From Disraeli’s One Nation vision to Thatcher’s Right to Buy, aspiration was once the animating principle of British conservatism. Yet after 14 years of Conservative government, the housing crisis has torn up the old promises of reward for hard work. In the 1990s, a first-time buyer couple saving 5% of their wages could afford a deposit in three years. Today it would take 24.
How did the Conservative commitment to encouraging aspiration slip away – and what would it take to restore it?
Mario Creatura, a former special adviser to Theresa May in Downing Street, joins CapX editor Marc Sidwell to discuss ‘A Blue Hope’, Mario’s new report for the Centre for Policy Studies. He explains what pushed ambition and opportunity off the Conservative agenda – and how to bring them back.
Below, you’ll find some short excerpts from our conversation.
Marc Sidwell
Editor, CapX
What does aspiration mean to you as a Conservative?
It’s an incredibly important question, and it gets to the heart of why we chose to write the paper in the first place. Fundamentally, we were looking at the warnings coming out of the polls and the by-election results – what they hold for the Conservative Party in particular, and how we rebuild a centre-right offering that the general public can really get behind.
One of the key lessons from that is that Keir Starmer and the Labour Party had no vision. Andrew Neil termed it the loveless landslide. They won not because they were offering something new, innovative and hopeful for the country, but simply because they were the next best thing to remove the Conservatives from office.
And so from our point of view as the authors of this paper, we asked: what is the animating vision that can fill that gap? For us, that’s aspiration.
Can an aspirational message beat the message that ‘Britain is broken’?
The declinist doom loop is a self-perpetuating problem, and social media has a massive role to play in that. It self-perpetuates when people feel there is a lack of justice – but it doesn’t offer any solutions. It has no path out of the quagmire.
The aspirational message is a harder one to land, because it requires people to believe in something almost intangible. Which is why we’ve tried in the paper to make it tangible – to build a credible framework grounded in polling data, one that looks at different values and translates them into the concerns people are facing in their day-to-day lives.
Why should a young voter pick the Conservatives?
Aspiration and the Conservative Party have a history that is inextricably intertwined.
And there is a reason for that.
Conservatives believe that work should be rewarded, that saving should mean something. That home ownership should be within reach and that children should have fundamentally better chances in life than their parents.
That if you start a business it should be encouraged rather than punished, and that all of the effort you put into your life, all of the responsibility that you have for your life, the contribution that you make to your community should be recognised and encouraged.
And for me there’s only one party that is doing that and that’s the Conservative Party.
