Peter Franklin: The Conservatives should position themselves as the party of fairness

Peter Franklin is an Associate Editor of UnHerd.

For the first time in a year Tory polling averages are on a clear upward trend. It’s early days, of course, and we’ve a long way left to go – but a degree of optimism is in order.

So, do we stop fretting about the future direction of the party and just stick to the current strategy? Absolutely not. Having got nowhere for so long, we need to find out what we’re now getting right. Whatever it is, further progress depends on sifting the diamonds from the dust.

Speaking of gems, it would be wrong not to acknowledge Kemi Badenoch’s remarkable run of recent parliamentary performances – as analysed by Tali Fraser last week. It’s not just Westminster watchers who’ve noticed the improvement in Badenoch’s form. According to YouGov polling (as featured by Matt Chorley), there’s also been a corresponding improvement in how the public perceive her.

So can we explain Tory fortunes purely in terms of the leader’s personal trajectory, i.e. a stumbling start followed by a newfound confidence?

For hardcore Kemi-sceptics, the fact that her first half-year as leader coincided with a six-month slide in Conservative support cannot be ignored. But what if it were just that – a coincidence? Consider the fact that her personal approval ratings have run at a consistently higher level than the party’s ratings during the whole of her leadership to date. According to Luke Tryl, “the gap currently sits at around 12 points.”

It may be that the public is more sympathetic to leaders than parties. Yet as Tryl points out, there’s no gap between Sir Keir Starmer’s (dis)approval ratings and those of the Labour Party. He is every bit as unpopular as his party and vice versa. Interesting, then, that the same dynamic does not apply to our situation. One might almost conclude that it wasn’t Badenoch dragging us down, but the other way round.

That doesn’t mean that she hasn’t made mistakes. Some of her policy announcements are half-baked, she hasn’t even begun to address the party’s catastrophically weak position with younger voters, and her tendency to shoot from the hip still leads her into pointless controversies. And, yet, her number one problem isn’t any personal inadequacy, but the deep unpopularity of the Conservative Party itself.

We’ve been here before. During our last spell in wilderness (1997 to 2010) political strategists spoke of the Conservative Party as a “toxic brand”. Various attempts at detoxification were made, some of them laughably superficial. There were the desperate photo-ops, for instance – including William Hague in a baseball cap on a water slide. Inevitably, the party logo was redesigned (in 2004) – and then redesigned again (in 2006). And though it came to nothing, there was even talk of changing the party’s name.

During those lean years I formed a rather cynical view of political strategists. The idea of them practicing “dark arts” seemed risible to me. Most of the time, they couldn’t find their arts from their elbows.

However, there was one occasion when I heard a strategist say something genuinely insightful. You’ll have to forgive the lack of names and dates, because this happened in a private meeting. The subject under discussion was the party’s messaging, and the individual in question urged those present to step back from the detail and think of one word to sum it all up. By this he meant a common theme that links everything a party says and does – like the name that runs through a stick of rock.

The question of what that word should be is as relevant now as it was then. Some Tories will say it ought to be “freedom”. However, it’s not the 1980s and we’re not libertarians. Others might suggest something along the lines of “patriotism” – but Nigel Farage has got a grip on that one. In the first phase of her leadership, Badenoch tried to lay claim to “competence” and “caution”, but that was never going to fly after the slapstick antics of the previous five years. The good news is that a more compelling theme is coming into view.

It’s worth thinking about the specific moment that the tender green shoots of Conservative recovery began to appear. It wasn’t in the immediate aftermath of the leader’s speech to party conference. That was well received, of course, and the policy announcements did lift Tory spirits, but there was little visible impact on our poll ratings. Rather, the turning point – if that is what it proves to be – came later with her storming response to the Budget.

There are occasions in politics when you can see a government making a choice that will define it for years to come. Rishi Sunak made one in November 2023 when he sacked Suella Braverman and appointed David Cameron in a Cabinet reshuffle. Two years on, Starmer signed-off on an equally momentous decision: to raise taxes by more than required to plug the black hole – and spend the proceeds on welfare.

In so doing, he put his standing with his Labour colleagues before the good of the country. To ordinary workers already struggling under the burden of high taxes and a cost of living crisis, the budget wasn’t just bad for the economy, it was unfair. If Kemi Badenoch has earned the Conservative Party a second hearing from the voters, it is because on that day her fury was their fury.

The question now is whether she’s willing to lean into that moment of connection – and make “fairness” the word that runs through Tory stick of rock.

To understand what’s at stake here take a look at a two-axis model of the political spectrum i.e. one in which the familiar left vs right continuum on economic issues is plotted against a traditionalist vs progressive continuum on social issues. This divides the political space into four quadrants. Moving clockwise from the top-right these can be labelled “conservative”, then “right liberal”, followed by “left liberal” and ending with the tricky fourth quadrant in which people lean to the to left on economic issues, but to the right on cultural issues.

For decades, these fourth quadrant voters were poorly represented by the political establishment. But in the course of this century they’ve rebelled – disrupting old party systems and driving the growth of populism across the western world. In the UK, Brexit allowed Boris Johnson to make inroads into this part of the electorate – resulting in the gain of fifty Red Wall seats in the 2019 general election.

Sadly, he (and we) then threw it all away. In part, that’s because the Conservative Party has never worked-out how to represent voters who lean left economically. Reform UK – at heart a libertarian party – has a similar problem.

The key to the conundrum is to realise something that the two-axis model obscures, which that the economic values of populist voters are not the same as those of the liberal left. The core value of the latter – including most of the Labour Party – is equality. But in the fourth quadrant the primary concern is fairness.

Of course, extremes of inequality strike most people as unfair. But at the same time, fairness can demand unequal outcomes. To put it bluntly, people who work hard deserve to have more money than people who laze around all day. Then there’s the question of belonging: citizens and non-citizens should not have equal access to social security and public services.

Indeed, if you apply the principle of fairness across the board, from the allocation of social housing to who’s allowed to participate in women’s sports, then it’s clear that Conservatives could and should fight for the voters for whom this is the core value.

In fact, the party should pursue fairness all the way out of its current comfort zone. For instance, is it fair that we should allow speculators to price our own citizens out of affordable home ownership? I’d argue it’s a travesty – and that, furthermore, by betraying the Conservative ideal of a property-owning democracy we’ve eroded our own voter base.

One thing’s for sure: even if we do claw our way back to the 24 per cent of the vote we won at the last election, this is still pitifully inadequate. To rebuild a winning electoral coalition means a complete transformation in the way that the Conservative Party is perceived. Becoming the champions of fairness would be an excellent start.