Asking Conservatives to stop sounding negative may be naive but I agree with Nicky Morgan: they need a change of tone
You might call it "doing a Theresa". A female Conservative minister has told her party to stop saying what it hates, and start saying what it likes, if it wants to win the next election. Echoing the infamous phrasing of Theresa May, now home secretary, who told the Tories they were seen as the "nasty party", the Treasury minister Nicky Morgan has called for an end to negativity.
The Conservatives must come up with a "positive plan", the economic secretary says, rather than just "we're against this, we're anti that, we don't like them, we don't want them here, we don't want them doing this".
Well, fine, except I get the feeling that Morgan, a rising star on the liberal wing of the party, fundamentally misunderstands what Conservatism is about. People who call for Tories to stop opposing things and sounding negative seem to me to make a crucial error of judgment. The Conservative party exists to conserve, or at least it used to, and in doing so it necessarily opposes things.
And Conservatism is rooted in reality. Tories know what works, and most of the time this is not something that sounds fluffy, friendly and fun. Unchecked immigration, building on green fields, law-making from Brussels, crime going unpunished … The party exists to take tough decisions on these matters in order to provide quality of life for citizens. But Morgan wants the Tories to sound more positive, which may be a good idea in this image-obsessed age.
So let us at least give her the benefit of the doubt, and try to come up with some ideas for how traditional Conservative ideas could be dressed up to appear more cheerful. Let sunshine, as David Cameron once said, win the day:
1.Instead of opposing immigration, the Tories could announce that they are opening the doors to skilled migrants. Anyone with a skill Britain needs will be allowed to stay, and anyone already in the country with skills we need will be offered an amnesty. Those who want to come to Britain to claim benefits will be prevented from doing so, along with those who refuse to learn English, in order to let in those who want to work and integrate. They could call this "controlled open-door immigration".
2.Rather than saying they oppose house-building, rightwingers should call for the protection of farmland for food production and the safeguarding of the countryside around cities which is providing an oxygen belt and a precious arena for leisure and family quality time. They could call this the Green Lifebelt.
3.The right should stop complaining about big infrastructure projects such as HS2 and start campaigning to save the taxpayer £50bn. It could promise every region of the UK a new hospital, new flood defences, new bus services, new cycle routes, and a new local railway station with the money saved. This would quickly become known as a golden age of essential service provision.
4.Conservatives need to stop saying they don't like European human rights law and EU regulations such as health and safety legislation. Instead, they could offer the British people a chance to say how much they like them. They could call this a referendum on continued membership of the EU.
5.Instead of banging on and on about how they want to overturn the ban on fox-hunting, not to mention carping endlessly about fishing quotas, the right should offer voters the historic opportunity to end the need to kill anything, from pests to farm animals, by proposing a system of mandatory national veganism. They could call this the Veg Society.
There, I've been relentlessly positive. Now don't say rightwingers never try to sound upbeat.