How do conservatives solve a problem like Reform's?

They say that nature abhors a vacuum. In politics, no organization knows this better than the Conservative Party. Between 2010 and 2024, successive Conservative Prime Ministers promised many things, but the results were insufficient. Under David Cameron, immigration was to be reduced to a few tens of thousands. The Conservatives left power with record numbers of people coming to Britain. Boris Johnson insisted his leveling up agenda would spread success across the country. Geographic inequalities remain deeply rooted. More recently, Rishi Sunak pledged to halve NHS waiting lists. He failed.

The result of the last election was a historic defeat and a landslide for the Labor Party. Yet now that Keir Starmer is in power, disillusioned British voters can already see that little seems likely to improve. To whom do the millions of voters bruised by the crash of 2008, the Covid pandemic and the false promises of prosperity that resulted? Enter Reform UK.

Reforms fill the void left by the failure of traditional politicians. Led by Nigel Farage, the party elected five MPs in the last general election but has dominated the airwaves since then.

In the weeks following the election, Farage was undoubtedly the party's main source of appeal. His victory in Clacton-on-Sea, his close relationship with Donald Trump and his ability to castigate conservatives in the media earned him high levels of support, even making him the most popular politician in the country (provided you only look at the number of people who like it rather than hate it).

Yet Reform is no longer exclusively the Farage show. Renewed coverage of the grooming gang scandal has attracted even more party attention, with Elon Musk reposting MPs Rupert Lowe's (and Kemi Badenoch's) call for the Home Office to carry out a national inquiry into the how this parody came to be.

How did the conservatives react? Not so good. During the Christmas holidays, the news broke The Reformers surpassed the figure of 131,680 announced by the Conservatives last year.. Badenoch took to social media to accuse the Reform Party of fudging the numbers. It came across as the outburst of a sore loser and gave Farage and Richard Tice the opportunity to tout their popularity with the Conservatives and present themselves as the vivacious and energetic heirs of the British right.

It’s understandable why Badenoch might feel baffled by all this. For centuries the Conservative Party has been THE a vessel for conservatism in Britain, allowing its leaders to concentrate their efforts almost entirely on fighting their ideological enemies within Labor and the Liberals. Reform, on the other hand, poses a fairly new threat to the Conservatives, even compared to UKIP or the Brexit Party, Farage's previous vehicles. Addressing this requires a two-pronged approach.

The first task is to clearly explain why conservatives have been unable to bring about positive change on so many fronts (and why they have failed to get enough credit for their successes, such as in education). . The rise of reforms is obviously interpreted as a reaction against the prevailing political stagnation. Besides major gaps in controlling immigration, repairing state institutions and increasing economic growth, there is also a pervasive feeling that politicians have neglected the little things too. A revealing study of Stonehaven published last year showed that what united the seats that leaned toward the Reform Party was that they all lacked a road that would easily connect them to the outside world.

A article published by the Badenochs campaign in October 2024 on the growth of the bureaucratic state does a good job of describing the obstacles policymakers face in bringing about change, but explaining why his party has failed to dismantle these structures for so many years must play a larger role in his direction.

The second task is to develop a delivery plan. So far, Badenoch has argued that it is too early to provide precise policy details on what a Conservative government would do if re-elected, given that the election is so far away. It's certainly a good argument, but Conservatives are operating in unique circumstances. Labor may be struggling and Reform may not yet have a fully worked out plan for government, but their rise to power shows no signs of slowing. A recent MRP survey Led by More in Common, the right-wing newcomers are dethroning the Liberal Democrats as the UK's third party at the next election.

The first phase of the plan is, in some ways, the easy part. A healthy pride-swallowing session would go some way to conveying the image of a party that takes seriously the challenge that awaits it. The second phase requires real courage. Andrew Lilico wrote in CapX this week that conservatives have ignored their intellectuals for too long, leading to a deficit of bold ideas within the party. He's right. In magazines, newspapers and think tanks across the country there are smart people coming up with innovative solutions to Britain's problems. In the 1970s, when our country's problems were just as intractable, Margaret Thatcher listened to and surrounded herself with right-wing thinkers.

Badenoch is someone who has an intellectual hinterland. Indeed, when the Conservatives were in power, and particularly during her first leadership contest, she became angered by the party's refusal to do the deep thinking needed to solve Britain's problems. If Badenoch wants to come up with a plan to suppress reform, then she needs to show voters she has the answers to their problems.

The alternative is to leave a vacuum on the right that the Reform will seek to fill. At best, it would split the Conservative vote at the next election and help Labor stay in power. At worst, it risks destroying the world's oldest political party.

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