Gossip Tory

Well, it’s over. It’s been a long, long haul, but it’s over. Now it is time to look back and assess what happened. On an incredibly high note Boris Johnson, that media darling of a Conservative, has returned to City Hall for four more fantastic years at the top of London. Nationwide the picture wasn’t quite as bright, as significant losses led to us losing 403 councillors and twelve councils, and all this was against a background where our poll ratings are considerably behind what they used to be.

The Conservative Future played a pivotal role in both the London election and nationwide elections, whether it was organising Battle Buses that moved activists across London, planning early morning dawn raids, working late into the night, making non-stop calls from CCHQ or any one of a whole host of other activities.

Further afield, the Conservative Future proved its importance in a range of very tight elections where it played a crucial difference. In Nuneaton a Conservative Future Action Day helped hold back a potential tide of losses, in the East Midlands a Conservative Future Social Action Project helped members give something back to the community and in Essex a number of members worked hard wherever and whenever they could.

Conservative Future has done fantastically well in the last twenty months, building a structure that allows it to mobilise large numbers on effective campaigns, hosting a wide variety of events involving the Chancellor and the Prime Minister and moving itself away from its London focus and broadening itself nationally.

That’s not to say it’s all roses, however. Recently we have begun to see fractures appear in the organisation we all care about and want to succeed. Some blame these frustrations on the national party, some on the Conservative Future’s executive and some claim better choices have appeared elsewhere.

These have precipitated a recent spat of defections to UKIP from members of the Conservative Future. In my eyes, these defections aren’t the negative and damaging disaster they are made out to be. Instead, they are a perfect example of a growing organisation that is exploring the path it wants to take forward.

The Conservative Future is an organisation with a very bright future, a sizeable membership base and that is now taken very seriously by the party. At the moment the Conservative Future needs to just make sure it doesn’t tear instead apart with mindless squabbles and disagreements between people who all fall together on the same wind of the party. Whether you are Conservative Future or UKIP, you still subscribe to the same fundamental belief and you still have the same enemy to fight: socialism.

Therefore I implore everyone in this leading youth wing that is an example across the country to stand together and make sure we don’t do damage to ourselves and help the left in their job. Whether you want a youth wing that is more to the left, more to the right or standing in the middle is an issue for us as a group and not for us to air in public.

The Conservative Future has proved, once again, what an important tool it is. It provides the on the ground energy and dynamism every election needs; it provides the leafleters and canvassers that are vital for our campaign to work and it provides the numbers that help to ensure the Conservative message is spread online.

Let us make sure we harness this success and continue to build an organisation that we can be proud of and that people wish to join and remain members of. We must make sure we don’t allow disagreements to grow so large that they damage our work. One of the most important parts of this is respect. Respect for every CF member, respect for every UKIP member and respect for every YBF member.

Our Conservative-led government is currently being forced to make difficult decisions trying to deal with a deficit built up by 13 years of Labour mismanagement. At the same time the Prime Minister is also working alongside our Liberal Democrat partners. All this means that our party may not be delivering the exact policies we as a party want. But we know that the Conservative-led government is making fantastic strides forward in our country and is of course preferable to further years of Labour. Rather than dividing among ourselves at the moment, let’s unify and get ready for a 2015 election.