Inside Onward: The new Conservative think-tank preparing for life after Brexit

Former Senior Downing Street staffer Will Tanner has said the Conservatives are currently "sleepwalking into opposition".
As Director of think tank Onward, Tanner looks to reinvigorate ideas on the centre-right, and come up with ideas ready for implementation.
Tanner also described the fall in ethnic minority vote share for the Conservatives as "painful", and said the Conservatives need to build relationships with communities all year round.

LONDON – When

"The prospect of a hard-left government is terrifying. It would be a tragic end to what could've ... could still be a reforming government."

British Prime Minister Theresa May views a car on a production line during a visit to the Jaguar Land Rover factory on September 1, 2016 in Solihull, England. BusinessInsider

Now out of Government, Tanner is unafraid of combatting the issues facing the Conservatives, highlighting younger voters and ethnic minority voters as an area where the Conservatives are weak.

"There are a lot of assumptions about millennials [being] individualistic, I don’t believe that to be true, and not true in aggregate either," he said.

"Non-political Millennials value community and the NHS, not necessarily in favour of lower taxes, but are aspirational and enterprising ... It’s patronising and ill-thought through to generalise."

Onward plans to launch a major polling and focus group research project into the policy preferences of young people. The research is set to include how young people perceive parties, and which values and specific groups may be attracted to centre-right ideas. Tanner says that he wants to "challenge the widely held assumptions and identify the reasons they don't vote Conservative, and how they might be won over.

Tanner also bemoaned the party's failure to win over ethnic minority voters, with the party overseeing a 6% swing to Labour in the general election.

With BAME voters also turning out in greater numbers, some analysts believe it cost the Conservatives even more than in previous elections. The Telegraph reported it could bethe reason May failed to secure a majority.

Tanner labeled the 2017 slide "painful," saying that the party needed to do much more to demonstrate "that the Conservative Party gets it and is on their side".

He said that while a greater representation of ethnic minority politicians in the party would be welcome, it was more important to recover efforts begun under former prime minister David Cameron to convince BAME voters on policy.

"It doesn't matter where you're from, you can still have the relationship with those communities ... Cameron did it well as PM, and May did it too as Home Secretary with Afro-Caribbean communities over stop and search and mental health," he said.

Inside Onward: The new Conservative think-tank preparing for life after Brexit

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