What would Osborne do? | Conservative Home

“I think the kind of ten year trend inside the Conservative movement of trying to copy the Brexit Party or the UKIP Party, or now the Reform Party, has not really worked.”

So spake George Osborne to Andrew Marr on LBC yesterday. There’s nothing remarkable – or perhaps more accurately, nothing unusual – about the sentiment. It is standard Tory-left boilerplate. If only we hadn’t pandered to Nigel Farage, all would be well.

It’s one of those lines which sounds perfectly sensible at first glance, especially if it’s exactly what you want to hear. But as I noted in the Guardian recently, the big problem for the people peddling it is that it has never been at all clear what they would have the Party do instead.

After all, the Conservative Party’s only two parliamentary majorities since 1992 – the slender one secured by Cameron and Osborne’s modernisation project in 2015, and the much larger one secured by Boris Johnson in 2019 – occurred at points when they had more or less neutralised Nigel Farage. Elections where the Party definitely hadn’t look more like last Thursday or the 2019 European elections, when we achieved 8.8 per cent of the vote.

Even then, these triumphs were obviously conditional. Consider 2015, the election with which Osborne was most directly involved. Despite David Cameron having offered an In/Out referendum, UKIP managed to place second in one hundred seats. Had there been no such promise, does the former Chancellor think they would have done better, or worse?

Or how does he think Farage would have been doing in the event of a Remain vote, when it would have been the other side holding the bag for an extremely unpopular status quo? Losing the independence referendum in 2014 did not, er, obviously hurt the Scottish National Party’s electoral prospects.

If the Conservative Party tacked towards UKIP, it did so for a reason: because a split on the right would be, and is proving to be, deeply deleterious to its electoral prospects. Moreover, in a two-party-and-change system, shifting ground to box out radical parties is its job, just as it is Labour’s on the left.

The real charge to be laid at the Tories’ door is quite different, because in one crucial respect Osborne’s analysis quoted above is straightforwardly wrong.

The Conservative Party since 2010 has seldom ever been ‘trying’ to accomodate Faragism, or even the public concerns which animate the Faragist parties; it has been pretending to. Cameron twice promised to bring net immigration down to the “tens of thousands”, but he never made any serious attempt to actually do this, and he pledged an In/Out referendum on Europe only because he expected to have to trade it away to the Liberal Democrats in a second round of coalition negotiations.

No, you can’t actually out-Farage Farage. But you can head him off at the pass by shifting Conservative policy to deprive him of political space. But despite that the Tories never really tried this, plenty of people have memed themselves into thinking they did.

Osborne is not the only Conservative to make this mistake; as I noted in the above-linked Guardian piece, on almost all the really important policy areas it was, for our entire 14 years in office, the ‘Sensible’ wing which had its way most of the time: “more young people than ever were funnelled into higher education; immigration was allowed to rise to whatever level industry and sector lobby groups demanded; taxation levels soared.”

Nor is it only them. This was Kemi Badenoch’s answer to a question from GB News about “specifics” a cap on immigration during her leadership campaign launch last year (a question she said “illustrates quite well where things went wrong”):

“We had a cap of tens of thousands when David Cameron came in. We need to ask ourselves: ‘Why didn’t that work?’, rather than just saying we’ll make another promise. Something went wrong there. So it’s not just about throwing out numbers, thowing out targets – something is wrong with the system.

“That’s why I’m talking about the system. People who are throwing out numbers, and saying ‘Oh we need to leave the ECHR’, and so on, are giving you easy answers. That is how we got in this mess in the first place. I’m not going to do that.”

Further on, she describes leaving the ECHR as “another thing we would end up doing that doesn’t actually solve the problem.”

Now I’m not an engineer, so perhaps I’ve missed something. Nor do I even think a hard cap on numbers is a good way to sustainably reduce immigration. But at the risk of sounding like Charlie Drake’s witch-doctor, surely the most obvious reason that Cameron’s tens-of-thousands cap didn’t work is that it was never implemented. There was no cap.

In that context, Badenoch’s pivot to talking about the people enforcing border control seems, at best, disengenuous; liberal border guards cannot subvert restrictive policy that doesn’t exist. So too does describing leaving the ECHR as “another thing we would end up doing”, as if the cap were a thing that actually happened. (Perhaps she meant instead the huge increase overseen by her now-Shadow Foreign Secretary?)

Both within sections of the Conservative Party and in much of the commentary on it, the distinction between word and deed has collapsed. Senior Tories froze income tax thresholds and called themselves ‘tax-cutting conservatives’ – apparently sincerely, if their bafflement at the electorate’s failure to reward them is any indication. Meanwhile commentators look at a party which did that, uncapped student numbers, and tripled net immigratiton and say it ‘lurched to the right’.

So I ask: in lieu of “trying to copy the Brexit Party”, or whatever, what would Osborne do? Circling the wagons around an elite consensus works on low-salience issues, such as the death penalty. It does not work on issues such as immigration. (The test for whether a policy is in the first category or the second is whether or not a new party can ride it like the horseman of an electoral apocalypse.)

In the latter case, doubling down on the status quo simply shuts the political pressure release valves and sets the system on the path toward an explosion. Especially if, unlike in Germany, you can’t simply ban the new party.

Thus, all the Osborne analysis (and it is peddled by many) really amounts to is the implication that if we had all just ignored Farage, he would have gone away. One might as well chide a recalcitrant audience of Peter Pan for killing Tinkerbell because they did not believe in fairies hard enough.