The Tories really might just fade away
British politics is splitting into Left and Right blocs — and the Conservatives no longer lead theirs
There’s always a risk of over-indexing following a defeat. After the 1992 general election, in which the Conservatives triumphed despite a painful recession and consistently poor polls, Labour genuinely feared it would never win again. The party secured a landslide victory five years later.
Post-1997, when the Tories won their lowest share of the vote since the Duke of Wellington in 1832, they seemed poised to enter a death spiral — a view not wholly discredited by a second defeat in 2001. Yet, the party returned to power and held it, in one form or another, for a further 14 years.
More recently, Labour bounced back from a dire 2019 result to secure office within a single parliament. Given all this, and even after its 2024 shellacking, the Conservatives might well feel confident of a revival. It is, after all, the most successful party in democratic history for a reason.
But what if this time really is different?
Bloc Parties
Two separate but related phenomena are taking place in British politics. The first is that the party system is splintering. The second is that these parties are coalescing around two competing blocs: the Left and the Right. Despite a poor first year in office and electoral threats from the Greens and independents, Labour still leads the Left bloc, with all the advantages that confers under first-past-the-post. Conversely, the Tories no longer lead theirs.
This is no time for MRP polls which forecast with apparent confidence the makeup of the next parliament. The next general election is so far away that the UK may have navigated a major economic downturn, entire political careers will have begun and ended, while Donald Trump will either no longer be in the White House or will have refused to relinquish power. Nevertheless, the fact that Reform UK is consistently polling near 30% represents a material change in circumstances — and an existential threat to the Tories.
And it gets worse. The Liberal Democrats, under the careful leadership of Ed Davey, appear to be settling on a strategy of their own. That is, not to replace Labour as the leader of the Left bloc, but to be the safe, moderate, pro-business and pro-environment alternative to the Tories in those affluent English shire seats. This helped the party secure 72 seats at the last election, and could probably push them past 100 at the next, setting themselves up nicely to be the junior party in a coalition.
Of course, both Reform UK and the Lib Dems are getting a fair amount of assistance from an unexpected source.
We need to talk about Kemi
Kemi Badenoch is the leader of the Conservatives. I mention this because we don’t hear all that much from her. And when we do, it is often rather confounding. Ahead of her party’s conference in Manchester, which begins on Sunday, Badenoch announced her intention to repeal the 2008 Climate Change Act, saying she wanted to prioritise lower bills and economic growth. The move follows a pledge earlier this year to ditch the UK’s commitment to achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Even parking the issue of a warming planet, this is confusing for a number of reasons. First, polling by More in Common last year found that voters supported net zero by a margin of 77% to 17%. Unsurprisingly, this was underwritten by large majorities among Labour, Lib Dem and Green voters. But just look at the graph below: Conservatives were not far behind. Even a narrow majority of Reform voters backed it.
So it’s not popular. But what about business? Surely those hard-nosed capitalists will jump at the chance of ditching pesky environmental regulations and go pell-mell for North Sea oil? Yeah, not so much. Rain Newton-Smith, chief executive of the Confederation of British Industry, said the decision to scrap the Climate Change Act would be “a backwards step” and warned:
Fundamentally ripping up the framework that’s given investors confidence that the UK is serious about sustainable growth through a low-carbon future would damage our economy.
Yikes.
Remember — what Starmer did was unusual
I think, because of everything that has happened since — a global pandemic, full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, double-digit inflation, the return of Trump — we forget just how close Labour came to extinction post-Corbyn. It took a series of deliberate steps by Keir Starmer (and a fair bit of luck) for the party to come back.
First, Labour members had to elect the right leader and not the continuity Corbyn candidate, Rebecca Long-Bailey. Can the Tories claim to have done the same, when James Cleverly remains criminally underemployed? Then, Starmer had to draw a line under Corbynism and even rid the party of the man himself. Has Badenoch come close to expelling Liz Truss, who continues to make ever more unhinged statements on social media?
Starmer addressed the party’s antisemitism crisis head-on, took greater control of candidate selection, positioned Labour as fiscally responsible and offered a safe alternative to a Tory party buffeted by personal and economic scandals. Such was the scale of this achievement that Starmer became the first opposition leader to defeat a sitting majority government and win a parliamentary majority of his own since Ted Heath in 1970.
Of course, Labour is unlikely to get a whole lot more popular, with further tax rises, stubborn inflation and anaemic economic growth all but guaranteed. Yet the difference is that Starmer put Labour in position to be the primary beneficiary of an unpopular government. The Conservatives, at present, are not even close. If you want to punish the government, why vote Tory? And if you want to stop Reform, same question again?
The death of Tory Britain would not be a good thing. The alternative to a fiscally conservative, socially liberal, pro-business centre-right party will not necessarily be permanent social democracy. Instead, it could be something far harder — whether on the Left or Right.
Across the democratic world, mainstream centre-right parties are being hollowed out or replaced by the hard-right. In the US, France and Italy, the process is already complete. I suppose the question is: why should Britain be any different?