POLITICS: Off-putting youth
Bring back Adrian Lee
Political articles on ERO have frequently — and quite rightly — concentrated on debunking the whole modernisation debacle to which the current regime appears intent upon subjecting the party to. But something many, if not most, ‘traditionalists’ and ‘modernisers’ are as one on is that something must be done to resurrect the fortunes of the Conservative Party. The two camps are, however, painfully divided on what that ‘something’ should be. But are the current electoral dire straits in which Conservatives find themselves really the biggest threat to the Party’s future? What of the youth of the Party? I think it high time that the senseless and endless nonsense spewing forth from a corner on the fourth floor of CCO were examined more closely.
Conservative Future — or ‘cee eff’ as its leading lights, though no one else, would have the world call it — is, of course, still The YCs to pretty much everyone else on the planet. Set up during the Hague era to give a new image to the Conservative youth wing, its brave mission was to shake off the years of derision and lampooning by the likes of Harry Enfield, the Tory youth movement had suffered. This attempt to shake off the dreaded ‘Tory Boy’ image occurred, ironically enough, when most of the country thought that the grown-up party was being led by one.
Whether or not this image change has been successful is debatable. One thing is clear, however: the foolishness and general incompetence that pervades so much of CCO has equally infected the Conservative Future office. The organisation was supposed to take off with the injection of around £100,000 by Lord Ashcroft in 2000. The full-time CCO employee at the time was a fellow called David Loader — grandly titled as the ‘National Organiser’ (or National Dis-organiser, as the rapier wits of CF swiftly nicknamed him).
The first major expenditure of our man from/of/in Belize’s money during Mr Loader’s tenure was on the ‘Stand Up!’ campaign. Pay attention to the oh-so-trendy exclamation mark; it might be argued that a question mark would have been more appropriate. This campaign featured a prominent, youthful member of the Party who spoke out on simply how marvellous it was to be gay and Tory. Admirable sentiment, but one must question the excessively lavish production of the accompanying leaflets; these were bedecked with stylish cartoons on a rather fetching beige cardboard. The £80,000 spent on the leaflets might have been more justifiable had not the prominent young Tory in question been one Ivan Massow — and when he promptly defected to Labour, most of the ‘Stand Up!’ leaflets had to be pulped.
As for David Loader himself, he met with a highly controversial end. Whilst on tour around the country with the CF team during the 2001 General Election campaign, Mr Loader had one of his many petty arguments with Hannah Parker, National Chairman of CF at the time. Mr Loader then proceeded to call Steve Norris (yes, that Steve Norris — then Party vice chairman responsible for CF) and resigned in a fit of drunken pique. The next day — at the exhortation of Hannah Parker — Mr Norris refused to allow Mr Loader to rescind his resignation. Mr Loader’s deputy, David Pugh (of whom more later), was appointed in his place. David Loader then sued the Party for constructive dismissal; the industrial tribunal was told that Mr Loader had had the right by law to retract his resignation, especially as it had not been written down. The Party settled out of court, and Loader found himself, by all accounts, £15,000 the richer for it.
David Pugh has continued where David Loader left off, whilst being ever-critical of his predecessor. This might be acceptable at a stretch, were not Mr Pugh’s own record in the job so dire. Let us examine the evidence, starting with CF’s media profile. In the past six months alone, two PR disasters have befallen the organisation, both unarguably on Mr Pugh’s watch. First of all, an article in The Independent newspaper was published in September after a unfriendly journalist had foolishly been allowed to accompany CF members on their National Weekend. This ‘access-all-areas’ visit included a trip to a night club in Bath, where several CF members proceeded to drunkenly humiliate themselves, behave like arses, and threaten to throw said journalist off the night bus home; all of which events were, naturally, predictably and gleefully reported on the next day.
And let us not forget the Conference media fiasco. The CF exhibition stand was kewly re-titled ‘The Chill-out Zone’, where under-30s — no doubt exhausted from their hard evening’s clubbing — could go to rest their weary little feet. The media rightly pounced on this and ridiculed it as a tragic attempt to be trendy and yoof-like. this, in the event, really wasn’t the moment for our friend Mr Pugh to spread his wings and become the svengali of the lobby, assuring sundry hacks as to the genius of this scheme.
Despite these two recent media set-backs, the most laughable piece of journalism was yet to come. In October, the Sunday Express ran a piece on the Conservative Party’s up-and-coming new ‘stars’. Mr Pugh, for he was one, detailed his political thoughts: his political hero, he said, was not Thatcher, or Churchill, or any passing shadow like that. No, his pop idol was one John Bercow. ‘He is a great man’, contended Mr Pugh. A biographer’s dream indeed.
CF’s media mismanagement, all of which has been damaging, has radically lowered the main Party’s view of Conservative Future. All this, combined with the organisational ineptitude of successive national organisers — delays in sending out ballot papers; poor organisation of events, particularly at this year’s Conference; an incomplete database of members, in spite of the part-time employment of a ‘database manager’; the late arrival of Freshers’ Fair packs to Universities (thereby wasting the thousands of pounds of Party money that was spent on promotional gimmicks) — has produced a youth wing in far sorrier state than the state that preceded it.
Almost tragically, however, there is yet more pettiness and incompetence to relate. It would appear that this fish doesn’t so much rot from the head down, as bloat and reek and decay every which way. Or to rephrase that marginally, it’s not just the fault of baby CCO staffers, the elected executive must also take their share of the blame for CF’s current rut.
Former chairman Hannah Parker was ever-present at this year’s Party Conference. Thrust on-stage and into the limelight at every opportunity, Miss Parker is beloved of Smith Square’s media and candidates departments. She is everything that the new, modern Party aspires to: young, female, repetitively right-on, middle class and — most importantly — a rabid Portillista. Let us not forget, this is the same Hannah Parker whose national executive in 2001 penned an ‘anyone but IDS’ letter to that aforementioned Tory bastion, The Independent in the middle of the leadership campaign. The expert judgement of youth was that poor, deluded Mr Duncan Smith could never be leader due to his supposedly negative views on [gasp!] gays and lesbians.
All interesting enough, in the way that only the fluffiest trivia can be, but merely the smallest pinkie waded into the sea of bile that is Tory yoof ‘politics’. What is bringing CF to its knees is the obsession with student and NUS politics that the current CF executive have. Many of them have previously held NUS positions, and official CF policy is now to co-operate with NUS in all ways possible, encouraging members to stand for NUS positions nation-wide. One would have thought the problems with this were obvious: there will never be enough Conservative members elected to NUS positions to make anything other than a tame, token difference, and NUS will never take the Conservatives seriously as it is purely the finishing school for Labour student hacks.
This student obsession is so damaging because CF was explicitly intended to be an organisation for all Party members under thirty, yet it really has little to offer anyone save for students. This demonstrates beyond all doubt the foolishness of combining Students and Graduates. The two groups have disparate aims and interests, and do not blend well together, to the detriment of the graduates. Admittedly, CF is attempting to lure more graduates into their ranks, but until the Party gives graduates their own organisation, the Party will have little success in doing so.
CF’s stagnation is the most fundamentally worrying problem, as far as the future of the Conservative Party is concerned. Party membership is literally dying out, and CF has no positive recruitment structure outside of universities. London is very well organised, but outside the M25 and the south-east of England, CF represents nothing more than scattered pockets of poorly organised members. Above all, it is this that CF needs to address: they are fiddling while Rome burns; obsessed with petty in-fighting, NUS involvement, and trivial Portillista concerns, whilst all the time their membership is drifting away. Far from feeding now recruits into the wider party, CF acts today as a positive deterrent to people joining.
For proof of this institutional entropy, look no further than the turnout in this year’s CF elections. Six thousand ballot papers were sent out, and less than five hundred were returned: an overall turnout of just over 8%. This is the ultimate example of membership disillusionment.
How, you ask, can we improve upon this situation? There is little doubt that massive changes need to be made. Graduates and Students must, as God and tradition have ordained, be rent asunder. The current situation is far too one-sided in favour of students (a distinctly time-limited category of beast), and this is alienating all non-student members. CCO needs to offer qualitatively superior management support — and it would be an obvious kind of wisdom to appoint someone who wasn’t a recent CF alumni. Far greater emphasis should be placed on working, as youth cadres, with constituencies (and areas) to improve infrastructure and recruitment; the organisation is presently satisfied with a small national caucus and strong London branches whilst ignoring the rest of the country. Finally, the Tory youth movement needs to make radical changes to the left-wing, NUS-appeasing direction in which it is moving: it needs to become Conservative again.
PGC, a practising undergraduate, writes with a heavy heart
StudentWatch, December 3, 2002 02:19 PM