Thomas Haynes: Britain needs a coherent conservative movement

Thomas Haynes is founder and editor of Blue Youth, a blog written by and for young conservatives.

I had a look at David Miliband's campaign website the other day. It has a large banner encouraging people to "Join the Movement for Change" and "Sign up now for training to be future leaders".

It isn't just rhetoric. His campaign aims to train a thousand "Future Leaders" in basic community organising techniques; an attempt to emulate the success of Barack Obama's grassroots campaign in America's 2008 presidential election.

I have no idea whether it will work, but it got me thinking about political movements. We hear a lot about the "Labour movement" - there were frequent complaints on the Left that Blair ignored and marginalised it, and all the leadership candidates now want to rebuild it.

But how much do we hear about a "conservative movement" in the UK? Not much.

We have just had an election that focused a lot (too much, in my opinion) on the party leaders. The TV debates made it almost inevitable, although the party itself didn't help - I seem to recall "Cameron 2010" placards at some Tory campaign events.

We hear a lot about "Team Cameron", the "modernisers", the opponents of Cameron on "the Tory Right", but very little about the UK conservative movement beyond the Cameron himself and the Conservative Party in parliament.