LONDON: Britain’s opposition Conservatives gathered for their annual conference on Sunday, licking their wounds after a historic election defeat and waging a battle over the party’s future direction. The four-day meeting in Birmingham, central England, comes three months after the Tories ousted Labor, with Keir Starmer taking over as prime minister. It is the Conservatives’ first conference in opposition since 2009 – a year before David Cameron set them on a path of 14 successive but chaotic governments marked by austerity, Brexit, the Covid pandemic and infighting. The meeting will see four candidates audition in front of parliamentary peers and local members to replace former prime minister Rishi Sunak as the next Conservative leader. Kemi Badenoch, Robert Jenrick, James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat will take to the stage in the main hall of the International Convention Center in the second largest British city. Predecessor and former immigration minister Jenrick promised immigration a “cast iron” cap when setting up his stall. “The age of mass migration has to end. It puts enormous pressure on housing, public services and community cohesion. You can’t integrate 1.2 million people into a small country every year,” he told Sky News Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips. . The issue was a key issue in July’s general election, when the Conservatives lost critical votes to Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration British Reform Party. Jenrick’s closest rival, Badenoch, said immigration was something the country needed to “fix”. “Numbers matter…culture matters. If we want to have a well-integrated society, we need to make sure we have a shared culture and a shared identity,” Sky said. Conservative MPs will vote on the two final candidates next week. Party members will then select the winner in a vote that will close at the end of October. “It’s basically going to be a talent show,” Robert Ford, a professor of politics at the University of Manchester, told AFP. The new leader of Britain’s opposition – and the person charged with unifying the party ahead of the next election – will be announced on Saturday 2 Whoever is chosen will decide whether the party plunges further to the right or tries to regain the limelight after the Conservatives’ worst-ever result in the July 4 general election. Labor won an overwhelming majority of 174 seats in the 650-member British Parliament. The Tories lost 251 seats to return just 121 MPs, the lowest in their history. It completed a stunning fall from the previous election in 2019, when the Conservatives under Boris Johnson won 80 seats, largely on a promise to “get Brexit done”. The party went off in style. Several scandals, not least a Downing Street staff party during the coronavirus lockdown, forced Johnson out of office. His successor Liz Truss then lasted just 49 days thanks to her mini-budget, which piled on the pounds and spooked the markets. Brought in to steady the ship, Sunak failed to reverse the slide and his 20 months in office were marred by factional infighting. After the election, he announced that he would resign after the election of a successor. The party faces a dilemma: should it focus on winning back voters who defected to Nigel Farage’s hard-right British Reform Party, or try to win back the support of those who defected to the centrist Liberal Democrats? The party as a whole has moved to the right in recent years, but Badenoch and Jenrick are seen as the more right-wing of the candidates, with Cleverly and Tugendhat closer to the centre. “It’s true that elections tend to be won in the spotlight unless one of the other parties abandons them completely,” said Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London. “Now that Labor seems absolutely determined to screw it up, it would seem that the Conservatives are probably going to have to fight in that territory,” he told AFP. The conference ends on Wednesday.
