It looks as if Rishi Sunak has run out of road. The latest Labour byelection victories in Wellingborough and Kingswood come despite Keir Starmer’s most challenging fortnight as Labour leader, with a key policy U-turn on the party’s £28bn green economy package and its continued issues with tackling antisemitism. Yet in spite of all that, Labour won with significant swings, and Thursday’s results show a Conservative party whose vote is being eaten up on all fronts.
On one side, the Conservatives are losing out to a Labour party that is stealing the Tories’ levelling up mantra, itself now claiming the mantle of being the party of aspiration with a “breaking down barriers” mission. And on the other side, the Tory party is under pressure from Reform UK, which is highlighting Sunak’s failed “stop the boats” policy and portraying that as a wider failure to control post-Brexit immigration.
It’s clear that many in the Conservative party will now push it to counter Reform UK by matching yet more of its political rhetoric and policies. That would be a huge mistake. Part of the problem is that Sunak’s emphatic stop the boats promise is akin to a prime minister claiming that rather than cutting crime, they can stop it completely. Whatever the clear merits in rightly combating illegal people smugglers, the oversimplistic rhetoric is a political gift that will keep on giving to Reform UK. If just one boat arrives, they can keep telling voters Sunak has demonstrably failed.
A further shift towards a Reform UK version of the Conservative party also leaves the broader political landscape ever wider open for Labour to dominate. With so much focus on shoring up its Reform UK-minded voters to the exclusion of others, it’s harder and harder for the Conservatives to get any credible policy messages across to the rest of the voting public.
There is a solution for the Conservative party, one that counters both the Labour challenge on opportunity and the Reform UK challenge on migration. It is to set out an ambitious, generational plan on developing homegrown talent and driving social mobility, to produce the skills Britain’s economy needs, and remove the barriers that too often stop talent flowing to, and creating its own, opportunities.
The Conservative party must understand that it will never win by being Reform UK–lite. It will never successfully “out-Reform” Reform UK. Aping it just plays into Reform UK’s hands. The only real answer was to deliver on the levelling up promise that Boris Johnson made but failed to fulfil, something people voted for, regardless of whether they had ever voted Conservative before. Disastrously, levelling up has been all but shelved under Sunak’s leadership, not mentioned once in his ill-judged “let Rishi be Rishi” 2023 conference speech.
Those who warn that the party faces an “extinction event” at the forthcoming election are right. But it’s because, time and time again, the party has consistently chosen to play up to the negative, simplistic, culture wars-driven rhetoric of Ukip and, latterly, Reform UK. Instead, it should have some collective courage, not just to reject those siren voices, but to become the broader, more positive alternative – the ambitious party of social mobility that Britain needs. The Conservative party has been heading down a political cul-de-sac for some time. It might have felt like moving forwards, but the reality was different for voters. Now the party’s hitting the end of the road. It will be a long way back, but the journey needs to start now.
Justine Greening is a former education secretary and Conservative MP for Putney
