“Kemi Badenoch is to launch a review into whether Britain should leave the European Convention on Human Rights and how to prevent lawyers “subverting” government policy.”
In a way, you have to admire the respectability of it. Ordering reviews into things is what governments – that don’t want to change something but really want to seem like they want to – do. The great privilege of opposition is the freedom to say whatever you want. Abstaining from such an indulgence is, in a sense, noble.
Is it wise? That’s another question. The ur-problem with Kemi Badenoch’s slow-and-steady approach to rebuilding the Conservative position is that the party is already well on track to becoming a marginal force.
Labour has enough MPs to have a very engaging multi-sided civil war even before one gets to Reform UK. People – and that label includes journalists – need a reason to care about what the Tories are saying about anything. A review is not very exciting.
In fairness to Badenoch, the parliamentary part is split on this issue, as so many others. Perhaps a review by Lord Wolfson will provide the cover needed to shift the party’s position on the question.
On the other hand, one reason such tactics are needed is that our leader didn’t seek a mandate for any dramatic shifts in policy during her leadership campaign. In consequence, nobody who backed her committed themselves to anything by so doing.
Perhaps this review is after all, then, performing much the same role as those undertaken in government: kicking the can down the road a ways and postponing a fight for another day.
That brings us back, however, to the problem of giving people a reason to pay attention to the Conservatives. Whatever your view on the substance of the proposal, as a matter of opposition tactics in the party’s present circumstances, “a review into whether Britain should leave the ECHR” is badly calibrated: it addresses a big topic, but in a vague and slow-burning way.
We should also give the public sufficient credit to presume that they are not, in the year of our lord 2025, going to be getting excited by a politician announcing a review of something.
Does this mean that Badenoch must instead jump in feet-first and commit to withdrawing? No. When it comes to something as potentially dramatic as leaving the Convention, doing the work first is genuinely a good idea. But it isn’t going to wrest the initiative back from Nigel Farage and Reform UK.
Fortunately, our constitution means that we don’t have to make a binary decision about being in or out of the ECHR: we can instead simply choose sometimes to ignore it, as did the Blair Government on prisoner votes. Badenoch doesn’t need to wait for Lord Wolfson’s complete report to make firm commitments on narrower questions (such as barring certain types of foreign national offender from appealing deportation on ECHR grounds).
This is true across other areas of policy, too. Perhaps it needs must take a year or two do complete a comprehensive review of party policy, especially if the party is under-resourced. But if it is under-resourced, spreading those resources thinly across a full-spectrum review is perhaps unwise if they could be otherwise employed hot-housing a few policy areas to give the Tories a pitch to the voters.
During the leadership contest, parts of the party and commentariat talked themselves into a false binary: principles versus policies. So far out from the general election, the argument ran, there’s no need to spell out precisely what we need to do if we returned to office in 2029.
There is some truth to that statement, inasmuch as it would be otiose to have a comprehensive programme for government ready to go at this point in the cycle. Yet whilst a tactically-astute frame for a campaign without policies, the principles-versus-policies frame missed two things.
First, as I’ve noted several times, is the middle level of analysis. There is a big difference between standing for leader without a detailed prescription, and standing without even a fleshed out diagnosis.
Second, though, is that in themselves talk about the party’s principles is meaningless. The previous government went to its grave able to talk, quite comfortably, about its nominal principles; its senior members continued calling themselves ‘low-tax Conservatives’ no matter how high taxes got.
As with the well-worn tactic of the review, we need to give the voters a little credit, and that means acknowledging that it is no longer that the Tories are viewed as the party of low taxes, or law and order, or any of its other traditional domains; that those reputations need to be won back
That’s where policy commitments come in. They solidify airy talk about how wonderful our values are into solid ideas about how they could make voters’ lives better. If they’re realistic, they also make politicians face up to trade-offs and reveal their real values. In politics, after all character is who you are when the money runs out.
A good policy offer is rather like a good compliment: bold and carefully-targeted. And people tend to like receiving them – if they think they’re genuine.
