David Willetts: The Conservative Party cannot disown its past

David Willetts is President of the Resolution Foundation and a Conservative peer.

I had better start with a confession. Yes, I was at the launch of Prosper UK – there were many old friends there. I believe both Andy Street and Ruth Davidson are experienced political leaders and communicators from whom today’s party can learn a lot. David Gauke’s excellent column yesterday set out the case for the initiative very well.

Behind this is the question of the Conservative Party’s relationship to its own past. Most of the former politicians there knew they were former and weren’t trying to pretend otherwise. And most of us are realists about the next generation of Conservatives detaching themselves from us. It is part of the process of renewal; how to manage that process is one of the big challenges of Opposition.

In my pamphlet After The Landslide, I investigated how the Conservatives remade themselves after previous historic defeats. One of the clearest lessons was how much the party breaks with its own record in office and changes quite radically before it gets back into office.

Bonar Law told the Party Conference in 1917 “Our Party on the old lines will never have a future in the life of this country.” Quentin Hogg described the 1945 defeat as the result of “a long pent-up and deep-seated revulsion against the principles, practices and membership of the Conservative Parry.”

Compared to those blistering statements most of the comment on this website about Conservative Governments 2010-2024 is modest stuff – and Kemi Badenoch is right not to use up political capital on defending our record in Government.

Changing personnel is key to that distancing and renewal. Recruiting new candidates and reformed candidate selection was a key a part of the post-1945 recovery. Tali Fraser’s column on the fresh talent that has come in as MPs is a vivid example of that starting to happen.

There is also a process of learning from past mistakes. That is painful and necessary as part of renewal. After 1945 it meant confronting the role of many prominent Tories in appeasement. After 1997 it meant trying to tackle the caricature of Thatcherism as meaning “there is no such thing as society”.

It is very odd that the current process of critically appraising our record in Government appears to exclude by far the biggest single feature of the recent Conservative record – Brexit. It is hard for the party honestly to confront challenges from migration to the growth of the Civil Service if it is not allowed even to review the effects of hard Brexit. Indeed the process of renewal is only credible and serious when the biggest and most painful issues are confronted.

That is not because we are going to rejoin the EU, we aren’t, but because recognising its effects it is a precondition for proper engagement with the business community and the younger generation. Only then will the Party have really matched the bravery of those quotes from our past and got serious about renewal.

Appealing to younger generations is key. So it is odd that today’s Conservative strategy appears to be focussed on older voters. Part of the Conservative Party’s electoral problem by 2024 was the extraordinary concentration of its vote amongst older people. A lively new insurgent party should be ambitious about changing that rather than doubling down on it. There needs to be a much deeper and more radical effort to develop policies to spread the property-owning democracy to the next generation.

One important message from Prosper UK is that economic policy matters. This in particular is an area where bold risk-taking may not be the best strategy. Instead a lot if it is about discipline and avoiding false promises – an area where Conservatives should be far ahead of Reform. The party may be able to learn from successful fiscal policies in the past – from Geoffrey Howe to George Osborne.

Cutting public spending is hard: the problem is not that lily-livered chancellors have lacked guts. I was working in the Treasury on public spending in the early 1980s and remember the fraught internal arguments when an Opposition commitment to reduce real public spending became instead a commitment to bring it down as a percentage of GDP and even that took years of effort, a surge in economic growth, sales of the nationalised industries, and freezing the real value of basic state pension.

The triple lock, plus the NHS plus a surge in the number of old people, plus rebuilding our defences makes that even more difficult now – though not impossible.

There is one other warning about this process of developing new policies – and it comes from Sir Keir Starmer. He seems to have thought that Britain’s problems were caused by a group of bad, incompetent Tories and if only good well-intentioned people replaced them then everything would be fine.

His Government was not prepared for the tough trade-offs you have to face in Government. It would be absurd for the Tory Opposition to repeat that mistake and attribute all the flaws and mistakes of our time in Government to bad people who somehow didn’t care about controlling public spending or immigration.

Distancing from the past and trying to do better does not require that. Indeed that approach stands in the way of real renewal. The Conservative Party today can chart a different course and make different trade-offs but preparing it involves rigour and realism.