Cllr David Taylor is a councillor in Havering. He is also an accredited PR practitioner, with a focus on the charity and social housing sector.
Our parliamentary party has been decimated, and we are down to a small handful of MPs. With our party doing some serious soul searching, it is tempting for us to be led by this small group.
The reality is that it is time for our MPs to follow the lead of Conservatives councillors, of which there are nearly 5,000 across the UK.
One of the major differences between election campaigns for MPs and that of local councillors is the type of promises and pledges that are made. MPs make bolder, broader promises that often aim to impact nationally: “stop the boats”, “invest in our NHS”, “Levelling up”. This is in stark comparison to pledges “secure a new junction”, “stop overdevelopment”, or “plant more trees”.
It is tempting to think that the future of the party will depend on what broad promises we make and the vision we cast for the country. But Labour’s victory shows us that the way back to government is less about big ideas and more about realistic deliverables. This is where councillors can lead.
The Conservatives won, and won big, in 2019 on the back of Boris Johnson’s promises such as getting Brexit done, 40 new hospitals, a programme of levelling up, and an end to mass migration. They were undoubtedly attractive. Unfortunately, we failed to deliver on pretty much every one of them – not for a lack of trying, but because they were simply not realistic.
The public saw we couldn’t deliver, and they booted us out. We broke the public’s trust and no amount of leaning into Reform is going to fix that. The Reform manifesto reads more like a fairytale than a series of deliverables.
Conservative councillors across the country are now in a position to set the example of how the party moves forward. We can do so by demonstrating the power of deliverable promises, focused on a local level, and actually getting things done.
As a local councillor, I represent a ward of just a few thousand people. I live in the ward, I walk it on a daily basis to and from my day job, and I’m infinitely more accessible than any MP can be. This means that, like other councillors, I have more opportunities to listen to what the public have to say.
They are not just talking about immigration. What they talk about is their local environment. They talk about how the area is run down, about how the hospital is full, how the roads are in a state, and how the homes being built are unsuitable.
They do talk about national politics, but their remarks are more about how they feel let down, lied to, and that they can no longer trust the Conservative party. To rebuild this trust we must start small, learn to walk again before we can run. Our MPs must do this by starting local, working hand-in-hand with councillors, to understand what it is locals want from their representatives.
For me to win the trust of my residents, I have to deliver tangible success. I have to secure that security lighting on a housing block, get the parking bay lines repainted, have the height of a future tower-block reduced. People must be able to walk around my town of Romford and say “David got that done”.
If they can’t do that, then they don’t much care about whether I promise them nice things or say that I’ll “fight for them”.
Here in Havering we held off the Reform surge, just. This was best demonstrated in Hornchurch, where the bookies had Julia Lopez as being near-certain to lose her seat to Nigel Farage’s candidate. Our constituencies, on the edge of Essex, were ripe for Reform to take.
The campaign run here was a great example of how to do it. Hornchurch Conservatives talked about success as much as they talked about promises. The MP had secured funding for a new NHS diagnostic centre, and a decrepit flyover is now on the books to be replaced. There are tangible signs of Conservative delivery in the area.
When people talk about the failures of the Conservatives in government, they focus more on the last three or four years than they do the first ten. Whilst Labour capitalised on the “14 years of Tory Chaos” strapline, the reality is that people feel more let down by the broken promises of Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak than they do the productive years of David Cameron or Theresa May.
To describe the first decade as ‘chaos’ is to ignore what was achieved. When Cameron won re-election in 2015, with an increased majority, he did so because he could point to progress: crime down, the deficit down, and welfare reformed. The public saw promises and they saw them delivered.
As we enter this period of soul-searching the focus should not be on whether we were right-wing enough. We should not be asking whether we made big enough promises around immigration.
What we need to focus on is delivering, on getting things done, and our network of nearly 5,000 councillors is how we are going to do this.
Councillors can transform a community in ways an MP can only dream of. It is we who sit on planning committees and vote for or against new tower-blocks, who get the roads re-laid, the streets cleaned, and parking improved. We can shape our communities at a level that people encounter every single day.
If our MPs work with local councillors, and take a lead from them on what issues to face, we can continue to deliver across the UK. Despite not being in power nationally, we are in power across UK councils. We have influence and authority.
By working hand in hand, at a local and national level, Conservatives will prove we’re a pragmatic party and that we can be trusted to deliver. Once we have earned that trust then we can begin to make bigger promises.
It is a lack of trust that lost us the election, it is pragmatic politics that will restore that trust. Whether we lean to the right or the centre. Over the next few years, it is time for councillors to lead the Conservative Party.
