Conservatives must have core principles around which we can unite – here are my 10 propositions

Labour is in hock to sectional unions. The Tories must become the trade union for the entire country

After 1997, it took 13 painful years to regain the trust of the public. During that time, Tony Blair transformed our institutions, politics and country.

This time, we must rebuild far more quickly. And yet the challenge we face is greater. Our parliamentary party is smaller; our intellectual movement is divided; our brand is tainted.

We rightly face a deep well of anger. If we do not listen and change, political wilderness awaits.

To rebuild, we must first collectively understand why we lost. I think the immediate answers are clear. We failed to deliver what we promised in 2019 on the economy, the NHS and immigration. We indulged in internal drama and lost our hard-won reputation for good governance.

Underpinning these errors was a more profound crisis of identity. The party failed to unite around the core conservative beliefs required to tackle our nation’s challenges.

We were a broad church, as we must always be. But we lacked a common creed. When we knocked on doors, too many voters didn’t know what we stood for. That blue rosette had lost its meaning. Our party has time-honoured principles that have been endorsed at the ballot box for almost three centuries. In opposition, we must rediscover this identity.

Manifestos detailing our policy proposals must respond to specific circumstances. But our foundational values must endure. It is these principles that will stop us from getting blown off course or failing to deliver.

We must state afresh the shared values around which our entire party can unite, updated for the modern world. Our country faces a truly stark set of challenges: the shift of power from West to East, technology such as AI upending old industries, and mass migration, to name but a few. We need pragmatic principles to guide us, not wishful thinking, and a positive vision of the future we seek to build.

This can’t be done overnight. No one person or part of our party has a monopoly on wisdom. It must be a collective endeavour between our MPs, councillors and members. And it must extend beyond our voters too, including those who collectively rejected us, like the younger Britons whom I am determined to win back.

But we must start somewhere. The following 10 principles are a first attempt to outline what our common creed should be.

1. The nation-state is fundamental

The nation-state is the most successful vehicle for peace and prosperity ever created. Nations, not supranational bodies, are what naturally command loyalty. It is the duty of the government to advance the interests of the citizens that constitute this national community over those outside it.

2. Our people and Parliament are sovereign

Sovereign authority is vested in our democratic Parliament. The protections and freedoms British citizens have enjoyed for centuries do not derive from international human rights treaties, but from statute and the common law. Contested interpretations of international law should never prevent us acting in the national interest. Government can and should deepen co-operation to tackle shared challenges via international agreements, but must never cede control. Public agencies and quangos must be clearly responsible to Ministers, who themselves should be accountable to Parliament.

3. Market economics drive growth

Prosperity is not the creation of the state, but of people acting freely in collaboration and competition with each other. Government is there to create the conditions for entrepreneurs and investors to succeed, dismantle monopolies and crony capitalists, and promote property ownership as a moral good. Like many developed countries, we are trapped in a low-growth cycle. Boosting our GDP per person is a moral imperative. Growth alleviates poverty, increases opportunity, and enables strong public services.

To improve our productivity, we must densify our cities and build infrastructure faster.

We need reliably cheap energy built on nuclear power – not expensive, intermittent energy sources with no plan for when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow. We must pragmatically balance net zero against economic growth and energy security, generating enough energy at prices we can afford. Energy costs have trebled in the last 20 years – we will reindustrialise only if they fall.

And we need to equip the next generation with real skills, not low value qualifications. One in five graduates now end up earning less than they would if they had never gone to university.

This must change.

4. The NHS is a public service. We must make it deliver

Government should ensure that all, regardless of means, have support in sickness, infirmity and old age.

The pandemic caused NHS waiting times to surge. But our performance was not good enough.

Our failure was not resources but productivity: the NHS has a fifth more money, doctors and nurses than it did in 2019, but hospitals are barely treating any more patients.

Too often, the NHS story is that of heroic frontline staff being let down by poor management. We cannot allow fear of our opponents distorting our arguments to deter us from advancing bold solutions. Nor can we allow the NHS to be hijacked by unions at the expense of patients.

5. Mass migration must end

Illegal migration is a national security emergency. People we know nothing about have entered the country with scant prospect of removal.

Without secure borders, we don’t have a country.

Over the last 25 years, legal migration has been nearly 100 times higher than the quarter-century preceding it – fuelling the housing crisis, suppressing wages, causing public service waiting lists and destroying trust in politics.

The only test for immigration policies is whether they benefit the British people.

We must become the Grammar school of the Western world, admitting those who contribute more than they receive in benefits and services.

6. We need a small state that works, not a big state that fails

Government isn’t working as it should. The state costs more than ever, but public sector productivity is lower now than it was 25 years ago.

As the pace of global change increases, the importance of state capacity increases. To seize future opportunities – like AI and life sciences – the UK must move faster than our competitors. We need an entrepreneurial state that employs the brightest, harnesses technology, obsesses over performance, and can take advantage of the regulatory opportunities afforded by Brexit. A state that has the self-awareness to recognise some decisions are best taken at a local level, closer to local people.

The state should believe in itself. It should champion our history and institutions, and deploy its full powers to defend our Union.

7. We are a national party, serving the whole country

Disraeli called it One Nation; Boris, Levelling Up. Different words, but the same point: the Conservative Party is a national party or it is nothing.

It’s a party of and for everyone in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, working to spread opportunity and tackle social injustice.

Our base is too narrow. We won just 11 seats across the North, London and Wales. Amongst non-homeowners, we won just 13 per cent of the vote. The Greens won more votes than us amongst people under 40.

Becoming a national party again means standing for forgotten Britain: the 30-somethings stuck in their childhood bedroom; the deprived towns Westminster neglects; the parents struggling with bills; the white working-class boys falling behind; the communities across the four nations whose patriotic unionism isn’t reciprocated. In short, we must become the trade union for the entire country.

8. Prison works

We have witnessed a breakdown of law and order. Crime is an offence against both its victims and society itself, which depends on the trust prevailing amongst law-abiding citizens. The purpose of prison is to punish people and keep the public safe from dangerous criminals. Yet criminals with 50 or more previous convictions have been spared jail in more than 50,000 cases since 2007. Fifty per cent of crime is committed by 10 per cent of offenders. Too much anti-social behaviour goes unpunished.

We urgently need more prisons so we can jail repeat offenders for longer and cut crime. We believe in rehabilitation and second chances, but we can’t be taken for fools.

9. Promote national unity

A nation is not just a people, but compatriots bound together by shared values, traditions, stories and experiences. These bonds are weakening as family breakdown accelerates, mass migration triggers unprecedented change, and communal rituals fade.

And our culture is under attack from extremists that threaten many of our public institutions. They oppose free speech, subjugate individuals to group identities, denigrate our past, and side with our enemies.

In the face of such an assault, our aim cannot be meek, liberal neutrality. We must promote a unifying national identity and robustly defend it from those who oppose the very ideals upon which our way of life depends. We must nourish civil society, and robustly defend our values against those who despise us.

10. Peace comes through strength

The UK is a great nation with a great history. We believe the Western democratic model is the best means of achieving security, prosperity and freedom. The purpose of British foreign, defence and development policy is to protect the British people. Our commitment to other countries stems from that.

We must stand up to our enemies and stand alongside our allies that share our values and interests. As our adversaries rise, we must defend our beliefs in the marketplace of ideas and the arena of geopolitical reality by investing substantially more in our defences and protecting our critical industrial capabilities.