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“What’s the point of you, you don’t even have any polices?”
Get used to this tired jibe, it’s going to keep coming.
I’ve explained here before why our opponents use it. The party needs to ignore the obvious baited trap. The other common jibe, “the Tories were just as bad” is similarly flawed in that it deliberately assumes, because our opponents need it to, that the party of now is a carbon copy of the party of then.
For better or worse, depending on your view, it is not. It is under new leadership, and whether you voted for that leadership or not that’s more than a slogan, it’s a fact.
Kemi Badenoch may get criticism for things she says, or fights she seems to pick, but on the policy question she’s been very clear. Strategically it makes sense. There’ll be no new detailed policies announced this far out from an election.
Many who disagree with this strategy forget that one of the electorate’s passing-shots to a crushed Conservative party, was that a period of opposition to think about fresh ideas was probably what it badly needed. Also, why give your opponent’s time to either steal your ideas or take four years slowly attacking them? The challenges of 2025, will be subtly different in 2029. That’s the logic in LOTO.
Surprises can be good too. There’s a certain joy on every side of politics when you finally do the big policy reveal and see your opponents’ faces fall.
Labour advanced, policy free, for the entire time it was in opposition. The difference, one hopes will be that if Kemi and her team are still there fighting the next election, they should have a set of detailed and tested plans to put into action and actually deliver positive change, rather than the word-soup-aspirations Labour keeps relaunching.
Six months on and today Rachel Reeves is having another much-trailed relaunch of her stuttering growth agenda. The Conservatives should learn a stark lesson: if all your big ideas put you where Labour are after six months in government, you got opposition thinking time very wrong.
Now whether you belong to the “I give her a year” school of thought or the “patient rebuilding, not more infighting, is the only way” philosophy, what you may not know is that policy formulation has not been kicked into the long grass but is already underway.
Just before I started working at the Office of the Children’s Commissioner in 2017, the bright young Policy Director left, to take up a seat in the house of Commons. His name was Alex Burghart. From autumn 2021 to today, he has been offered, in a short time an array of jobs both in government and now opposition, and he now deputises for Kemi Badenoch, albeit unofficially. He is, as they say, ‘a smart cookie’.
If you want new policy formulation, we start with him. He is running the Policy Commissions process and he spoke to the shadow cabinet this week. The theme was that they have three periods of opposition they could look at as strategic pathways: Heath, Cameron, and Thatcher. It’s the latter the Shadow Cabinet will follow.
Thatcher did not rush into policy when she was elected leader almost exactly 50 years ago. She and especially Keith Joseph bided their time building policy not for tomorrows headlines but for a return to government. Those two also set up the Centre for Policy Studies in 1974 which to this day, on its website, cites Thatcher’s own verdict, that the CPS was:
“Where our Conservative revolution began”
It’s no coincidence Kemi Badenoch gave her big immigration speech last year at the CPS, and her most recent speech at Onward: she may not like woke, but she quite likes wonk.
More proof of that comes from some of those in her team. Most of her close advisors, some experienced former special advisors, cut their policy teeth in the abundance of right leaning think tanks that exist today.
Outside the Westminster bubble there is a kid of reverse intellectual snobbery about think-tanks. It’s a mistake, frankly. Truly original thought and detailed new ideas are actually hard to come by. Many who shout more loudly about how good they are at it, aren’t. Many who ask ‘why don’t they just do this’ never think it might have been tried and tested, and failed elementary scrutiny.
Plenty of political people get by rehashing ideas they heard somewhere else, trying desperately to sound like it was theirs all along. Or they imagine real policy is the same as detail-free attention grabbing headlines.
Think-tanks do the dull but vital hard graft.
Now at this point some of those who have decided the Conservatives are doomed (but still seem curiously obsessed with reading about them) will leap up, the scent of blood in their nostrils:
“This where all the problems have come from. Group-think-tanks. Doing the same thing with the same old ideas, will inevitably lead to the same terrible results”
Well, get it off your chests. Some of those saying that loudest have faith in a party that doesn’t appear to have a policy team bar a comms operation, but for anyone else here’s three reasons why you’d be wrong.
First the ask is different. The party isn’t looking for ‘cover-versions’ but new songs. The values and principles underpinning them might be older – the red meat restaurant Badenoch promised – but what the policy team aren’t asking for is what the Thais call “same-same but different.” The menu is going to change.
Second, in 14 years, and frankly the last six months, the civil service takes – and has taken – government aims and developed the policy to deliver it. It turns out, I could have said ‘takes over’ and that also is an area being looked at: the hardwiring of government (the need for which Starmer seems to have only just discovered). Think tanks are going to be providing policy foundations for government, it may be they’ll also need to be plugged in more to government.
If their work in 4 years’ time helps build a manifesto that is both different and popular, it’s time we considered giving the architects a much better role in delivery. Not just holed up in the centre but right alongside civil servants – in the same rooms, meetings, and conversations that too often happen without political involvement.
The system currently is not working well and hasn’t for some time. It is too rigged to say ‘no’ – as Rachel Reeves will acknowledge later today. You want something Dom Cummings got absolutely right long before she did? It’s that.
The third reason is the original thinkers and disruptors, hell, even Dom Cumming’s misfits, don’t tend to do their thinking through a megaphone. The people who think they are all nerds with no understanding of the ‘real world’ have rarely met them. The disconnect is as much about their detractors as it is about the wonks themselves. The word ‘wonk’ is used as much as a criticism as it is a colloquial label. However, the stereotype of a think-tanker ignores a very useful repository of intellectual and political rigour.
So no, no finished policies yet. But the work has clearly started and seemingly will continue regardless of any flak that comes in now. The pressure couldn’t be bigger. It’s a vital process and one they cannot afford to get even slightly wrong.
And in the meantime, for those that like the cut and thrust of politics I repeat my plea for more ambush opposition to keep the government on its toes and our readers engaged.
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