Do we need Conservative Future?

I have recently seen a post on Liberal Democrat Voice entitled Opinion: Why do we need Liberal Youth?, inspired by the fact that the LYers are currently engaged in their annual elections. I've heard enough about past Liberal Youth elections to know when to leave private grief well alone.

But another youth & students wing is soon to have its own elections - Conservative Future. (Already a number of blogs such as Tory Bear are running opinion polls. If anyone wants to vote for me as a write-in candidate feel free to.) So it's time to raise a few questions, perhaps playing Devil's Advocate a little. Now I've been around the block a while and jokingly refer to myself as something of a Methuselah of CF, so maybe this is just the rumblings of a grumpy young man. And yes I'm approaching the upper age limit for CF so perhaps this is someone else's business now. But maybe this means I can speak more freely than others about the problems.

And I've also for a long time seen an organisation that at times has never really known what it's there for, which occasionally finds an answer only to ditch it soon after (usually after a change of leadership) and which seems clearer about what it isn't than what it is.

Now this doesn't apply everywhere. At the local level Conservative Future provides a useful way to recruit and engage younger members of the party (although historically retention has been poor) and the national brand provides both a uniform identity and quality materials that can't be duplicated elsewhere. (Of course at the university level this creates some problems because many of the university branches are much older than CF and are very reluctant to change their names. But the smaller bubble of university means that it's usually easier to advertise anyway and overcome this.)

At the area and regional level CF's record has been mixed with some successes when strong local branches have banded together and some failures when the organisation nationally has tried to direct things. The real problem here has long been a very weak structure between the branches and national level - the old system of just electing an area chair for each of 43(?) pre-defined areas did not in itself guarantee much overall success, though there have been many area chairs who have worked wonders in spite of the limited resources and support available.

At the national level CF has successively de facto decided (without, it has to be said, any real formal choice) that:

• It doesn't want to be a platform for expressing policy opinions that would encourage ideological faction fighting
• It doesn't want to be a super branch for London
• It doesn't want to just be an advertising service for local events
• It might want to get involved in the National Union of Students but then again it might not depending on the background and prejudices of whoever happens to have the portfolio
• It doesn't want to repeat the infamy of the Federation of Conservative Students
• It wants to avoid the Tory Boy stereotype of the last years of the Young Conservatives
• It doesn't want to repeat the previous CF leadership's mistakes

Yes this is negative, but there are some things CF has decided for:

• It wants to create an environment to encourage people to get and stay involved
• It wants to campaign for the party at all levels
• It wants to encourage talented younger members to rise fast in the party, particularly standing as candidates at all levels (and sometimes takes credit even when said candidate has had minimal involvement with, or support from, CF)
• It wants people to enjoy themselves

And a lot of this has taken place against a background of umpteen rounds of personality based infighting, with (let's be honest) many people putting themselves forward because they want to help and make a difference and instead merely finding themselves the subject of bullying and malicious gossip. It should not surprise anyone that there have been quite a number of resignations over the years by people who no longer want to put up with all the crap, especially when they seem unable to get much done. What does surprise is that few want to openly admit this, let alone take firm action to stamp it out.

This post has been quite negative. But the starting point for all improvement is to identify not just what is wrong but why it is wrong. Problems with both individuals and general culture can't be solved simply by changing the rules in the hope that whenever some last week's problem repeats itself exactly it will be solved differently. Whilst having a clear complaints process is essential, they also need to be solved by a proactive people based approach. More generally the organisation needs to find not just a direction, but also a destination, and one that there can be much greater continuity for.

So as the Conservative Future elections begin, I issue a challenge to everyone thinking of standing in them to answer these questions:

1. What is Conservative Future for?
2. What is the ultimate aim of CF?
3. How will you tackle the culture of nastiness that has driven away so many?

It's how people answer these questions, and nothing else, that will determine who I give my support to.

On ideology in youth wings

Tory Bear has recently posted Back to the Future about the lack of ideological battles in Conservative Future elections. And he has a strong point - for as long as I can remember in Conservative Future (since about 2000 - yes I'm showing my age!) virtually all the candidates in elections for the national executive have run campaigns based on what sort of administration they would run if elected and nearly all have had supporters' lists that are ideologically all over the party. The handful who've tried for purity have never got anywhere and even those candidates strongly associated with certain ideological groups in the party have not tried to run on such a line.

Now to a large extent this is because the Conservative Future national executive is an administrative body and so it's utterly irrelevant as to what are someone's opinion on grammar schools, whether or not Conservative MEPs should sit in the European People's Party (although the issue of Conservative Future's affiliation to the European Democrat Students is one that could do with settling) or so forth.

But it's also because a lot in Conservative Future have always been deeply wary of bringing ideology into elections. Many of us have encountered the teenager and twenty-something year-old for whom everything in politics is absolutely back & white with nothing in between, for whom ideas of pragmatism, compromise, electability and so forth are anathema and who often calls for those who don't agree with them to leave the party. Friends in Labour and the Liberal Democrats have confirmed that this is not a feature unique to the right. The idea of ideological based elections brings the danger that the outcome would be a very ideological Conservative Future that would be very off putting to new members, to the detriment of membership and effectiveness. (That problem exists at the moment but it would hardly be resolved by this!) It could also become an embarrassment to the party in general if the youth wing started coming out with absurd policies. Then there's the danger that particular groups in the party would regard the youth wing as a platform to be captured for espousing their own particular policies rather than for benefiting the younger members of the party as a whole.

And what exactly is the point of a party's youth wing espousing political views, which would generally not be those of the membership as a whole or even a national council, but probably those of just those members of the executive controlling decisions and/or accessing the microphone? If it's to influence the party policy there are far better ways to do that - indeed it's better to be enabling individual members and groups to be able to submit their voice rather than have one single voice for all young members. If it's to give the organisation a sense of purpose then it's rather an extreme step to take. And taking it back to the issue of elections, what difference would it make if one candidate is from the One Nation wing of the party, one from the Thatcherite wing and one from the Faith, Flag & Family wing? How would their ability to do the job be in any way affected by this?

(The one point I have seen a few people raise is over the allocation of forty-two places on the Conservative National Convention that are reserved for Conservative Future. How the places should be filled has been a somewhat contentious issue over the years and in one election a chair candidate's supporters asserted that there is a danger of putting forty-two voting places in the wrong hands. But the answer to that must be reform of the Convention places, not hoping for the "right" hands!)