Author Archives: Jed Walker

So the National Conservatism Conference 2023 has kicked off in London. For three days our capital will play host to a procession of right-wing, populist speakers ranging from government ministers to climate change deniers. 

Even before the event began, it was mired in controversy. Snippets of the speech to be given by the Home Secretary leaked, with suggestions she would suggest training our own fruit pickers would resolve some of Britain’s economic woes, and left-wing media organisations reported being barred from attending. OpenDemocracy reports that they, along with others, were denied passes to the conference due to space and availability, but claim there were empty seats at the conference today and that other less progressive media outlets were awarded passes after applying just days before the event.

But what a first day. We started with the chairman, Christopher DeMuth, telling the audience that he had been communing with the spirit of Margaret Thatcher who was, he was happy to report, “totally on board”. Perhaps that is a case of ‘enough said’.

It is hardly surprising to anyone, I would imagine, to hear Jacob Rees-Mogg align himself with the politics of isolation. He has defined national conservatism as “national political ideology by its nature in contradistinction to liberalism or socialism, which since their beginnings have had internationalist ambitions and have attempted to impose similar or identical structures on different nations”.

What was perhaps more surprising was his acknowledgment that the introduction of Voter ID rules was in fact a way for the Conservative Party to gain an electoral boost. “Parties that try and gerrymander end up finding their clever scheme comes back to bite them – as dare I say we found by insisting on voter ID for elections,” he said (albeit mis-using the term gerrymandering, which really relates to what Americans would call re-districting and we call boundary changes).

He went on to say: “We found the people who didn’t have ID were elderly and they by and large voted Conservative, so we made it hard for our own voters and we upset a system that worked perfectly well.” I have to disagree with the former minister here. There has been no conclusive examination of the data – most of which is still only slowly coming in – to suggest the majority of those who didn’t vote because of Voter ID issues were elderly. Rees-Mogg has also tried to say he was not massively in favour of the legislation, leading to a plethora of shared videos on social media showing him strongly arguing in support of the proposed changes on the floor of the House of Commons. 

Try as he might, to suggest the Tory losses in this months local elections were due to Voter ID issues is folly. The public turned out in droves to reject a continuation of Conservative ideology at local level; perhaps in protest at the national party, but they turned out all the same. The swing against the party was despite the new Voter ID legislation, not because of it.