Attracting defectors from Labour and the LibDems

The Conservative Party is looking for a leader that will win us the next election. That, of course, is how it should be. But let us not dismiss the possibility of making a major parliamentary advance before 2009. How could this happen? Labour’s majority is enough to last it a full term and, these days, by-elections are few and far between. That just leaves the intriguing possibility of defections from both Labour and the Liberal Democrats.

Let’s take Labour first. The recent election has left a large number of slender, if not wafer thin, Labour majorities. No one’s suggesting that Labour MPs will cross the floor just to save their jobs, but let’s just say good Conservative poll ratings will concentrate minds wonderfully. There is also the small matter of the Labour succession. A Brown leadership combined with a resurgent Labour left will make life unpleasant for true Blairite believers. They may conclude that the only real prospect of genuine public sector reform lies with the Conservative Party. Now, this may apply to no more than a handful of MPs, but even two or three defections would be of great symbolic importance – anything more than that would count as a political earthquake.

There is the possibiliy of second earthquake along the faultline that runs through the Liberal Democrats. On May 5, the Lib Dems failed to make progress against the Conservatives, but they did make major in roads into the Labour vote. This sets up a rather interesting dynamic in which the radical/urban/northern Lib Dems seeks to outflank Labour on the Left, while the moderate/rural/southern Lib Dems seeks to hold back the Conservative advance. It is a badly-kept secret that the swollen Lib Dem ranks conceal around two dozen free marketeers, many of them closet eurosceptics. One doesn’t suppose they view the prospect of five more years of lefty posturting under Charles Kennedy with any great enthusiasm.

So what can the Conservative Party do to provide disaffected Blairites and Liberals with a tempting bolt hole? For a start we need to look like winners, making the choice of leader all important. Furthermore that leader needs to set out a coherent plan for public sector reform, not privatisation, together with a genuine commitment to social justice and the environment. International policy will also be important. It needs to be pro regime change in order to attract the pro-war Blairites, but sufficiently rounded out with peaceful initiatives on international development to reassure the Lib Dems. It goes without saying, that our Euroscepticism should be clear, principled and outward looking, rather than inconsistent, opportunistic and isolationist. Finally, on welfare reform, we should appeal to the Frank Field tendency by launching a relentless critique of Gordon Brown’s means-tested dependency culture, and put forward a bold, compassionate alternative based on the principle of supporting independence.

These are things that the Conservative Party should be doing anyway. But if we get it right and get it right soon, the ‘Con Gains’ could be flashing up long before Peter Snow dusts off his swingometer.

Comments

[Edward]

I've been saying for about 5 years that I think the Labour party will split in two after this government collapses so couldn't agree more.

I was campaigning in the south west and we were very, very lucky that the Liberal strategy was so badly conceived. Had they not promoted such a tax raising strategy the Tories would have lost all of those seats in Devon & Dorset, pushing the yellow line even further in.

However rats don't tend to jump off a floating ship and the Liberals are on the rise at the moment, it is only Labour that are going backwards so it is there that the potential lies.

Didn't former MP Helen Clark just defect from Labour???