Prosper name checks new Tory campaign project – Daily Business

An initiative aimed at reviving support for the Conservative party could find itself in a dispute with a Scottish business organisation.

Tory peer Baroness Ruth Davidson and former West Midlands mayor Sir Andy Street are launching a movement targeting seven million voters – and businesses – who feel the parties have overlooked them.

The new campaign group will be launched on Monday and is likely to be called “Prosper”, which is the name of the networking organisation formerly known as the Scottish Council for Development and Industry. It rebranded in October 2024.

Its chief executive Sara Thiam told Daily Business that it will “need to find out a bit more first. We need to check in with the IPO [Intellectual Property Office] to see whether there is overlap.”

In May last year a branding clash caused the Scottish think tank Reform to change its name to Enlighten to avoid any confusion with Nigel Farage’s party.

The Davidson-Street movement is not a new party and will not be fielding candidates at the next election. Nor is it attempting to unseat the current leader Kemi Badenoch, though some will see its plan to bolster key areas of policy as an indirect comment on the current lack of clarity in some key areas.

Baroness Davidson, who transformed the Scottish Conservatives from near-extinction into the main opposition to the Scottish National Party, was once tipped as a future Downing Street occupant.

She also denied the new movement was a direct response to defections among Tory MPs, though one of its missions is to stem the haemorrhaging of Tory voters to Reform.

“What we’re trying to do is have honest conversations with voters about what they want and need from a centre-right party in Britain,” she said.

“It’s about working on policy; it’s about making sure that we’re getting out and speaking to people in Cardiff and Edinburgh and Birmingham and Wolverhampton and all these other places. But it’s also about listening and it’s about trying to make policy that will improve this country.”

They want to see the Conservative Party develop a more “credible, economic” message going into the next election, something that they believe both Reform and Labour currently lack.

The Tories have a nine-point lead over Labour on who voters trust to run the economy, according to the polling company YouGov.

Sir Andy, who led the John Lewis Partnership before entering politics and had two tenures as Tory mayor of the West Midlands, said reforming the tax and benefit system to incentivise work, as well as creating “real incentive to set up, grow and invest in your private business” will be among their “guiding principles”.

Polling by the think tank More in Common revealed that 34% of voters who describe themselves as centrist, or centre-right, say there are no parties that represent their views. Overall, almost one in three voters (28%) say they are politically homeless.

Sir Andy added: “The world is fragmenting into populists of the left and populists of the right and the centre ground is being squeezed out.

“Our argument is that is completely wrong. And actually in Britain, there are still a huge majority of people who have centrist views.”

MSP Jamie Greene, who defected from the Tories to the Liberal Democrats, said: “It seems like the penny has only just dropped within the One Nation Tory centrists that their party has drifted so far to the right you’d need a speedboat to catch up with it. 

“Ruth Davidson’s era of moderate, centrist politics has been annihilated and she knows it. 

“It’s not a new “movement” the Tories need, it’s political oblivion to teach it a lesson is what’s required, and the writing on the wall says that’s exactly what’s coming to them. 

“Thanks to the intolerance and rot which beset the Tory party, I too was politically homeless like many people. I found a home in the Lib Dems, and I suggest Ruth comes and joins me, where we treat people with dignity and respect and stand for the values of decency and tolerance which she once proclaimed.”