ONE WORD. That’s all it comes down to, in the end. One word that either a party has or it hasn’t, and without which everything else – the policies, the candidates, the press releases, the promises – is just noise.
Principles.
Politics without principles isn’t really politics at all, it’s management. Britain has had more than enough management. The Conservative Party’s tragedy is that it forgot this. Somewhere between Thatcher and Cameron, it made a fateful decision: that the path back to power lay not in conviction but in competence, not in ideas but in administration. It would no longer tell the country where it was going or why, it would simply promise to run the existing machinery more efficiently than the other lot.
Cameron was less heir-to-Blair (who after all had a vision), more Heath II: a man of the managerial centre, suspicious of ideas, more comfortable in the vocabulary of the technocrat than the statesman. And like Heath, he set the tone for everything that followed. The party produced no Thatcher because it had stopped believing that a Thatcher was what Britain needed. It had decided, somewhere along the way, that governing well meant managing things – and that the highest ambition of a Conservative government was a balanced set of books and a quiet life.
Reform UK promised something different. But what, exactly? As far as I can tell, they want to be the new Tories: bigger, louder, more combative in style but not fundamentally different in substance. The party of managed decline with slightly better branding and a lot more showbiz flair.
Restore Britain have convinced themselves that what Britain needs is an identity rooted in blood rather than in the values that have made these islands remarkable for centuries. No thank you. We’ve said no to that before as a country and we’ll say it again. That’s not who we are.
So where does that leave someone like me, a sitting councillor who has spent years looking at what has gone wrong in Britain and who has not the slightest interest in either managing the decline gracefully or accelerating it toward some darker destination?
It leaves me with Advance UK.
I’ll be honest: I came to them cautiously. I had to be sure. Because a party can dress managerialism up in the language of principle – can talk about accountability and service and the national interest – without any of it meaning a thing, and I have been in British politics long enough to know exactly what that looks like. But the more I looked at what Advance UK stands for – not just what it says, but the instincts that run beneath what it says – the more I recognised something I hadn’t felt in a long time. Relief.
What I found was honesty. Integrity. A party that understands the difference between principles and positioning. A willingness to do the right thing, even when – especially when – it is the hard thing. These are not positions that come naturally to most political parties; they tend to reach for them in manifestos and abandon them in practice. Advance’s record, short as it is, suggests something different.
When the Gorton and Denton by-election came around, Advance UK fielded a candidate. They knew perfectly well they couldn’t win. There was no calculation of advantage, no comfortable decision to sit it out and preserve resources for a more winnable fight. They stood because people in those constituencies deserved a real choice at the ballot box, and providing that choice is what a party that believes in democracy does – not when it’s easy, not when the odds are favourable, but as a matter of principle.
Then there is the question of how the party makes policy. Advance has built a College, independent of the party executive, elected by members, whose purpose is to develop policy properly. It is slow work. It is unglamorous work. A party chasing headlines would never bother with it; it’s far easier to announce positions than to construct them. But positions announced without the intellectual architecture to support them are not principles, they’re weathervanes. The College exists precisely because Advance understands that difference. Notably, the College also elects the Leader and can remove him or her by a vote of no confidence. In a political culture defined by leaders who treat their parties as personal vehicles, that is a quiet but significant statement about where sovereignty actually lies.
Two data points do not make a party’s reputation. But small acts of political integrity, undertaken when no one is particularly watching and nothing easy is on offer, are a better guide to what an organisation truly is than any number of policy documents. That is what I was looking for. That is what I found in Advance UK.
Last week, something happened in Shrewsbury that brought all of this into focus for me in a different way. People, patriots, have been hanging the British flag from lampposts. Not as a provocation. Not as a political statement, in any aggressive sense. Simply as an expression of who they are and where they belong. And they have faced organised antagonism for it. On Thursday, a man was struck hard enough in the head by anti-flag protesters to cause an epileptic seizure.
I am organising an event next Saturday in response. Many of us – and I have particularly asked first- and second-generation migrants like myself, who love this country and what its flag represents – will gather quietly and peacefully, and hold the flag. Not to make a point about anyone else. Simply to say: we are not ashamed of this. We do not accept that our flag belongs to extremists. It belongs to us.
I was genuinely uncertain how Advance UK would respond when I mentioned it. That, I’m afraid, is the legacy of spending time in political parties that have looked down on exactly this kind of event, treating ordinary patriotism as something slightly embarrassing, something to be managed rather than embraced. When they told me they were not only supportive but would bring a presence to the gathering, I felt something I hadn’t expected to feel. I won’t pretend otherwise: I came close to tears.
That response told me what I needed to know. This is a party that understands what it means to simply love your country without apology, without caveats, without the constant anxious checking of whether it looks quite right. That kind of sanity is rarer in British politics than it ought to be.
It also told me something about principles. Supporting a small, peaceful gathering of patriots in Shrewsbury when no cameras are pointed at you, when there’s no political calculus to be done, when it’s simply the right thing to do – that’s what principled politics looks like in practice. It’s not always the grand gesture. Sometimes it’s just being willing to stand with people who love their country, and mean it.
Britain doesn’t need more managers. It needs people who know what they believe, who will make the hard calls that belief demands, and who will not flinch when the alternatives look easier. That’s what I found in Advance UK. That’s why I joined. That’s why you should too.
Note: We are gathering in Shrewsbury on Saturday April 11 at noon in the town square to fly the flag peacefully and celebrate British culture. You are welcome to join us. Please bring songs, poems, readings that celebrate British culture and British life.
