THE Conservatives know they badly need a positive message. The Tories can feel Labour’s challenge growing. The ongoing grind of austerity is opening up voters to Corbyn’s message of radical change. 

The purely negative messages the Tories wanted to rely on — Corbyn is a communist, an anti-semite, a nazi, a terrorist lover, etc — aren’t working. 

So many Conservatives are looking for positive messages and a new generation of MPs to deliver them. From the right of the party Liz Truss thinks a new think tank called Freer will help. 

Truss pumped the launch of Freer, which promises to promote “free enterprise and social freedom” with a spray of excitable tweets about how “the Tory revolution was once fermented [sic] in the townhouses of Notting Hill, now it is in the industrial towns and port cities where the call of freedom rings loudest” and that “this generation are #Uber-riding #Airbnb-ing #Deliveroo-eating #freedomfighters.” 

Many on the left mocked Truss’s free market word salad. After all, riding in an Uber or ordering a Deliveroo might be convenient, but working for either doesn’t offer much of a future.

But the Tories aren’t put off by the sneers. They think Freer is part of their re-launch, re-brand or re-bound.

According to Tory blogger Guido Fawkes, MPs at the Freer launch “seemed genuinely buoyed to see some actual signs of life in the Tory Party. It piqued the interest of senior ministers including Michael Gove, Dom Raab and Brexit brain Shanker Singham.”

But who esactly is involved with Freer? The think tank’s website has a 240-word statement about its “relationship with the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA).” 

It turns out the relationship between the new Freer and the old Thatcherite IEA is very intimate. “Freer will be housed within the Institute of Economic Affairs,” its website says and “in legal terms, Freer staff will technically be staff of the IEA.”

Freer’s website was registered by the IEA. The Freer phone number is the IEA communications director’s number. Why the close relationship, and why does it have to be described in a long statement full of their independence from each other?

For the IEA, it is an “independent charity.” It can’t be seen to run such a totally Tory organisation and preserve its charitable status.

The Freer “parliamentary supporters” are Truss and 15 other Tory MPs. Freer’s publishing schedule is also made up of forthcoming pamphlets by Tory MPs. It would not pass the Charity Commission rules that stop purely party-political organisations being charities.

For Truss and her Freer pals, they can look young, fresh and separate from the IEA’s baggage. Freer gives these Tory MPs chances to pontificate around their new slogans —  “Free to aspire,” “Free to Be” — but avoid links  to the IEA and its controversial history, like its longstanding opposition to the minimum wage or  history of taking money from tobacco firms to argue against tobacco regulation. Or they would be if the link between the IEA and Freer wasn’t so obvious.

Chuka Umunna’s love-in with the Blue Brexiteer

Chuka Umunna, seen as a top anti-Brexit MP,  employs one of Labour’s leading pro-Brexit thinkers. Blue Labour “intellectual” Jonathan Rutherford works as  speechwriter and policy researcher for Umunna.

Umunna is viewed as a leader of the “anti-hard Brexit” MPs, fighting to keep Britain in the EU’s single market and customs union.  

Rutherford has argued that “Brexit is not a reactionary moment. It is a democratic moment” and said in December that leaving the  “customs union and single market” is “what we should expect to happen.”

In  2016 Umunna showed enthusiasm for “Blue Labour,” the Labour thinkers who wanted the party to get back votes by focusing on so-called “traditional values” and “patriotism.” 

He recommended “every UK Labour member and supporter” should read an article by Rutherford which said the party should turn away from the “technocratic and managerial Labour politics which embraced liberal market globalisation and large-scale immigration.”

Umunna recommended Rutherford’s article, which argued that “Brexit has, for the first time since 1945, given the economic losers a democratic victory over the economic winners” and was “a potential disaster for the pro-EU Labour Party” repeatedly on Twitter.

In October 2016 Umunna himself told the Huffington Post that single market membership was less important than limiting free movement, saying: “If continuation of the free movement we have is the price of single market membership, then clearly we couldn’t remain in the single market.”

A spokesperson for Umunna said  that Rutherford is jointly employed by Rachel Reeves and Chuka Umunna to provide policy research and help with speechwriting and that “Mr Umunna welcomes a range of policy opinions in his office and challenging political debate. There is a range of views and opinions in his office, as there is in any office in the country.” 

Umunna also argued that, in relation to the single market and freedom of movement, the Labour Party should have, er, both.

Clarifying his comments to Huffington Post, Umunna said: “Britain must be a member of the single market” but “at the same time, we need an alternative to free movement as we know it. The government should aim for both in its EU negotiations.”

The “centrist” bit of politics — the New Labour people who have, since the rise of Corbyn, become a lot more keen on “soft” Tories like Anna Soubry — are enthusiastic about Chuka Umunna. 

Umunna  wants to place himself at the centre of the “anti-hard Brexit” campaign, as chairman of the “Grassroots Co-ordinating Group,” which represents some of the larger pro-EU campaigns.

Rupert Murdoch’s The Times  even suggested that Umunna, fellow Labour MP Chris Leslie and Anna Soubry were actually considering forming a new centrist breakaway party.

According to the Times, the  MPs had toyed with “The Democrats,”  “Back Together” and “Regain” before settling on “Start Again” as the name for the new party.  The MPs deny the story. 

Some of Umunna’s admirers think he will be very firm on what they see as “liberal” values, threatened by “populists,” including freedom of movement for people in the  European Union.

I think that his friends and his  past show that he will be much more likely not to be firm, and keen to pick up “Blue Labour” themes about immigration. 

Solomon Hughes writes evdry Friday in the Morning Star. You can follow him on Twitter via @SolHughesWriter.