Kemi Badenoch has been accused of dragging the Tories back to being the 'nasty party', but a prominent backer insists the party worries too much about how it is seen, while real nastiness in British politics today is on the Left.
Ameer Kotecha, CEO of the Centre for Government Reform, argues the Conservatives have always been hampered not by nastiness but by excessive concern about appearing nasty. Writing in the Daily Express, he says whenever the party has wanted to be robust and conservative, an impulse within it – and a large constituency within its parliamentary party – has held back from doing anything that might seem unsympathetic.
Badenoch's 90-page blueprint
Conservative Party Conference is in full swing, with the Tories hoping to make political hay with common-sense policies. Badenoch has published a 90-page document, The Right Way, inspired by Keith Joseph's 1976 blueprint for Margaret Thatcher which laid the intellectual foundations for Thatcherism.
The BBC asked Badenoch on Sunday whether plans to tighten benefits for under-25s, tougher controls on welfare and expanding prison capacity represented the return of the 'nasty party'. Theresa May used that term in 2002 when, as Tory party chairman, she said: "Our base is too narrow, and so occasionally are our sympathies. You know what some people call us: the nasty party."
Internal Tory divisions
The problem persists, Kotecha says. Over the weekend the Guardian quoted a shadow minister in Badenoch's team who said: "The way we are going, we risk being seen as the nasty party again". This is what concerns those who have deserted the Tories for Reform – that even if Badenoch is robust in her conservative views, there are too many others in the party who don't share her outlook.
Kotecha says Badenoch is trying to weed out such people, yet Penny Mordaunt, very much one of these liberals, has just been readmitted to the Conservative candidates' list, having apparently survived the ideological purge. Suella Braverman, Reform's education spokesman, argues in her new memoir, Patriot, that the Conservatives repeatedly betrayed the principles on which they were elected.
Real nastiness on the Left
Kotecha argues much of the real nastiness in British politics today is on the left. At its party conference last week, the Greens – polling around 10 or 11% – passed a "Zionism is racism" motion and failed even to pass an amendment on safeguarding Jews in the party. He calls it a matter of national shame that a party like the Greens enjoys such support.
The Marxist intellectual Stuart Hall argued one of Thatcherism's great achievements was establishing a new political "common sense". Kotecha says much of the political class has travelled in the opposite direction, treating ideas that strike ordinary people as obvious as radical, extreme or even "nasty".
He argues the cult of kindness that energises the Left is not true kindness, for sometimes kindness requires tough love. There is nothing kind about allowing a horrific people-trafficking trade to continue, facilitating the arrival of dinghy after dinghy – boats on which, as Shabana Mahmood said this week, nearly all the women may have been raped on the journey. Nor is it kind to the British communities where these people are deposited, or to the asylum seekers themselves.
There is nothing kind about putting young people straight out of school or university onto the treadmill of benefits, a trap from which it then becomes difficult to escape. The kind thing is to show tough love – to set up incentives so people have a reason to work, and if they can't get a job, to make them do community work or training to enable them to get one.
The Tories should spend less time worrying about being seen as the nasty party and more time reflecting on why fear of that label over their 14 years in power led them to stray so far from their principles.
