Douglas Carswell
Douglas Carswell was first elected to Parliament in 2005 by a slender 920 votes. He was returned as MP for Clacton in 2010 with a 12,000 majority. He is the author of The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy and believes that the internet is making the world a vastly better place.
The Tory patrician hierarchy has failed. If the Conservative Party doesn't hand power to ordinary people, it will die
The Tory squirearchy is strangling the party
When we Conservatives “won” the 2010 General Election, we did so by getting a smaller share of the vote than we gained in 1945, when we went down to a Labour landslide. Such has been the long-term decline in Tory fortunes, what we today regard as a peak of electoral achievement would have once seemed like a disastrous trough.
Except of course, we did not win the 2010 election. Our party leadership obtained ministerial office after polling day by entering into a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Unless we reverse a long term downward trend for the Conservative party, coalition could be the best it gets.
In towns and cities across the country where we once used to win elections, we don't even come second any more. After years of defeat and retreat into the South East of England, are we not in danger of ending up as a kind of English version of Italy’s Northern League? Regional in reach, not even aspiring to galvanise beyond a narrow core of supporters.
You don’t need to be a genius to recognise the problem. Thus far, no one in the Tory party seems to have found the answer. That’s why I believe that the launch today of a new campaign group, Renewal, could be so important.
“The key is energy bills,” some will tell us. “We need to focus on the cost of living and fuel prices,” say others. Many of Renewal’s anti-corporatism policy proposals are great. Yet decades of Tory failure in, say, the North East, or in urban Britain, are not going to be reversed by a tranche of policy proposals alone.
What we also need is a change in the culture of the Conservative Party. For too long we have been a Westminster-based party, run by a small hierarchy, with a few local franchises. What we need instead is to be an open platform, controlled by local people. Those who live in, say the North East, or urban Britain, should select local candidates and control the local Tory brand. I have a chapter in Renewal’s publication that suggests how this real modernisation agenda might be done.
Decades of patrician Toryism run out of SW1 have failed. What we need instead is insurgent Conservatism; anti big corporate interests and politics-as-usual in Westminster. Fiercely in favour of ordinary folk trying to make the most out of life.
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