Bartek Staniszewski: A party without a clear philosophy is not going to win votes – just look around Europe

Bartek Staniszewski is Head of Research at the think-tank Bright Blue

“We Conservatives need to get back to first principles.”

When I heard Kemi Badenoch say this, I felt a sense of relief.

The Tories, over the past decade, have forgotten what they stand for, and Kemi seemed to have the right idea – we need to reassert a clear identity and build a firm foundation upon which a cohesive policy platform can be built. Alas, no such thing has happened. Four months have passed since Kemi became the leader of the Conservative Party, but its principles remain unclear; a problem they share with the centre-right across Europe. Until they sort this out, they are unlikely to return to winning ways.

When David Cameron was elected as Conservative Party leader in late 2005, he offered a new vision of Conservatism. It was meant to be modernising and exciting, combining the best of the old and the new. Big Society and Universal Credit were representative of the compassionate conservative vision he sold to the electorate. After 2013, however, austerity got in the way, and both were sacrificed at the altar of fiscal responsibility.

Fine – responsible economic management has long been a selling point for the centre-right across the western world. But, by 2019, the Tories had jettisoned that too. In electing Boris Johnson, they appointed a leader who, for all his charisma, brought in a much more left-leaning big-state paternalism; merely coloured in the red, white and blue of Brexit. State expenditure ballooned, first to fund levelling-up but especially once Johnson was confronted with COVID. In 2018, government expenditure amounted to 38.9% of GDP. In 2020, it was 50.0%.

To replace Johnson, the Tories chose Liz Truss – also fiscally irresponsible, but in a very different way, favouring drastic tax cuts over increased state expenditure. It did not take long for her, too, to be replaced – this time by Rishi Sunak, who lacked any identifying principles. His technocratic Government’s policy ideas were seemingly picked at random, without any consideration for whether their underlying principles present a coherent vision.

The paradigmatic example of this was the smoking ban. Now happily picked up by Labour, whose philosophy it suits far better, it appealed neither to libertarians – for whom it was an attack on freedom – nor to small-c conservatives – who often enjoy a cigarette themselves.

I cannot imagine that anybody who voted for Johnson at the then-most recent 2019 general election could have possibly imagined the Tories banning smoking.

A similar story could be told about Sunak’s attempt to present himself as a Net Zero sceptic after many years of Conservative successes on the environmental policy front.

Indeed, on the night of the Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire by-elections, which took place soon after the smoking ban was announced, I got into a discussion with one of Sunak’s advisers and confronted him about it. “Voters don’t care about philosophy, only whether their bins are taken out on time,” he said, paraphrasing. I disagreed, suggesting that voters would not trust a party with no principles.

For this reason or another, Conservatives lost both the by-elections.

The Tories can take some solace from the fact they are not alone. The centre-right is facing a similar identity problem all across is Europe. Ireland’s centre-right parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, have spent the last decade steadily abandoning their Catholic, socially conservative roots. By March 2024, they had shifted to the left on social issues so hard that, in two constitutional referenda proposing to extend the definition of family to include relationships outside marriage and to replace gendered language on women, they supported the ‘Yes’ vote. The ‘No’ vote won both, by 68% and 74% respectively.

A similar story can be told for Germany, where, to the average voter, the centre-right, Christian democrat CDU/CSU have become almost indistinguishable from the centre-left SDP. Having presided over unsustainable levels of immigration and having paid little tribute to the ‘Christian’ part of their name, they are now under increasing pressure from the reprehensible AfD party, which won 20.8% of the vote in the most recent election to become the second-biggest party in the Bundestag. With the CDU/CSU lacking a philosophy distinct from that of the SDP, voters looking for an alternative have finally turned to one.

The problem with having no philosophy is not just that it irritates philosophers. First, you cannot expect voters to trust you if you have no principles that can be used to justify your policies and to which you can be held accountable. A principle-less party can shift its policy platform completely overnight, so how can a voter possibly trust them not to change their tack? After all, the Tories have done just that, having embraced three wildly different political philosophies between winning the 2019 general election and their 2024 defeat.

Second, it betrays incompetence. I tutor part-time, and my students sometimes practice multiple-choice questions with me. When they get a question wrong, I ask them to try again. After enough tries, they will inevitably eventually stumble upon the right answer, but I nonetheless know that they do not know the right answer. The Tories’ approach to policy is largely just like this – name policies at random until one sticks. A competent politician knows why their policy rests upon sound principles and why those principles are right.

Some may wish to point out that the centre-right across Europe prides itself on its political flexibility – its ability to shift policy positions to respond to political developments. But flexibility must be done with a steady goal in mind. There is no point flexing toward a goal if you change that goal every couple of years.

There is really no need for this. The centre-right stands in an abundantly rich intellectual tradition from which it can draw, both in the UK and elsewhere. It can look up to great thinkers such as J. S. Mill, Michael Oakeshott, Friedrich Hayek or Maurice Cowling, just to name a few. Indeed, Bright Blue is currently working with the German Konrad Adenauer Foundation to try to rediscover a clear intellectual identity for the European centre-right.

The Tories need to decide what they believe in and stick to it. Kemi’s speech at the CPS Margaret Thatcher Conference recently was the clearest expression of her vision yet, but it has come after over four months of vague tributes to “realism,” “national interest” or “getting serious” and there is no guarantee that the Conservatives will stick to Kemi’s philosophy.

Their identity crisis remains emblematic of a problem plaguing the European centre-right; a problem which, unless overcome, will mean that the centre-right’s historical dominance over European politics will soon come to an end for good.