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The year following his tribunate, Gaius Gracchus’s political enemies seized upon the unrest (sparked in part by him and his allies) as a pretext to declare martial law and move against his supporters, ultimately resulting in his death. Besieged on the Aventine Hill, his last words were reportedly the wretched lament - spoken to no one in particular - of ‘Whither shall I, unhappy wretch, betake myself? Whither shall I turn?’
It is a question Kemi Badenoch must, on instinct, have asked herself. Her electoral opportunities look slim; the red wall now seems the battleground for a Reform-Labour battle, she has little more than a finger hold in Scotland, is besieged in the affluent commuter towns by the Lib Dems and everywhere else by Reform.
However, a new report may offer her a way forward. Published by the Conservatives Together pressure group and titled Rebuilding the Rural Vote, the report urges her to concentrate on securing and holding 70 key rural seats.
Endorsed by Sir Grant Shapps, the report criticizes the party for relying on “assumptions of inherited loyalty” and putting in “minimal effort” to maintain support in these areas. It attributes the party’s recent losses to its neglect of “less traditional” rural concerns, including housing affordability, environmental issues, and the selection of non-local candidates. In an op-ed, Shapps highlight’s the report’s recommendations of ‘the lack of modern campaigning techniques and the selection of non-local candidates’.
The slide of rural seats away from the Conservatives has been evident since 2019. Since Brexit and the shift to new agricultural and trade policies, around 8,000 farming businesses have shut down - a decline of over 5%, bringing the total to 141,000. This is compounded by concerns over Britain’s free-trade agreements with Australia and New Zealand, which will progressively open the U.K. market to increased imports of beef and sheepmeat. Last year, the unthinkable happened; Labour took the lead in slews of rural seats. Internal Green Party polling even suggested they could take two rural seats from the Tories - which proved to be accurate.
The shires are the heartland of the Tory Party. But at the last election, they were reduced to just 83 rural seats, compared to Labour’s 114 ; the real winners of the rural vote in 2024 may have been the Liberal Democrats, who won 44. With his party’s success in the shires replicated at the last set of local elections, Ed Davey said the results showed the Lib Dems were now “the party of middle England”.
The Tory Party’s retains remaining rural strongholds in Yorkshire and the Humber and the South West. But even these may not be safe; both East Yorkshire and Greater Lincolnshire turned turquoise at the last set of local elections. Polling by More in Common for the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit showed high levels of concern for climate change, and strong support for the net zero target, with 58% supportive of a new onshore wind farm and 64% supportive of a solar farm being built in their local area respectively. Given that Ed Miliband’s Net Zero plans will see huge swathes of Britain’s green and pleasant land turned over to green energy, that commitment is about to be sorely tested. Reform have already staked their position as green energy skeptics, who plan to use their newly-gained powers to appeal to local resident’s soon-to-be worsened concerns at overdevelopment.
To retreat into the Blue Hedge may offer a temporary sanctuary, but it is no strategy for revival - only for survival. The report’s recommendations, including fast-tracking local candidate selections, would see them set off in the direction of becoming little more than a county party. Should the party double down on rural strongholds, it will cease to bea national force, and will drift toward geographic - and therefore ideological - isolation, alienating itself further from the urban and suburban swing seats where political power is increasingly contested and won, where the majority of the population like and where, therefore, the mood of the nation is best understood. Just as Gaius Gracchus found himself encircled, lamenting his isolation on the Aventine, the Conservative Party risks becoming a stranded remnant in the political wilderness.