THE Conservative Right is to turn to new American campaigning techniques and the internet to try to revive the party and overcome what it sees as opposition from the metropolitan Establishment.

Only weeks away from the general election, senior Conservatives will open a new front today in the battle for ideas by creating a website advocating “social conservatism”.

It will invite people to bypass the media and put forward their own views on how the party should evolve.

The faction behind it denies that it is “rocking the boat” in the pre-election period and says that in the early weeks the website will be used to campaign for a Conservative victory. It wants people to use the increasingly popular practice of “blogging” — writing online diaries — to break the power of the broadcast media.

The toppling of Dan Rather, the veteran anchorman of evening news programmes on CBS in the United States, after “bloggers” exposed as false documents about President Bush’s military record is being cited as evidence of the way that the internet has given new power to ordinary people to influence events.

The website — conservativehome.com — is being started today by Tim Montgomerie, who was political secretary to Iain Duncan Smith when he was Tory leader and was head of the Conservative Renewing One Nation unit under William Hague.

It is independent of the Tory party, though supportive of it, but the website will inevitably be seen as the start of a fresh debate about where the party should move in the event of a third successive election defeat.

The website combines the concepts of a think-tank and online newspaper and its aim is to provide a forum for the revival of Conservative thinking and policies. Mr Montgomerie is an expert on American politics and the way that the Right has used websites to bypass the mainstream media, which is felt to be broadly hostile to conservative ideas. It is funded by donations from private individuals.

The site will suggest a values-based approach to politics. It will favour tax relief, oppose British membership of the euro, support the strengthening of marriage and back pre-emptive action in the War on Terror. It will also advocate a broader form of conservatism, opposing the sale of arms to repressive regimes and suggesting that a “bias to the poor” should be its defining mission. Students will be a key target.

In its first phase, conservativehome.com is to try to persuade what it calls “social conservatives” to back the Tories at the election.

The second phase will follow immediately. At that point, it will begin to urge Tory supporters and natural conservatives, particularly within the faith communities and environmental movement, to support “one nation” conservatism.

In a recent article Mr Duncan Smith said that the “blogosphere” would become a big force in Britain and could boost conservatism.

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