Big Tent Politics

I enjoyed this article by Daniel Finkelstein which appeared in The Times recently - not only because I recognise and lived through many of the big changes highlighted in his piece - but also because he's right about the importance of younger voters.

Political parties and other organisations, like trade unions, owe their existence to the energies and efforts of a small band of activists - without whose support they would slowly wither and die because most of the work is done by this network unpaid volunteers

But if these activists become unrepresentative and delude themselves into believing that their own deeply held -  yet essentially very narrow views - are much more widely shared then the inevitable crash cannot be far away.

Right now the lunatics appear to be 'taking over the asylum' as far as the Tories at Westminster are concerned, yet who can blame them - especially when UKIP which is even more bonkers, of course - is the only party in the whole country whose opinion poll ratings are going up rather than down.  

Cameron needs a big-tent Conservatism

By Daniel Finkelstein

Defectors to Nigel Farage came mostly from older voters. Cameron needs to attract the young and the aspiring

In 1987 I got my first job. I worked as a journalist on a small magazine, sharing an electric typewriter with two colleagues. In 1988 we won a prize and received a single PC which we would all fight over as deadline day approached.

The PC wasn’t connected to anything, no one was, since the world wide web didn’t exist yet. It would be another two years before Tim Berners-Lee even proposed the idea. But my friends thought our rudimentary equipment was amusing since the title of the magazine was Network, its subject was office computer networking and the prize we won was Technology Magazine of the Year.

Nobody — or hardly anybody — had a mobile phone either. There was a mobile where you could get a signal, but only if you stood outside a post office or a main line railway station. I remember the press release.

In 1987 we were still several years off having Sky TV and Channel 4 hadn’t reached its fifth birthday. The Premier League hadn’t begun yet. David Cameron, Ed Balls and Nick Clegg were still undergraduates, Ed Miliband was studying for his A levels, George Osborne for his O levels (the GCSE didn’t replace it for another year).

In 1987 Liberace died, still suing people who claimed that he was homosexual. Very few people, and almost no politicians, had come out as gay, the immigrant population in the UK was small, nobody took much of an interest in Islamic fundamentalism, Margaret Thatcher was regarded as a strong supporter of the European Community, the Soviet Union was between perestroika and glasnost and still years off collapse.

Politically, socially, economically, 1987 was a long time ago. And the last time the Conservative Party won a majority big enough to endure for an entire Parliament was 1987.

The most pessimistic UKIP member is correct. The country they grew up in has changed and it is changing. The youngest person to vote in 1987 is now 44 years old. Britain is a different place in many ways. And the Right has struggled as this change has taken place.

Last week UKIP won votes that came disproportionately from older voters, particularly those who are not graduates and who are not optimistic about the country. And if David Cameron has been reading the papers since then he will not have been in want of advice about how to win them back.

But Conservatives need to understand that winning these people back isn’t the only problem. The problem is how to form a broad coalition with these people as only one part.

You see, winning elderly pessimistic white males has not been the Tory difficulty over the last quarter of a century. The difficulty has been winning people beyond this group.

Let me provide an example. Everyone seems to agree that one of the reasons Mitt Romney lost the US presidential election was that he didn’t win enough votes from ethnic minority voters. And it is widely accepted that the Republicans are doomed unless they can do something about it. Well, Mitt Romney won the support of 18 per cent of minority voters. In 2012 the Conservatives won the support of 16 per cent of minority voters. Only 73 per cent of the population under 5 years old is white.

Or let’s take gay marriage. David Cameron is being advised by some of his MPs to drop the proposal because it is so unpopular. But this isn’t true. It is unpopular with over-65s. It is strongly popular — something like two to one — with all other age groups and all social classes. For every one person under the age of 40 who opposes gay marriage, nearly five support it. And they regard opposition to it as rather odd.

The Conservative Party cannot, of course it cannot, dismiss older voters or ignore their concerns. It needs to reassure them that their central concerns are being addressed and that their opinions matter. It needs to find inventive ways — the benefit cap is a good example, the European referendum another — to talk to these voters and a wider constituency at the same time.

But at the same time it cannot win — indeed it has no future at all — with just these people. The Conservative Party has to capture the young, has to win the optimists and the aspirers and has to appeal to those who want to support a moderate pragmatic party of government.

The mainstream Right sees its job primarily as trying to put pressure on David Cameron to meet UKIP’s demands. They might consider that they have another serious task. It is to explain to Tory core voters and defectors, and to the rest of the Right, that they cannot govern by themselves, pleasing only themselves. There aren’t enough of such people. They have to compromise. They need the support of others to have a majority and a future.

On Friday Nigel Farage cited the rebellious Canadian Reform Party and the way it had overhauled the governing Progressive Conservatives. And he was quite right. In 1993 they split its vote and almost destroyed it. But Mr Farage failed to say what happened next.

Over successive elections Reform failed to improve on its inital showing. It could get core votes in the West of Canada, but nothing much more. The Canadian liberal Left therefore had majorities for 12 years until the Right reunited. It became the Conservative Party, moving back towards roughly the same ideological position it had in 1993. Everyone had gone around in a big circle and ended up pretty much back where they started.

Because the course of modernisation that David Cameron has embarked upon cannot be avoided. Mathematically, demographically, it cannot be wished away. Core Conservatives cannot govern by themselves. They have to win the support of centre voters to the Tory cause or share government with others like the Liberal Democrats.

The Right — all of us — needs to understand what the challenge is and how severe it is. Conservatives can solve the UKIP problem easily enough. William Hague did. Michael Howard did. The real challenge is to solve the problem at the same time as winning new voters that have been departing from the right for more than two decades.

Britain can have governments of the right, but they will be open, socially liberal, moderate, ethnically diverse, optimistic and willing to compromise or they will not win power. That message, after all, put David Cameron in Downing Street in 2010.

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk