Andy Street: The Alternative Conservative

The former West Midlands Mayor tells the Byline Times podcast his party needs to regain the centre ground.

Then West Midlands Mayor, Andy Street, in 2021. Photo: Steve Parsons/PA Images/Alamy

As the boss of John Lewis for the best part of a decade, Andy Street has stacks of real-life business experience; he also knows his way around Westminster and Whitehall, having served two terms as elected Mayor of the West Midlands.

He is, in other words, the kind of politician who would seem a natural fit for the House of Lords, but given that his centrist brand of Conservatism is at odds with party leader Kemi Badenoch, he’s unlikely to be nominated to speak from the red benches any time soon.

So, instead, Street has set himself another task — redefining what it means to be a Conservative in an age of political extremes, through his think-tank cum pressure group Prosper UK, which he recently founded alongside former Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson, another renowned moderate.

“Many commentators have said, not just in Britain but around the world, that politics is polarising to the extremes,” Street observes. “Prosper exists to prove that that need not be the case in the UK. We actually believe there is still an incredible ‘silent majority’ in Britain, who are still actually centre, or centre right voters, but perhaps they’ve not had a voice to get behind in recent years. We are trying to defy what might be described as the accepted wisdom of what is happening internationally. And thus far, the response has been very encouraging, and it certainly lets us feel that there is all to play for.”

Former Conservative ministers David Gauke and Amber Rudd have thrown their heft behind the new group, which is targeting the estimated seven million politically ‘homeless’ Brits who reject the simple answers of populism, but who have become disenchanted with the major parties. Perhaps Prosper’s hardest job will be to sway Badenoch and her inner circle who, like their Labour counterparts, have tacked ever rightwards in an attempt to fend off the electoral challenge posed by Nigel Farage and Reform UK. The polls suggest this is a doomed strategy — witness the recent Gorton and Denton by-election where the Conservatives came fourth and lost their deposit.

In contrast to Badenoch — who wants to scrap “indefinite leave to remain status” and remove welfare rights from non-British citizens — Street is willing to make the case for migration. He pushes back against the “snake oil” proferred by the hard right and argues that, “we need to acknowledge that there is a need for some level of migration to get our economy firing.

“We’ve particularly got to attract those footloose international migrants who are setting up businesses [and] contributing to economies. If we don’t, we will be the lesser for it. There’s an emerging issue around this as well, about not losing people who are really critical to our economy. So [while] the net migration number has become such a headline, we mustn’t solve that by losing the very people who are going to be critical for the UK economy in the future.”

Badenoch’s lurch to the right, though partly prompted by Farage, also reflects a strain of racism — or at least of narrow nationalism — that has pockmarked the Conservative party for decades. Margaret Thatcher echoed the rhetoric of Enoch Powell when she raised fears the UK might be “swamped” by settlers from the Commonwealth in 1978; more than three decades later, Theresa May created the “hostile environment”, which directly led to the Windrush Scandal, in which dozens of people who were legally settled here were deported to the Caribbean.

Indeed, it is one of the quirks of recent British politics that despite boasting the country’s first South Asian Prime Minister (Rishi Sunak), and having, in Badenoch, a leader of African heritage, the party continues to focus relentlessly on migration. This week, for instance, it published analysis suggesting that nearly 40% of new homes will be needed for migrants by 2030 — the kind of claim which is lapped up by far-right social media accounts and outlets such as GB News.

Street realises that the issue is likely to remain a hot topic for the electorate, but prefers to associate himself with the more inclusive “one nation” Conservative tradition of John Major and David Cameron.

“If you look at the city that I was part of [Birmingham] and the West Midlands mayoral area, it has been a natural welcoming place for generations of different migrants, whether it be the Windrush generation or South Asian migrants and they have been a critical part of our economic success. That’s one of the reasons I reject entirely the oversimplification and the stigmatising that tends to go with the populist answer. You’ve actually got to acknowledge that economic contribution, but you’ve also got to think about how we solve it for the future, not just look back to the past.”

Prosper’s main emphasis, however, is on the need for economic growth, where Street makes the case for less burdensome bureaucracy. Labour’s ambition to build 300,000 new homes a year, for example, has been stymied, he says, by blockages in the planning system. Questions about the contributory role of deregulation in the Grenfell fire are artfully fended off and, as with all of his policy positions, there’s nuance — a careful weighing of both sides, albeit ultimately, with a pro-business emphasis.

“If you think of the situation we are currently in as a country, the balance between the share of GDP that the state takes and actually freeing entrepreneurs to create the wealth that then pays for everything else, is out of balance. What we need to do is get the private sector economy growing so it can fund public services — we can get tax levels down to drive the flywheel of the economy. So it’s that sweet spot of private sector enterprise, but appropriate state regulation that we’re looking at.”

A staunch Remainer at the time of the EU referendum in 2016, Street insists he’s “not a Remoaner, because the country decided for better or worse [to leave the EU] and I honestly believe we still have to respect that decision, so Prosper is not going to be arguing for immediate rejoining. I think, frankly, the sort of convulsions that would put the country through would be incredibly disruptive themselves, going back to the battles of 2016 — but we have to acknowledge they’re our biggest trading partner, and trade with the EU went down massively. Yes, it has rebuilt, but not to the levels that it was at previously and therefore we really do need to work through on a pragmatic basis of what closer relationships really mean.”

Street also acknowledges the reality of man-made climate change — a further break with Reform and some on the right of his own party — saying that “those who deny the evidence of climate change are doing next generations an incredible disservice. It remains an existential threat to the world, and we can’t ignore that.”

Asked to give evidence of Prosper’s potential mass appeal, Street reports that when the 20,000 people who have signed up since the movement’s launch last month were canvassed about their recent voting history, “about a third of people who responded said Conservative, one third Labour, one third Lib Dem.”

In years to come, perhaps in tandem with Davidson, this might just be the basis for an election winning force on the left of the Conservative party. Unlike Badenoch, who said the new grouping “needs to get out of the way”, Street does have form winning actual elections, becoming West Midlands Mayor against the odds in 2017, before securing a second term in 2021.

He is too much of a loyalist to openly criticise his leader, but notes that “the Conservative Party only wins when it is a broad church and looks to the middle ground as well. That is the story of the last 100 years, whether you go right back to Neville Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin, McMillan, Margaret Thatcher, David Cameron — they all won their elections from a centre ground positioning. That’s what we have to do again”

Listen to Adrian Goldberg’s full interview with Andy Street on the Byline Times podcast here.