United We Fall
A guest post from Joe Hackett
This is a guest post from Joe Hackett, originally published at his substack The Take Quarter. I thought it was an interesting look at what Canadian Conservatives could teach the Tories, beyond the Pierre Poilievre fanboying that was so popular.
Following his defeat, I asked Joe to provide a postscript updating those lessons. I hope you find it as grim reading as I did.
Lessons from Canada are in fashion on the British right.
Beleaguered British Tories look longingly at the success of their Canadian counterparts, riding high in the polls under Pierre Poilievre. Multiple Tory leadership candidates have either cited Poilievre as inspiration, or been compared to him by their supporters.
The leadership contest, of course, follows another piece of Canadian conservative history echoing painfully around the heads of the British right.
If Poilievre is the blueprint to follow, then Brian Mulroney and Kim Campbell are surely the ones to avoid. In the run up to July’s election, plenty of commentators pointed out the alarming similarities between the British Tories’ predicament and that of the Canadian Tories in the run-up to the catastrophic 1993 election.
As it turned out, Rishi Sunak’s defeat was catastrophic, but not Canada ‘93 catastrophic. They at least got more votes and seats than Reform, who have clearly modelled themselves on their Canadian counterparts from 30 years ago.
The question for Sunak’s would-be successors now is how to respond to the catastrophe. And while Poilievre offers inspiration, another cautionary tale has emerged from Canada’s Pacific coast.
For the last 30 years, the province of British Columbia has had two main parties: the NDP on the left, and the BC Liberals on the right. The Liberals had been virtually dormant for decades before benefiting in the 1990s from the spectacular and largely self-inflicted collapse of BC’s previous main right-wing party, Social Credit.
By the 2020s, however, the Liberals’ fortunes had taken a turn for the worse. They’d lost power in 2017, and suffered a landslide defeat three years later.
It probably didn’t help that they were called the BC Liberals despite the fact that most of their voters supported the Canadian Conservatives and were very much not fans of Justin Trudeau’s Canadian Liberals. This would occasionally lead to the long-dormant BC Conservatives gaining ground in the polls before promptly collapsing, not unlike UKIP and the Brexit Party in the 2010s.
They responded to this quandary in two ways: drop the toxic Liberal brand, and cast a more ‘moderate’ image. Under the leadership of Kevin Falcon, the party rebranded as ‘BC United’. Falcon also equivocated on gender identity in schools, and swiftly expelled one of his MPs, John Rustad, from the party for retweeting a comment questioning the scientific consensus on climate change.
It went, in a word, catastrophically. The new name as panned as meaningless and sounding like a football team. Many voters didn’t clock the rebrand at all. Rustad joined and promptly took over the moribund BC Conservatives, and matched the party’s recognisable name with solidly right-wing policies.
Rustad’s BC Conservatives overtook United in the polls, defections followed, and in August, BC United finally suspended its campaign and endorsed Rustad for the province’s upcoming elections.
Rustad is currently neck-and-neck with the NDP, having hoovered up most, if not all, of United’s few remaining supporters. United, meanwhile, look destined for the fate of Social Credit before them - reduced to dormancy, running just enough paper candidates at each election to avoid being deregistered. History has a taste for irony.
What can the Tories learn from BC United’s spectacular collapse?
The first, and most obvious, lesson, is that even a ‘toxic’ brand is better than no brand at all. And thankfully, none of the Tory leadership candidates are suggesting anything quite so drastic as rebranding the party as ‘UK United’.
However, the Scottish Tories are currently rehashing their periodic debate about whether they should divorce themselves from the Conservative Party. If they needed a case study to illustrate why that’s a bad idea, BC United have given it to them.
South of the border, the Tories should reconsider the self-defeating practice of effectively de-branding campaign literature and trying to divorce their own candidates from themselves, presenting them almost as independents. Most independents lose their deposits for a reason.
BC United should also serve as a powerful reminder to the Tories of just how fragile their position still is, and how they cannot afford to neglect conservative voters.
Reform might not have overtaken the Tories in July, but, like the BC Conservatives, they remain an existential threat to their better-established rivals. Their leader is a veteran attention-grabber with better name recognition than any of Sunak’s potential successors. Recent polls have shown them gaining ground since the election. And it’s hard to imagine them not studying Rustad’s blueprint for success.
The next Tory leader will inevitably come under immense media pressure to neglect their right flank. They’ll be told that Labour and Lib Dem voters in the ‘centre ground’ count more. They’ll be reassured that Reform are a flash in the pan whose voters will eventually flood back to the Tories no matter what. They’ll be expected to take their core vote for granted because, after all, they even stuck with the Tories in 2024.
Leaving aside the question of whether such an approach would even help the Tories win over Labour or Lib Dem voters (and there’s plenty of reasons to doubt that), BC United have shown that it would be an extremely dangerous road to go down.
Much like in British Columbia over the last couple of years, right-wing voters in Britain have two options available to them. The next Tory leader’s first priority should be to show those voters not only that they have a place in the Conservative Party, but also that they can trust a future Tory government to deliver on their priorities.
In Canada’s national politics, Pierre Poilievre has set an example of how the Tories can do just that and take a commanding lead in the polls. But in its westernmost province, Kevin Falcon and BC United are a sobering reminder that things can still get worse - thankfully, they’ve also written the playbook on what not to do.
POSTSCRIPT
When I wrote this eight months ago, I’d hoped that the idea that the Tories could be overtaken and potentially replaced by another right-wing party would age badly, not the bit about Pierre Poilievre setting a shining example of how to win.
But here we are. Earlier this month, Reform won more than twice as many council seats as the Tories, and every poll since has shown them comfortably ahead of the Tories. The BC United scenario outlined above is now playing out in front of us.
It's notable that the Tories have managed this without making the exact same mistakes as their counterparts in British Columbia, although there are apparently still people determined to give that a try. Instead, they’ve just failed to give right-wing voters good enough reasons to choose or trust them over Reform.
This is despite Reform’s own missteps, which echo some of those made by the BC Conservatives recently. Like BC United before them, the Tories are failing to convince right-wing voters that the grass isn’t greener.
The Tory leadership team appears tired, short on ideas, and cripplingly inward-looking. They repeatedly invoke fading past glories like an Eastern Bloc regime in 1989. Their slogans are thuddingly dull and unoriginal. Kemi Badenoch seems to spend more time talking about her ambitions for the Conservative Party than her ambitions for the country. Her ‘new management’ team consists predominantly of ministers from the old management.
If the party wouldn’t wake up eight months ago, then it needs to wake up now. If it wasn’t sure then that its priority must be securing (or rather, recovering) its right-wing base, and that the cost of failure will be wholesale BC United-style replacement and extinction, then it must know it now.
It’s time for urgency. Badenoch’s much-vaunted ‘renewal’ process is moving at a glacial pace, but she mustn’t underestimate how quickly things can move now. It took just nine months after the BC Conservatives pulled ahead of BC United in the polls for the latter to completely disintegrate. The Tories must act, and act now, to avoid a similar fate.