Defending Cameron's Tory Rebrand

Many have argued that David Cameron’s Tory rebrand cost the party voters and resulted in a hung Parliament. Conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic though need to understand the measure of the difficulties the Conservatives faced and (partially) surmounted in the election.

British conservative columnist Simon Heffer published a broadside attack against David Cameron's reformed conservatism in yesterday's Telegraph. Heffer slammed Cameron for an "anti-core" political strategy that (Heffer argues) abandoned natural Conservative voters and resulted in a hung Parliament.

Heffer's critique was borrowed by Mark Levin on his radio show yesterday, with extra bonus abuse of David Brooks and me thrown in for good measure.

See here, starting about 43:20

Heffer:

Dave had to fight a widely despised Prime Minister leading a Government incompetent and destructive on a scale unseen in living memory. Seldom has there been a softer target; but seldom has one been missed so unnecessarily. With just 36 per cent of the vote, the Tories stood almost still since 2005. They are now on their knees to their other enemy, the Lib Dems. ... The party has chosen to mimic and validate the policies of its opponents, with the result that the public found little to choose between the main parties. This was exemplified in the television debates, in which the leaders fell over themselves to agree not only with any contention put to them by the public, but even with each other.

And not only was there no real choice, with many people feeling disfranchised, or driven to vote for fringe parties; there was no attempt in the campaign to address in depth the issues that really matter to so many of our people. Notable among these was the economy, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies pointed out last week; but also immigration and Europe. These were all massive opportunities for the Tory party, but because of fear of upsetting Labour and Lib Dem voters, it failed to exploit them.

Heffer offers no evidence to corroborate his claims. It's all assertion. But suppose you did want to test the Heffer hypothesis. How would you do it?

Well, first you might look for signs of Conservative demoralization and demoblization, the kind of decline in the raw vote that, say, Republicans suffered between the congressional elections of 2002 and 2006.

Didn't happen!

The Conservatives in 2010 won 10.70 million votes, up almost 2 million from the 8.77 million they won in 2005.

Likewise, the Conservatives increased their vote more than any other major party. Their share of the total popular vote increased by 3.8 percentage points, as contrasted to a 1.0 percentage point increase for the Lib Dems, and a 6.2 point collapse for Labour.

Heffer might rebut that the Conservative vote could have risen even more had the Tories run a "red meat" election campaign. But where are those missing votes? They didn't stay home. Total vote increased by 2.5 million.

The supposedly missing votes didn't go to right-of center minor parties: The UK Independence party won 917,000 votes, up some 300,000 from its 2005 level. The BNP won 563,000, up about 250,000 from 2005.

Are Heffer (and Levin after him) arguing for a strategy aimed at swinging those extra 550,000 UKIP and BNP votes to the Conservatives? Such an argument would overlook some important considerations.

1) 80% of all the net new votes cast in 2010 over 2005 went to the Conservatives. That's a good result. (George W. Bush gained only 70% of the net increase in votes between 2000 and 2004.)

2) Heffer takes for granted that the Conservatives could have somehow reached those 550,000 net additional UKIP and BNP votes (or even the entire 1.48 million grand total of the two), WITHOUT losing at least equal numbers of metropolitan, ethnic and female voters. That seems unlikely to put it mildly. Here's another way to look at what is going in British politics.

Look at the last Conservative election victory, 1992. In that election year, the total votes cast for anything that might be described as a "right of center" party (the two Ulster Unionist parties, BNP, etc.) added up to 420,000 votes. Compare that result to 2010's 1.8 million for the non-Conservative right, and you see some 1.4 million "missing" potential Conservative votes.

Over the same period, the Lib Dems added 2.6 million votes. Which looks to you the more dynamic trend?

Like the United States, the United Kingdom is becoming a society with more university graduates, more unmarried women, more upwardly mobile immigrants, more social progressives. (The latest issue of Britain's Prospect magazine, reviewing changes in British society and attitudes over the Blair years, notes a 16 point decline between 1998 and 2007 in the percentage of Britons who think homosexual relations between consenting adults are always or mostly wrong. ) The white working class meanwhile is shrinking in Britain as in the U.S.

The Conservatives have just had their best election in Britain since 1992. Agreed: it was not quite good enough. But conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic need to understand the measure of the difficulties the Conservatives faced and (partially) surmounted. Nostalgia cannot substitute for analysis, and assertion is not information.