most of this once in a generation opportunity to broaden their appeal, Conservative must continue to be bold and imaginative, but the electoral prizes for getting it right are glittering. The party also faces considerable, and overlapping, challenges that it must overcome if it is to benefit from the withering away of Labour’s support base. And these challenges are overlapping. The party is still seen by a majority of voters as being on the side of the rich, rather than ordinary people. A 2012 poll for Policy Exchange showed that 64% of voters agreed with the statement that Conservatives look after the interests of the rich and powerful, not ordinary people.1 Polling by Lord Ashcroft reaffirms this impression, with only 24% of voters saying that Conservatives are “one the side of people like me” and only 17% saying that the Party “represents the whole country, not just some types of people.”2 This perception is a major contributory factor to the fact that the Conservatives haven’t won an election with an overall majority for 21 years and a stubbornly high 42% of voters say that they would never vote Tory.3 The Party continues to perform indifferently outside of its South Eastern heartland. In their heartland, the Conservatives hold nine out of ten seats. In the 1 Policy Exchange, Northern Lights 2 Lord Ashcroft, Blue Collar Tories, p19 3 YouGov poll for IPPR, cited in the Observer, 24 September 2011. 7 Midlands, they have about half, in the North about a third and in Scotland they hold only one seat. And the Conservatives struggle particularly in urban centres outside of their heartland. There are 124 urban seats in the North and Midlands and the Tories only hold 20 of them – that’s 16%. Many seats outside of the South East also have a higher than average proportion of public sector workers – a group of voters which are less likely to vote Conservative.4 And research for Renewal has shown that the majority of key battleground seats are constituencies with above average public sector employment.5 In many Northern cities, such as Newcastle, Sheffield, Manchester and Liverpool, there’s not a single Tory Councillor and voting Conservative has become counter cultural– meaning that the Party is lacking an activist base in some of the most populated parts of the country. In Liverpool, which was once a bastion of working class Toryism, the Conservative candidate came a poor seventh in last year’s Mayoral election. Over the past few decades, Liberal Democrats have also replaced the Conservatives as the main opposition to Labour in several cities outside of the Tory heartland. This book includes contributions from Greg Clark, Guy Opperman, Lord Bates, Stephen Crabb, Paul Maynard and Shaun Bailey considering how the Conservatives can appeal to voters outside of their heartland. Conservatives also continue to struggle in attracting ethnic minority voters. As the chart below shows, only 16% of non-white voters backed the Tories at the last election, compared to 68% who backed the Labour Party. Polling conducted by YouGov for Renewal has also shown that only 6% of ethnic minority voters believe that the Conservatives are the party that is most in touch with ethnic minorities. Failure to win over non-white voters in 2010 may have cost the party a number of seats, such as Birmingham Edgbaston and Westminster North, where there is a higher than average proportion of ethnic minority voters. As part of this book, Nadhim Zahawi and Paul Uppal put forward their proposals for reaching out to ethnic minority voters. 4 Research by Policy Exchange (Northern Lights, 2012) showed that households where both adults work in the public sector and 30% less likely to vote Conservative and households where one adult work in the public sector are 18% less likely to vote Conservative. 5 Research conducted by James Kanagasooriam for Renewal analysing the demographic make-up of parliamentary constituencies. We will be publishing more detailed research soon. 8 Beyond the party of the rich | David Skelton Chart 1 – 2010 voting by ethnic group6 All ethnic White minorities Indian Pakistani Bangladeshi Caribbean African Labour 31 68 61 60 72 78 87 Conservative 37 16 24 13 18 9 6 Lib Dem 22 14 13 25 9 12 6 Other 11 2 2 3 1 2 1 All of these challenges are overlapping and none of them are new. If the Conservatives are to make the most of the opportunities that are rapidly emerging, they have to make a sustained effort to overcome these challenges. This book sets out how the Conservatives can widen their base and build a substantial new coalition of voters. It might not be easy reading for those Conservatives who think that ‘one more heave’ is all that is needed to turn round two decades of electoral underperformance. Nor will it please those who are content with re-running failed campaigns of the past in the facile hope that this will deliver different results. Building on change The Conservatives have already changed under David Cameron’s leadership and his changes to the Party were enough to give the Party its biggest swing since 1931, but not quite enough to push it over the line towards winning an overall majority. Under Cameron’s leadership, the Party has adopted policies, such as the pupil premium, taking the poorest out of tax, a bank levy, increased capital gains tax, exempting low paid workers from the public sector pay freeze and gay marriage, which would have been unthinkable earlier. The changes that Cameron has already made to the party means that the Conservatives have a strong platform to build on as they seek to become the new workers’ party. Despite this welcome progress, the party still has to do more to show that it is in touch with ordinary voters and make inroads outside of its heartland. Above all, the Conservative Party needs to change to set out a clear message that it is not the ‘party of the rich’.