The new-look Conservative Way Forward (CWF) is finally gearing up for its full launch. While the proto-Thatcherite group had hoped to launch some time in April or early May, it looks like it’s now battle ready to drum up support for free market policies within the parliamentary party. Convenient timing given the events of the last week in SW1…
Group chairman Steve Baker and Westminster spinner Ed Barker have joined forces to lead the charge, with both now listed as directors on the campaign’s Companies House page. Barker is a seasoned political campaigner who worked with Steve Baker throughout the Brexit years, including in the running of the Covid Recovery Group. Who also in a previous life played as a saxophonist for George Michael…
A few careless whispers throughout SW1 last week led to Baker’s pre-launch memo spreading like wildfire with Tory MPs ahead of Boris’s no-confidence vote, and Guido’s got his hands on the full pitch. It’ll come as no surprise that Baker’s view on the current state of the party is pretty grim, although he’s keen to stress that CWF’s antidote won’t be “a reheat of Thatcherism”:
“It will not try to return the Conservative Party to Thatcherism, but take these principles and adapt them for a 2022 society that is wholly different to the society in which Thatcher rose to power in 1979, and society when CWF was first founded in 1991.
[…]
We want the government to:
- Make the UK the most attractive and competitive place for investment in the world by reducing regulation, control and coercion over the economy and our lives, and by breaking down the barriers to private entrepreneurship.
- Reduce state spending and debt so that we can lower taxes and the cost of living for working families, giving them a greater a say over where their money goes, and for businesses so that they can reinvest and grow.
- Restore honest money, control state power and make government more effective. Genuine cost benefit analysis in Government, reform the way in which expert advice is provided to ministers including an Office of Research Integrity, and a new Public Health Act to ensure the most important decisions ministers make on our basic liberties are truly scrutinised by Parliament.”
Yet another attack on government policy from the right flank…
