Sam Collins: Badenoch has taken a brave and important step, lets hope the law doesn’t meddle

Sam Collins is Head of Public Affairs for Popular Conservatism.

Can you build a broad church without solid foundations?

That is one of the questions that the Conservative Party has refused to face for over a decade and that Kemi, with steely resolve, is finally forcing us to answer. As it now stands, only those who are willing to support and defend key planks of party policy – leaving the ECHR and unpicking the most harmful aspects of the Net Zero agenda – will be allowed to stand as Conservative candidates.

This is unquestionably brave from Kemi, and (as cogently argued by Oliver Dean in these pages yesterday) a key step to proving to voters, particularly deeply suspicious Reform switchers, that we as a Party have changed.

This has naturally provoked conniptions among those who disagree with the policy shift. Fortunately, so far at least, open opposition seems to be concentrated among former MPs like David Gauke, Peers like Gavin Barwell and small internal party groups like Prosper UK rather than sitting MPs. It is difficult to know exactly what to say to those opposed to Kemi’s article, as it is hard to discern what their specific opposition is beyond ‘I don’t like this shift in policy’. To cover this lack of meaningful objections, they coat their opposition in the idea that the Party needs to remain a ‘broad church’.

I don’t want to rule out the broad church approach entirely. Differences of opinion are not automatically bad.

Allowing some deviation prevents our MPs becoming brainless automatons doing nothing but repeating central office talking point (like some other parties we could mention). And, after all, almost no one could truthfully say that they have agreed with every single policy in every single area that our party has stood on since the 2010 election. Not least (as per Sir Humphrey) in order to have passionately believed in all the many U-turns and reversals over that period one would have to have been a “stark, staring, raving schizophrenic”! So we must accept some different opinions if we want to gather together the necessary amount of support to form a government.

But unfortunately many in the Party have reached the point where ecumenicalism ceases being a means to the end of building a large enough coalition to bring about robust Conservative change, and becomes an end in and of itself. A political party cannot (or should not) be merely a vehicle for those seeking power, but instead is a way to bring together people of a similar ideological viewpoint in order to maximise the chances of enacting policies that advance those ideological goals.

This cannot stand in an era where the road to a Conservative recovery lies as much in creating the belief that we will actually do what we promise as it does in choosing the right policies to champion. To enact our agenda, we will need a parliamentary party who can – and more importantly will – deliver on the promises being made. Leaving the ECHR, unpicking the most harmful elements of Net Zero and scrapping public sector equality duties would go a long way to achieving key tenets of the PopCon agenda. In the spirit of a broad church and open debate, however, I would say we could yet go further!

It is therefore grimly ironic that one of the areas we have not yet agreed to seriously tackle – the rest of the Equality Act – is one that could stymie Kemi’s whole plan to reshape the Conservative Parliamentary Party.

One hesitates to give Lord Barwell and potentially others ideas (although I have little doubt that enterprising members of the legal profession have already reached out) but recent legal cases make for deeply concerning reading for anyone truly interested in forcing specific policy views on to candidates.

But first, a little history. The Equality Act 2010 was introduced to consolidate previous legislation and case law to protect people with specific characteristics from being discriminated against for those characteristics. These include gender, race and sexual identity. One additional characteristic was “belief” so long as the belief was genuine, beyond mere opinion, weighty, cogent and respectable. This, incidentally, was a holdover from the previous Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulation 2003, showing once again that those claiming that it is easy to unpick these issues are generally failing to see how deeply they are embedded in British legal and political life.

The employment tribunals then got their hands on this protected characteristic and have, perhaps unsurprisingly, taken it well beyond the confines of the original intentions of the authors. A 2010 case (Grainger PLC v Nicholson) ruled that a belief in climate change could be a protected characteristic, meaning that discrimination for views on the topic could lead to significant payouts from employers.

We might be tempted to just roll our eyes and tut at judicial overreach were it not for a much more recent and concerning case. Natalie Bird, former Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate, won a case in 2024 against the Party after she was unceremoniously deselected due to her gender critical views. We might applaud this as a victory for free speech, one vanishingly rare inside a party that long ceased to be particularly liberal or democratic.

But we should also see the risk of these two cases combined. A belief in climate change is a protected characteristic. The judiciary effectively have told a political party that they have no right to discriminate against candidates due to their opposition to established party policy if it goes against their deeply held philosophical beliefs. It does not take a genius to see the potential for these two decisions to be weaponised against any attempt to ensure ideological selection of candidates.

Kemi has taken a brave and prudent step by dragging the Parliamentary Party onto serious intellectual and ideological foundations. But she and her team must ensure that the unelected judiciary does not have an opportunity to stymie it.

And maybe the Conservatives should widen our planned reappraisal of the Equality Act.