The Conservatives Must be the Party for Working Brits, Otherwise What’s the Point?

By Clark Vasey, Co-Founder of Blue Collar Conservatism

Blue Collar Conservatism was critical to securing Conservative majorities in 2015 and 2019. It placed working people and aspiration at the heart of our party’s mission and helped bring us relevance to new voters by showing we shared their values and priorities. Labour had taken them for granted for decades and left their communities worse off, but we presented how genuine Conservative policies can empower working people to have a tangible stake in our society.

2019 should have been a historic moment of realignment, but for reasons all too painfully known to us all we blew it. Many of those voters who put their trust in us for the first time in 2019 were amongst those who felt most let down by our failures on mass migration, the cost of living, not reducing the tax burden, not building enough homes, to name but a few pain points. Those voters along with a great many long time Conservatives have given up on us and right now don’t want to give us a hearing.

Not a single Conservative is in any doubt about the mountain we have to climb, although there may be some difference in how we get to the summit.  For us the rationale of Blue Collar Conservatism is as important as it ever was.  The Conservatives must unequivocally be the party of working people and their communities. It is why we must fight for low taxes, slashing legal migration which distorts our labour markets and reign in our out of control welfare bill.  We must build a Blue Collar Britain which is able to compete in the modern world.  If we don’t do this, we must ask ourselves what we are for.

This is why we are refreshing Blue Collar Conservatism. To champion these priorities and challenge our own party to do what is going to need to be done to get there.  The logic of ‘you had 14 years’ is impeccable, but we must be prepared to answer it and give them reasons to trust us again.

When we have talked to a few people about a refresh of Blue Collar a couple have said, but those are the voters we have lost to Reform. As if that is a reason not to do it.  Quite simply we can not write off these voters to Reform otherwise we have no future as a governing party.

A party regularly polling in the mid-teens can’t abandon its voters to a credible right wing challenger polling in the 30s and pretend there is another cohort of voters that can give us a route to power.  There is no fantasy centrist coalition out there waiting for us to double down on issues like the environment. Not least because how many more right of centre voters would we lose to Reform if we made such a shift? 

Unless we pursue an agenda which empowers working people and gains their trust in very short order we are condemning ourselves to third party status.  That is not what we should want for our party and the risk of giving Labour a route to hold on to power through the middle of a divided right is too great to comprehend.

So, in the coming months we will be building up a picture of Blue Collar Britain, its priorities, its concerns and its needs.  We will present a clear and authentic view on how we can deliver for our people once again.

This not about chasing Reform. Reform have chased us off our territory and we cannot simply leave them to it.  We won’t spend our time slagging off Reform, we all have friends and family who have made the jump and we want them back. Additionally while we hope to see the Conservatives succeed, if it does not we cannot rule out what accommodations will be needed to prevent a left wing Government, mostly likely worse than the one we have today with extremist parties like the Greens potentially joining a Labour led coalition. So Blue Collar is not about attacking Reform, but challenging the Conservatives to be the very best version of ourselves.

Ultimately, we must have the courage to set ourselves out as the best prospect on the issues which matter to working people so that when the next election comes it is us they look to.

If you share this vision, we invite you to get involved in Blue Collar Conservatism. Together we can do this!