The Tories’ culture wars may be a losing electoral strategy, but they may stoke a resurgence of the far-right, argues Elaine Graham-Leigh 

One of the features of the first couple of weeks of the Tory election campaign is how much they’re practising culture wars rather than offering potentially deliverable policies. From annual caps on migrant visas, to amending the Equality Act and bringing back National Service, the Tory electoral strategy appears to be to fight culture wars on every front they can.  

To be fair, for the Tories this is not entirely new. Susan Hall’s campaign to win the London Mayoral election for the Tories, for example, seemed to be based almost entirely on the culture-wars hot topic of the extension of the ULEZ (ultra-low emission zone) to outer London, including the eyebrow-raising claim that Londoners were staying inside to avoid the gangs of ULEZ enforcers stalking the streets. In the week before Sunak called the election, Esther McVey, the Cabinet Officer minister, appeared to call for civil servants to be banned from wearing rainbow lanyards, and the government also floated the idea of banning sex education in schools for children under nine. 

While this isn’t new ground for the Tories, it has often been unsuccessful. Susan Hall’s resounding loss to Sadiq Khan in that London Mayoral election suggested that, despite the conclusions reached on the basis of the 2023 Uxbridge by-election, car-based culture wars do not after all automatically win elections. While the current crop of culture-wars policies hasn’t yet been tested at the ballot box, immediate reactions haven’t seemed positive. Sunak’s National Service plans were greeted with widespread derision. McVey’s war on woke lanyards was so ridiculed that she was reduced to denying that she ever launched it, a U-turn memorialised in The Guardian as ‘Esther McVey claims she never proposed ban on rainbow lanyards for civil servants (even though she did).’ 

Research carried out by More in Common and 38 Degrees suggests in fact that pursuing culture wars is likely to be bad for the electoral chances of both the Tories and Labour, with the Tories risking a ten percentage point decrease in votes even among Tory supporters if they conduct a culture-wars based campaign. This could, the researchers point out, be significant, as there are 37 Tory seats where they were only 2% ahead of the second-placed party in 2019.  

It’s also notable how often the Tories’ culture-wars messages don’t land well with sections of the elite, who you would think the Tories would be anxious to keep onside. The armed forces, for example, were notably unenthusiastic about the national service plan, with Admiral Alan West calling it ‘bonkers’ and General Lord Dannatt dubbing it ‘half-baked’. The army’s position had in fact been set out by Andrew Murrison MP just two days before Sunak’s announcement, when he explained, in response to a prescient Parliamentary question about national service, that introducing potentially unwilling national-service recruits into the army ‘could damage morale, recruitment and retention and would consume professional military and naval resources.’ Even McVey’s lanyard proposal immediately annoyed the various civil-service departments who balked at this ministerial intervention into internal HR matters.  

Strategy of desperation 

This all therefore rather raises the question of why the Tories seem so wedded to an unsuccessful strategy. In part, of course, it is a course of desperation. Facing an election which they are overwhelmingly likely to lose, they might as well go down culture-war fighting. It is likely that there is something more to it than that. 

There are elements in the Tory party who genuinely believe that what are dismissed as culture wars are genuinely important. They aren’t a distraction, but the future of the Tory cause. This is the position of the Common Sense Group of Tory MPs, founded by John Hayes MP in 2020. John Hayes wrote for them in 2021 that ‘politics now is palpably about values not dull, mechanistic economic minutiae…  the [left] culture warriors are not merely a disruptive nuisance, they represent a profound threat to the values which underpin our civilised social order.’  

Not only do they think that culture wars matter, they think that they could give rise to a revival of Toryism. Gareth Bacon MP wrote in the same Common Sense Group publication that compared to the ‘woke’ values of Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion, ‘Conservative values present a far more appealing alternative – values of shared national identity, patriotism, family, faith, duty, freedom under the law, democracy and personal responsibility.’ How much influence people like the Common Sense Group have in the Tory party is debatable, but an understanding that the culture wars represent fighting for ‘common sense’ may be more general. It may not be irrelevant for example that McVey was apparently known as Sunak’s ‘Common Sense Minister’.  

While culture wars do not appear to work well in general at the ballot box, even on most Tories, they may work better in the competition between the Tories and Reform. Reform’s pitch appears to be based almost entirely on culture wars, from Lee Anderson’s boycotting of Euro 21 because of footballers taking the knee before matches, to Farage’s recent statement that he wants net-zero immigration. Reform did not do particularly well in the local elections in May, but current polling is showing them threatening to come close to the Tory vote nationally. As, if not more, important is their influence on the right after the election. Farage has said openly that he is aiming to take over the Tory Party, and that he called his party Reform deliberately after the party that took over the right from the Progressive Conservatives in Canada in 1993, ‘because the Canadian Conservatives had become social democrats like our mob here.’  

In London, during Susan Hall’s Mayoral run, the overwhelming sense was that much of the campaign wasn’t talking to the London electorate at all. Anyone in London would have known that Londoners were not, in fact, cowering in fear of masked gangs of ULEZ enforcers. To potential Reform supporters in places like Blackpool South, where in May 2024 they came within 117 votes of beating the Tories in May 2024, or Clacton, where Farage is standing, this may however have chimed with their ideas of what London is like. The same dynamic may now be at work in the general election. The Tories know they have very little chance of forming the next government, hence it doesn’t matter how much they irritate the army or the civil service. What does matter to them is if sections of their core supporters start seeing Reform as a better defence than they are against ‘the woke mob’.  

This is of course dangerous territory. It is no accident that the Tory culture wars feed into the far-right position that they are just defending ordinary [white] working people against the ‘woke elite’. We have already seen a Tory Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, calling the far-right to the streets when we refused to cancel the pro-Palestine march on 11 November. It may not be a coincidence here that John Hayes, the founder of the Common Sense Group, is a key ally of Braverman’s. The far-right mobilisation in London on 1 June was, at around 6,000, a fraction of the size of the demonstrations for Palestine, but still may represent the beginning of a far-right resurgence. The Tories have shown us that in this space, they’re prepared to send whatever encouraging signals they need to far-right supporters to fight off Reform, regardless of the consequences for the rest of us. It is becoming increasingly clear that whatever else we have to do in the first days of a new government, mobilising against the far-right may well be on the list.