Clark Vasey: Competence won’t win back Reform voters but a Conservative agenda focused on working people will

Clark Vasey is co-founder and Executive Director of Blue Collar Conservatism.

This is part 1 of 2 articles on Re-Introducing Blue Collar Conservatism.

As political activists, we naturally like political campaigns framed as a battle of ideas with a clear mission to transform things for the better. It’s why, despite the increasing passage of time, we still look to transformative Conservatives like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. They defeated the left both at the ballot box and, most importantly, they defeated the left in office.

However, most elections do not look like that. Instead, they hinge on persuading voters that one side will be more competent than the other. David Cameron’s pitch accepted much of Tony Blair’s ‘modern Britain’; we would just do it better. Theresa May was ‘strong and stable’ until voters concluded she wasn’t and almost let in Jeremy Corbyn. Even ‘Get Brexit Done’ was about replacing a political class unwilling to get it done with one that would.

This mindset shaped candidate selection too. How often have we heard that Joe or Jane Bloggs has a background in business, the military, or whatever, ‘they will make a great MP’? This led to a tendency towards managerialism.

By the end of our time in office, too many of our entrenched problems stemmed from Blair-era reforms we left untouched or shamefully expanded.

Today, we face a Labour Government of astonishing incompetence. Its unimaginative socialism offers only higher taxes and more intervention, each compounding the last problem it created.

Kemi and her team are in another league when it comes to capability. However, we must resist the temptation to make the ‘competence’ of one group of people over another our central pitch. It will not work.

The end of the two-party system has changed the rules. Labour’s failures no longer send voters back in our direction. Labour’s collapse in the polls shows people understand how utterly useless they are, but less than two years ago many drew a similar conclusion about us. Reform’s supporters share our diagnosis of Labour; they are just not looking to us as the alternative.

We rightly point out how much worse things are since we left office. But the state of Britain in 2024 was not a winning formula. Talking about getting back to what we were beginning to achieve in government will fall far short, especially when you consider the voters we need to convince.

Labour and the left are our enemy, but if we are serious about winning, we must attract significant votes from Reform. There are too many of these voters for us to write off and there is no fantasy centrist coalition to replace them with.

More than a decade ago, Esther McVey and I founded Blue Collar Conservatism because we believed working-class voters had been taken for granted by Labour. We recognised that they shared our values and stood to benefit most from a genuinely conservative agenda. At the time, the leadership was still more interested in chasing metropolitan liberals, but we predicted that these voters would shift right.

2019 ought to have been a historic moment of realignment. Instead, many of these voters ended up feeling just as let down by us. The rightward realignment has continued but now largely sits with Reform.

Labour understands that working people are no longer part of its base. Its coalition is now a fraying mix of metropolitan left-wingers and state dependents. Labour’s approach to Reform has little to do with winning back lost Reform voters and everything to do with attracting the votes of Liberal Democrats and Greens. Keir Starmer’s increasingly unrestrained Europhilia will not appeal to Labour’s Brexit voting former heartlands but might convince enough Liberal Democrats to help block Reform.

Reform polling in the low 30s is uniquely blockable and they know it. Reform has squeezed Labour to its metropolitan core and there is no more juice in that direction. To build a base that can withstand tactical voting, Reform needs to take support from us in significant numbers. Recent developments have made that abundantly clear.

Our challenge is the inverse, but with greater numbers: persuading Reform voters to trust us.

We will not do this by attacking them. We will do it by presenting a better, clearer alternative. We once talked about ‘love-bombing’ Liberal Democrats (I know, I hate that phrase too), but a similar mindset is required here. We must show Reform voters that we understand their frustrations and yes, their scepticism of us. We must convince them that we will do what we say we will do, and that never again will we take right-wing votes to pursue left-wing outcomes.

We all have family and friends who have gone over to Reform. Many of those who have been involved in Blue Collar Conservatism are now prominent Reform figures. Their values are fundamentally the same as ours. They want what we want: a country that works.

We just need to convince them that we are the best vehicle to deliver an agenda that works for ordinary working Brits.

Blue Collar Conservatism exists to do exactly that: to reshape Britain into a country that works for working people by delivering a programme of national renewal built on a relentless focus on jobs and opportunity, and ensuring Britain’s place in the world by maximising the potential of its people.

In Part Two, I will set out what this means in practice.