• ---

  Kemi Badenoch can grasp a once-in-half-century chance to renew our country

Eric Sukumaran

October 28th 2024

The world is changing rapidly. Thirty years ago we were certain in the ascendancy of the democracies as the driving force of peace and prosperity. Ten years ago we were broadly certain in our country’s continued membership of the European Union, whether we liked it or not. Five years ago, the Conservatives were settling into another ten years in power, and no one had heard of CoVid-19. Labour will deal with the challenges our country faces in this Parliament. But what about the next Parliament? 2030 is the first full year in which Conservatives could have the chance to face our country’s challenges once again, and we do not yet know what those challenges will be.

As the effects of Labour’s policies become clearer nearer the end of this Parliament, we will have to find new, innovative and politically attractive policies, none of which exist today.  After having suffered the biggest defeat in our modern history, now is a time for renewal, not making promises on policy as if we were still in power. The issues of the last election will likely not be the driving issues of the next, and it is to the next election that we must look. What will our policies be? What kind of party will we be? Five years out, it is all right not to know exactly.

When Margaret Thatcher was elected leader of the opposition in 1974, not many Conservatives were full-throated free-marketeers, strange as that may sound. Both Labour and the Tories had spent the previous 25 years embracing statist Keynesianism. It was in the five years between 1974 and 1979 that the last renewal occurred: new ideas were sought out and incorporated into party policy, culminating in the famous 1979 budget, the most transformative budget in recent history. Again, the priorities and platform of the previous election were not the priorities in 1979. Similarly, while we may agree with many of Robert Jenrick’s policy proposals, it is Kemi Badenoch who is offering the genuine chance of renewal — looking forward to 2030, and not back to 2024.

’79 was a rare moment. Things had gotten so bad that Thatcher was able to win a mandate to completely rewire the system, without having to accept some tenet of the outgoing government’s philosophy. No leader of the opposition has had that opportunity since. Tony Blair had to accept certain key tenets of Thatcherism. Thus we had the elimination of Clause 4, and Peter Mandelson declaring he was fine with people getting stinking rich, so long as they paid their taxes. David Cameron had to accept key tenets of the Blairite legacy. Chief among these was the acceptance that vast unelected bureaucracies, populated with like-minded individuals, had the right to stop the clearly expressed will of Parliament, the keystone of our constitution.

It was Blair and Brown’s way of making sure truly Conservative policies couldn’t really be enacted, and it is one of the main reasons why we have ‘talked right, and governed left,’ something I heard often on the campaign trail this summer as a parliamentary candidate. However, it is already clear that Labour is operating under a Corbyn-adjusted Blairite flim-flam of a governing philosophy – there will be no Starmerism worth the name. Labour will fail, miserably, to build prosperity in this country.  And so, there is an opportunity to return to power without having to incorporate something of the outgoing government’s outlook — a once-in-half-century chance to earn a mandate for a truly clean slate.

To really grasp that opportunity, we must be ready. Not only to win an election, with all the spectacle and eye-catching policies that entails, but also to govern successfully. To do that, we have to do the hard work now in opposition — redeveloping, rethinking and renewing Conservatism to appeal to a wide swathe of an electorate yearning for something new and hopeful, and not more of the same. As laid out in the pamphlet ‘Conservativism in Crisis’ by Kemi Badenoch et al., we will need deep thinking and planning to fix our underlying system and unwind the damage caused by Blair, Brown and Starmer, which we failed to do from 2010 to 2024. This will allow us to actually enact the policies we want. Without it, policies are just so much froth. It will require a great battle to fight for a rewired, reformed and renewed state which does fewer things spectacularly well, and which allows private sector activity to fill demand for the rest, creating jobs and raising wages along the way.

This is the challenge of our lifetimes — to restore the country we love to strength and prosperity. It requires a leader of exceptional moral strength and clarity of purpose to galvanise our party to achieve this, and to make us believe that there is so much more available than managerialism and decline. A renewed Conservative party did that once before, and with Kemi Badenoch at the helm I believe we can do it again.

Eric Sukumaran was the Conservative parliamentary candidate for Southgate and Wood Green in the 2024 general election