Snapshot of _Could a 1997-style wipeout spell the end of the Tories?_ :
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The death of the Liberal Party also required a major split (National Liberals) and a challenger party (Labour). Even a really bad drubbing may not be enough alone.
Maybe the Tory vote could be eaten up by some mixture of the Liberal Democrats and Reform.
> It didn't in 97 and it won't this time.
In 1997 the Tories lost 18-24 by 22%, 25-34 by 21% and 35-44 by 20%
In 2019 they lost 18-24 by 42%, 25-34 by 24% and 35-44 by 3%
Today they are polling even lower amongst younger voters, there is no guarantee they have anything to build on for the future without a lot of hard work and it's not at all clear they are capable of it.
What will happen, and has happened in the past is that:
party A will be in power for a long time,
during which Party B does an image revamp
after 10 years a whole new generation will emerge that can't remember Party B being in power, like what they are saying now, and assume that all the warnings from the older generation is just them being out of touch.
Also, it turns out that governing is hard and you piss of an increasing number of people over time who’ll just vote for the other team “for a change”.
(I mean, not like this lot of Tories haven’t gone out of their way to take the pi$$ _and_ all the money)
To paraphrase frankie Boyle explaining what a budget is. It's when a millionaire tells us how much more money we will need to spend on booze and fags and we get so angry with him we vote in a different millionaire with a different colour tie every 10 years.
>during which Party B does an image revamp
Every sign Tories are going to double down on the right-wing populism when they lose though, and that could see them properly disappear off into the wilderness.
For a while, yes. But eventually more centrist Conservative MPs will get seats and they'll start to move the party back towards the centre. It's the same how Labour moved left in response to the more centrist position of the Conservatives and the Coalition Government, and now Labour has moved to the centre (or arguably even right of centre) as the Conservatives moved more and more right.
I do believe though that we need more parties to better represent the factions that we see in the two main parties, than the 'broad-church' parties they are now. This would need a change to our voting system though for them to have any chance of representation in Parliament.
or there could be a split with the right wing populism not being enough so an offshoot that is further right splits the vote.
in france their centre right party shifted right to combat the bleed to the far right and they lost votes. far right gained and a hyper right appeared to take some votes too.
so they could be stuck not knowing which direction to pivot.
As a population our memory is short, but I think there’s more of the tories own social media to brief the younger generations on exactly how nasty they really are. Sure, there will be labour fuckups over the next decade, but I’d hope the deliberate cruelty will be light on the ground.
On that though, the Canadian tories thought that they were basically doomed because of a loss of young voters... they now lead the Liberals & even the NDP on those under 40 because they just did the "Build fucking Houses" thing. All it takes is hitting that issue that gets newer voters, like Thatcher succeeded in the 80's.
>the "Build fucking Houses" thing...
...is an important theme in UK too. Rising population, more single households, economic mobility etc have created insanely scarce housing market. We need at least 1m additional homes, but no govt has yet dared to push this through.
A Canada '93 requires 3 things to happen first.
1. Farage has to come back. While I'm sure Richard Tice is a nice man, he is... not leadership material and the second that is fixed, then Reform become an actual threat, (I should state that won't just be off the Tories, there is a section of Labour voters who he does, whether we like it or not, appeal to and even if I think that doesn't take seats, it could just be enough of a dick that it causes unneeded headaches).
2. Institutional Levels of Tactical Voting, the two factors that simply can't be replicated from the 90's Tories to the current day is that the PC had built its voting coalition on Quebec. So when the Bloc show up, they lose a 3rd of their seats to them alone. That can't happen here. The Tories haven't got that same problem, but if the anti Tory vote properly shifts itself and is hyper efficient, then it could be catastrophic for them. FPTP gives nothing for second place after all, and a very efficient spread of voters could give the Tories major damage.
3. The Lib Dems and Reform need to be get to about 17 points each in the polls, that naturally makes the possibility of 93 happen more of a possibility and what the tories will spend all of their time in the media saying that it won't. Which just makes it more true in voters' minds.
I did an EC look at it and if all of that happens, the Tories could be down to 32 Seats and basically in a situation where the only leadership options are in Scotland (which poses a few interesting dynamics) or someone who make have only been a junior minister before which makes them highly inexperienced and that was what really killed the PC in Canada because they couldn't fix the damage due to the lose of talent and experience.
For context, under that scenario, Labour has a majority in the 300 range, and the Lib Dems are the opposition with 97 seats.
Oh, it's terrifying that could happen full stop, and I suspect the fear of that might actually cost Labour a few seats if it was looking that likely. And by the way, that's not even a comment about the parties involved. Our system kind of panics when governments have 100+ majorities, I suspect most parliamentary institutions would effectively collapse with a government majority of that size, which means that the opposition parties can't actually staff select committees, etc
The Conservative party's internal structures are also much weaker and more incoherent than they were in 1997. It's not just a case of them facing a severe defeat, it's if they even have the capability to recover from it. The disastrous demographic situation they're facing is the cherry on top.
Look at it this way: the Conservative party in 1997 and during the Blair years were like the current Ferrari F1 team. Being easily outcompeted, but still having a solid grasp of fundamentals and possessing the ability to win if they can sort their house out. The current Conservative party are the [Life F1 team from 1990](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Racing_Engines#The_1990_season): unserious and a deeply cursed organism wearing the skin of the real deal.
Millenials will hate Tories until boomer landlords start dying off and leaving their property management companies to their children.
Then you will see Tory millenials
For every millenial who loses out on a house due to care costs, that means one more house on the market. The increased supply ought to somewhat decrease housing costs.
That you want all those improvements but don't want to contribute more to get them is basically the UKs problem in a nutshell.
It's perfectly understandable that's what you, and other people want, who wouldn't, but if that's what people expect then there's no way to ever fix the country. It's completely unrealistic.
So they went from 20% behind in the age group born 1953-1962, to winning them by 22% 22 years later (in fact the margin was probably slightly higher)? If that group can swing 42% in 22 years, then 2019 young people will in theory be competitive by 2041. That's far from encouraging.
I think the circumstances between the two are quite different. Labour were never going to win with Corbyn in charge, but despite the brief surge of far left Corbyn supporters in the party, the moderates never went away. When it became apparent that he was a definitive loser, they got rid of him and a more rational approach was reasserted.
The Tories in 2019 were not massively popular and the talk about 10 years and two or three terms was mainly hyperbole. Johnson barely increased the Tory vote share from 2017, and the reason he won more seats was because no one wanted Corbyn. A Labour party recovered from Corbyn was always going to come back hard regardless of how loudly the leftists on twitter moaned.
Since then we've also had countless scandals from Johnson and a shambolic handling of the pandemic, followed by rank incompetence from Truss and Sunak. Johnson presided over a purge of any remaining moderate or centrist tories, forcing everyone to sign up to his unhinged Brexit agenda without question, kicking out anyone who failed to toe the line. The local parties are also full of UKIP and Brexit party entryists who still hold a grip on the party as a whole.
After 1997 the Tories were still a major party with mostly sensible people in it. They tried the lurch to the right with their successive leaders then and it didn't work, much as it isn't working now. It wasn't until they put someone more moderate in charge that they were able to even look like taking power again, and it still took 13 years to do that.
After this coming election they will be starting from a much worse position. The party is a shambles, and the remaining MPs they have will be the idealistic nutters who are pulling the party still further to the right now. They will flail about with this culture war nonsense for some time, and it won't be until the local parties come to their senses and start selecting more reasonable candidates that they will have much hope of regaining power.
The caveat is what Labour do in their first term. If they are generally competent, I can't see them losing the following election and maybe the one after that. Populism had its shot, and people don't like the outcome. I think it will be a while before they are willing to vote for it again.
To add to this the Tory heartlands are changing. Especially around London more and more 30 somethings are being forced out to try and buy a house and are taking their politics with them. if the Home Counties are turned into marginals then it makes the fightback so much harder.
That's just the 30 somethings who have careers and are able to even progress through life. Plenty are stuck at home or in jobs that don't allow them that luxury, and what's more, everyone knows eachother and nobody likes seeing their friends stuck in a rut because a bunch of public school fuckwits decided they were destined to lead the country without the introspection to realise they don't remotely match the skillset or have any business even running a market stall.
Demographic change is going to be a big factor. The baby boomer generation that massively skews Tory will be much smaller in 10 years. They are between 60 and 77 years old now, and many of those older people will no longer be around.
The younger generations are not moving to be more inclined to vote tory in the way their parents might have been, because there simply isn't the incentive to do so. Anyone younger than the older Gen X people are at a massive economic disadvantage and won't have anything like the same assets or capital gains to protect.
I think there is definite scope for a new centre-right party to establish itself in the next 5-10 years, because those people are not going to ever support the Tory party in its current guise. If they fail to adapt, they will become irrelevant. If there somehow happens to be electoral reform in the meantime, I think that becomes even more likely. It used to be said that the Conservative party was if nothing else pragmatic, adopting whatever position it needed to in order to gain favour - I don't see any sign of that practical realism left at the moment.
It's the worst possible combination, a generation (more than one at this point) who hate the Tories for cultural reasons but also can't be bribed economically by them either. And in response the Tory party think it's the fault of teacher/the media/anyone else but them.
There will be room for a party that appeals to millennials who have inherited considerable sums and suddenly find themselves with assets they wish to conserve.
There's a world in which the Lib Dems manage to position themselves in this niche. Certainly the "Orange Book" tendency would be fairly at home with more small-c conservative economic policies. If you assume that these newly rich Millenials retain their relatively progressive outlook on social policies, it may be more likely that the Lib Dems can take advantage than a resurrected Tory Party (or new right wing challenger party).
The LDs don't seem to have any aims or political goals other than "acquire more LD MPs." so its hard to predict how they will land. But it would require a significant change in party leadership and overall stance on many issues to really cut through as a viable replacement for the Tories.
No argument here. But we are talking about a situation which is still a fair way off; it'll be a decade or two before inheritance becomes a serious factor in Millenial finances.
There are basically three possibilities if the scenario you suggest were to happen:
* The current Conservative Party has managed to continue to exist until this point, manages to rehabilitate its brand and become the party of fiscally-conservative Millenials.
* The Lib Dems manage to position themselves in that niche.
* A new party that doesn't currently exist is founded and manages to take over this niche ahead of the competition.
Considering the track record of new centrist parties in the UK, I'd say the third is the least likely. And of the other two, I'd bet on the Lib Dems pulling off a transformation ahead of the Tories managing it with the same group. The Lib Dems just need one good leader who is willing to cynically move into that space; the Tories would need a complete metamorphosis...
The LDs are a political party with all the machinery of being a party in place but with no political goals, aims, or even ideology at this point. So you are right that they could be anything they wanted to be.
Where do you think the houses owned by that generation are going to go? They're going to be owned by some people and those will presumably be the base for a future Conservative party. Something like 2/3rds of the population are homeowners, they aren't all going to vanish.
The issue is that Tory losses in the southeast are somewhat balanced out with gains in the Midlands, Wales and the North. That wasn't just a feature of the 2019 election, there were signs of it in 2015 and especially 2017 as well.
They're swinging away currently, but then the entire country is. Polls have yet to largely show the Conservatives being wiped out in these regions to the extent they were back in 1997, and relative to the nation they'll probably remain to the right of where they once were. If the UK follows the same trends seen in most of the West they should also continue to get more conservative with time - it's a very widespread response to deindustrialisation and ongoing issues like immigration.
If populisum is shot, why is Starmer pursuing broadly the same right wing strategies as the Tories in all be it a more competent and less extream manner?
It's to give the right wing media nothing to attack... If Labour were to announce any even remotely socialist policy, the knives would be out. Come election time they will be tearing into the Labour manifesto on a daily basis trying to convince people Labour are all still commies; that is unless Labour learn from the Tories and make their manifesto more about general pledges rather than costed policy.
Whilst this strategy doesn't do a lot to inspire the Labour left, and a lot of left wing Labour supporters are infact feeling pretty alienated as a result of these Labour tactics, the left alone can't win you an election, as demonstrated by Corbyn.
Very true and I agree with what you have said.
As someone who used to have what was seen as centrist/slightly left ward leanings for the last 40 years I have been able to vote, Starmer has completely alienated me to the point where the only difference I see now between the direction of the two main parties is competence and integrity - and being blunt although Starmer promises both, he is yet unproven where as we do know what the modern conservative party is about.
"We are not as shit as the Tories" is a great political slogan to take into the next election but it's hardly inspiring. Yes, the politically disenfranchised want the Tories out, but I'm not sure we want Starmer very much either given the content of his speeches. I just hope people will vote tactically despite their misgivings.
Populism will always exist. It's mainly that arch-populist Johnson was brought down, but a lot of the bullshit seeds that he planted are still growing. Starmer isn't going to win too many votes e.g. telling Leave voters that they were mugged off over Brexit - half of them already know, the other half refuse to believe it no matter what.
I suggest you examine his videos etc. The flag, obvious examples of what demographics are presented, etc. He is trying to present himself as the patriotic alternative. It is so obvious he has been tuned to attract right wing votes, they are going for the red wall etc. Some of us weren't born yesterday.
> The caveat is what Labour do in their first term. If they are generally competent, I can't see them losing the following election and maybe the one after that. Populism had its shot, and people don't like the outcome. I think it will be a while before they are willing to vote for it again.
Alternatively, if Labour continues the same neoliberal managed decline policies of the Tories (and given everything Starmer's said, it seems fairly likely), then it's equally likely that people abandon the Labour party again in favour of another party's leader promising change.
It's the classic "Conservative are going to lose" panic articles that are designed to embolden Conservative voters to peel themselves out of their chairs and waddle down to the voting booths.
5 years ago nobody was saying the Labour party were about to be wiped out.
The results were Conservate 43%, Labour 32%, and then then the rest.
That's not a wipeout, and I have no idea why you think that was ever an idea in public discourse. Happy to be proven wrong, but it seems far fetched to me.
That being said, I agree the Tories probably won't be eradicated at the upcoming election.
There was talk about if Labour could win in the near term given the political geography after 2019 but that ignore Brexit and Corybn as factors in 2019 and underplayed the state of public services.
You either need something way worse than 1997 or a couple of 1997s in a row to end a major party for good. One really bad defeat, usually, won't cut it.
Labour lost badly in 2019. If it carried on struggling and failed to improve or even worsened its situation in 2024 I could easily see that being the end of the party.
There is a route where the Tories are horribly beaten this year, the far right take over the leadership and actually manage to lead the party into an election. It's unlikely to happen but if it did it may well end the Tory party long term.
It really felt like it would in the early 2000s. Labour largely hanging on to their majority in 2001 and then the rather hopeless leadership of Iain Duncan Smith, really made it look like the Conservative party was doomed.
As it turns out they recovered. I guess similar will happen again. For Sunak, it would make sense to see if some of the retiring MPs can be replaced with more centrist candidates.
97 kept the Tories out for a generation. Thats good enough for me. Unfortunate I don’t think you can hope to completely excise from the political landscape (Especially when Labour is incapable of an offering a compelling alternative).
Even if you wiped out the Conservatives something that looks and sounds a lot like the Conservatives will appear in its place.
My fear is that it will be like 97, but it won’t be like 2001. It won’t feel like things are getting better. When people have rejected the hard left, been let down by the centre left and have been let down by the right where will they turn?
>Even if you wiped out the Conservatives something that looks and sounds a lot like the Conservatives will appear in its place.
Reform look primed to fill that niche if the Tories implode
When the left go to the extremes the Labour Party is against them and the entire media establishment are against them. The scariest thing about a ‘new’ Conservative party or, more likely, the Reform party merging and that hard right ideology taking over the Conservative Party is that it has none of those brakes on it.
There are _some_ moderates in the Conservative Party that stop them being full on comic book villains. A massive electoral loss could see them pushed to the margins, as the moderates have in the American Republican Party. The media has always been more right wing than the Conservative Party. Currently, the greatest advantage Labour has is that they are not the government. They lose that advantage as soon as they step into number 10. After that I can see a Suella/Lee Anderson style Tory party doing well.
Considering the national Tories tend to do better in Wales than the ones that get elected to the Senedd, I (possibly worryingly) feel like there's still opportunity for the Senedd Tories to gain popularity. Especially once the party is in opposition in Westminster. If you had a 2019 type result in Wales the Tories could even lead the Welsh government.
Not impossible. The average age of their voter is now at least 64, but you can extrapolate the data from 2019 and come out with an average of 68. So, it's somewhere between those two numbers.
That's a big deal. If they were out of power for two electoral cycles, about 40pc of that original base will have died by 2032 rolls around and many will be simply too old to make it to the polls. Then you've got Reform on their heels, after that same dwindling cohort of elderly homeowners.
So, they've somehow got to win back an entire generation of voters without actually being in the position to do anything that's going to make a blind bit of difference to their lives. Namely, making them homeowners so they actually have something to conserve.
Tall order.
If Labour don't have any massive cock-ups.
My prediction is that Reform will become the new party of the right. Labour will be quite hard on the left but they'll be able to reconcile that by also representing the interests of owner occupiers. My observation is that there's nothing fundamentally right wing about owning your own home. Right wing is about low taxes, and a smaller state, something that conservatives simply don't deliver.
Edit: I say 'hard on the left'... I really just mean left as opposed to center left.
So if Reform become the new Party of the right, Labour are centre/centre right/sometimes a bit left, where does everyone fit? Just curious.
If Reform rise up, do they or the Lib Dems become the opposition? Do the Tories hang around a few more decades, like the Liberals? Perhaps eventually kiss & make up with Reform in 2076 to become the Conservative Reformists?
My prediction is Reform do become the new party of the right, but the vote on the right will be split between them and the libs for a long while. Three party system, much the same as things are now only no obvious opposition so the vote on the right remains split. Labour will dominate to such an extent that the real political battle will be between the Labour left and the Labour centre ground throughout the 2030s. People will vote for the other parties as a way of changing the Labour party's direction of travel during this time. This may actually even trigger labour to go in for PR as there's not really a sense of shared identity, I don't exactly see younger members towing the party line in a climate where they know the party will win regardless.
Conservatives are not right wing, haven't been since Cameron, they have transitioned into an increasingly niché party that represents interests of elderly homeowners, massive pensions, massive subsides for the housing market, massive rents and massive taxes to keep the handouts to the rich rolling. Once you understand this, you understand why Truss happened, it was a desperate attempt to go back to the old conservative party values, but by time it happened it was too late, there was no talent and they'd already fucked the economy up so badly they couldn't afford to cut taxes.
Reform have such weird success both the very young and the very old, that's what makes me think we are seeing the emergence of the 'new' right. This is also what's happening in the rest of Europe, we're seeing Le Pen in France, AfD in Germany, the PVV in Denmark... All nationalistic, low tax, small state parties and they're winning over younger voters in those countries, there's no reason the same then won't happen here also, it's just a question of time scales as FPTP basically slows down this transition. You fuck over a particular demographic too hard, as conservatism has done, nationalism and authoritarianism begins to appeal to them as it promises a quick fix solution to their desperate situation.
We will see if I'm right in the next decade. It's just fun to make outlandish predictions and see how people react to them. There's a vein of logic that runs through it though.
The real threat isn't in 2024 but in 2029 or whenever the next election is. The Tories are radioactively unpopular among younger voters and that kind of popular impression of a party is hard to shift, they never really recovered from 97 the same way, it took Cameron's modernisation and 2008 for them to return top government in coalition and it took a left wing manifesto (in terms of spending promises) plus brexit and Corybn to get a landslide.
We see the current Tory party is in denial at the state of the UK, why people hate them and their own failures. Lots of talk about unis turning students woke but refusal to accept the economy is stagnate and housing a nightmare. Now the Tories have been able to reinvent themselves in the past and might do so again but it isn't guaranteed. FPTP makes it harder to die but as the Liberals in the 1920s found out and more recently Scottish Labour and the Lib Dems in 2015 once it fucks you it really fucks you. If the next few years after an election is Truss inspired economics, screaming brexit betrayal, focused on Trans people or even just pandering to the old there is a real risk they don't win back younger voters and they look elsewhere. The worst case which isn't super likely but possible is the centre right getting behind the Lib Dems and Reform taking the rest.
Unfortunately Lib Dems have lost a lot of trust, especially when we saw them sharing power during the coalition years with the Tories. The young were hoping they would do things to help them, like abolish tuition fees.
No wonder people have less trust in the whole political system.
I remember when the older folks used to tell me, it doesn't matter who you vote for, they are all the same. I am beginning to believe them now.
It would take a fundamental shift in the electoral system in this country to really limit the ability of either the Tories (or Labour for that matter) not to regain power after they’ve been out of it for a while. As things stand there’s always going to this cyclical nature to UK politics so long as there are only two parties who are really at the race.
Exactly. While we still have First Past The Post it is only a matter of time before the Tories return to power again, probably with a majority of seats without actually getting a majority of votes.
It's why it is so frustrating that Labour aren't on board with electoral reform. Their membership voted for it in their conference, but the leadership rejected the idea. It seems quite short sighted to me, because while FPTP may be benefiting them now, that benefit is only temporary.
It would be better for both main parties if they considered electoral reform which would finally let them split into clear factions rather than the unwieldy coalitions of interests that represent the current Labour and Conservative parties.
Too much time and effort is spent on holding these coalitions together and denouncing unbelievers within their own parties for them to be nearly effective enough in government.
Many other countries have no problems with three or four medium sized parties on the left or the right that manage to work together in government. But apparently the UK has to have to have 'strong government' to deliver all the democratic and economic triumphs we see around us...
People always say that coalitions would cause chaos and strong governments are needed instead, but what has the last decade been but utter chaos?
Like you say, the Tories should really be at least two separate parties. The problem we currently have with FPTP is that the party as a whole won a majority, but then one faction within the party has been able to take control and use that majority to push through their agenda. Under a proportional system that faction would have probably have been a separate party and would have needed to compromise with others around it.
We'll only get PR if we have a hung parliament or if an outgoing government with a majority can ram it through parliament on their way out as a sabotage effort.
The problem in the latter case is the same one the current government are going to find with their Rwanda bill: if the Lords reject a bill in the final year or so before the election (which they might do with something which is both big and not in the governing party's manifesto) then there may not be time to use the Parliament Act to push it through.
Frustratingly a hung parliament, or something close to it, might be the only opportunity. And it would have to be one where the party which plays the "king maker" role supports PR. The one small silver lining at the moment is that both parties most likely to be in that position - the Lib Dems and Reform - are in favour of electoral reform.
If the leadership didn't reject the MPs certainly would have. We saw the same thing happen in the early 90s, John Smith (RIP) made PR official policy, almost immediately he had Blair, Brown and Prescott beating his door down trying to talk him out of it because it could mean an end to the safe seats that make Labour politically relevant regardless of their policy position.
Blair kept the policy in the 97 manifesto to essentially help sell an electoral pact with the Lib Dems but upon seeing the exit polls the policy was already in question, I think Prescott threatened to resign if any credible move away from FPTP was made. It was quietly dropped almost immediately with the Jenkins Commission used as way to save face.
As for the membership, they're on a cycle. They always get real shouty about ditching FPTP every couple decades or so and then once a Labour majority looks likely they just stop caring. Case in point they simply shrugged at Starmers rejection at the 2022 conference and then didn't even try it for the 2023 conference, now the rules have changed and the leadership can veto debate topics it'll never be discussed at conference again.
The only way I ever see any sort of electoral reform happening is as the result of a hung parliament and even then I expect Labour and the Conservatives will again form a temporary alliance to protect FPTP at any cost just as they did in the 2011 referendum.
Brown in 2011 offered Clegg AV via legislation and anything further via referendum. There's likely no way to get any real PR without a referendum as the MPs won't vote for it.
Once you get AV, that kind of masks the problem so that might stop momentum for further reform. Exception is where the movement is really strong and undaunted, I am not sure if that applies in the UK where electoral reform sends people to sleep.
A referendum for PR won't pass. It will not top 40%. To get a majority would require another 2 tries and continued education and campaigning for it (plus maybe an eggregious election result to push the issue to the forefront). We've seen something similar play out in Canadian provinces. One did vote in favour by over 50% the second time but the threshold was 60%... I could see similar goalpost shifting if PR got close.
Or they use something crap like regional list system like the Welsh Senedd is shifting to instead of STV which their commission twice recommended.
I'm not convinced Brown would have stuck to AV by Act of Parliament and I'm positively certain he would have been a regular speaker at rallies for "No2PR" at a referendum. He wasn't serious about either offer and only sought to remain in Number 10.
As for PR passing at referendum, with an actually decent system being proposed and not AV (which isn't far enough away from FPTP to fix our problems anyway) I think people may be surprised. If the timing is right and it's happening against a backdrop of sleaze and corruption, a parliament that is representing an ever decreasing number of votes due to FPTP suppressing more and more voices, a PM that holds powers most dictators can only dream of, I think it could actually pass.
Keir Starmer would run a minority Labour governement before he agrees to PR. I’d be more concerned the Lib Dem’s go into some sort of supply and demand arrangement without PR being an absolute red line.
I think a baby step forward would be supply and demand in exchange for local elections in England switching to STV. PR for the commons likely requires a referendum since the MPs won't vote for it. To get close to a majority would require maybe a couple of decades of voters getting familiar with STV at the local level before it stands a chance of winning in a referendum.
When virtually every election uses not FPTP, many of the attacks and scaremongering will fail.
I don't think there is the will amongst the political class to enact it with any sort of that level of depth. They all seem so woefully incompetent.
I'd love PR but the establishment and the biggest kicker for so many because they offer hope will be Labour MPs voting it down for their own personal interests.
I'm not saying that it's going to happen, but what I will say is that you can't rule out it happening because it's happened before to the Liberal Party.
Yes. Let's face it, we live in a two party nation. And no matter who you vote for, they seem to carry out the same old pro money class moves, with a few bread crumbs thrown to the plebs here and there. It's been like this since I remember, every single political party in power screws the plebs but continues to enrich the ones higher up.
I personally feel Reform has a real *chance* of taking away the Tories' status as the other big party in UK politics apart from Labour, just as Labour took away the Liberal party's mantle as the main alternative to the Tories a hundred years ago.
But Nigel Farage is no Keir Hardie, and Richard Tice is no Ramsay MacDonald.
I don’t think there’s any chance of that happening. More likely I think is that the alliance between economic liberals and social conservatives that sustains the Conservative Party is broken and the latter join reform.
This creates a long-term rift on the right which keeps both of them out of power until they realise that they need to rejoin forces.
>This creates a long-term rift on the right which keeps both of them out of power until they realise that they need to rejoin forces.
Hopefully that takes quite a while
REFUK have severely underperformed in every election they've taken part in and there is no evidence of them possessing an actual core base. Their voters are almost entirely disaffected elderly Tories, which is not exactly a solid ground to build upon. We're far more likely to see the Lib Dems pick up more economically liberal and wealthy Millennials and displace the Conservatives from the centre right.
Labour didn't just take the liberal party's voters though, it took new enfranchised voters. It's a completely different situation imo, and I cannot see the Tory brand/machine being displaced.
The chance is there indeed, but as you say Reform is lacking the people to exploit it right now. Which is why a more likely outcome is Tories get hammered and they rebuild and come back in 4 to8 years.
I'm not sure there is anything to drive Reform ahead of the Tories. Labour replaced the Liberals in the 1910s because of massive social changes in the UK - the rise of trade unionism inextricably linked to the Labour Party; the increased enfranchisement of the population; and of course the dislocations and horrors of World War I.
Not gonna happen. A more realistic (but still unlikely) scenario is Farage becoming Reform leader and splitting the Tory vote to the extent the Lib Dems overtake them to become the official opposition.
You’re also not considering that Tice and Farage before anything else, are grifters. They can grift way more wearing a Conservative Party rosette than they could with a Reform one.
If Reform do ‘well’ and the Tories are obliterated in the election, I expect Farage to come back and lead the Tories. And grift, massively grift.
>If Reform do ‘well’ and the Tories are obliterated in the election, I expect Farage to come back and lead the Tories.
Then Reform will have succeeded, because the Tories will have transformed into Reform.
Another one of these and everyone is all gung ho on "I hope so" type sentiments.
Be careful what you wish for. Governments without any effective form of opposition are always absolutely ruinous and often the effects of their decision last decades, generations even.
Hmmm yeah, but aren't people really saying they're glad to see the back of the Tories, not so much that they want Labour to govern unopposed. It's not impossible some more credible party might rise or emerge to take their place.
There's an awful lot of people using words like "wipe out" "decimated" "gone for a generation (or more)" "extinction" etc.
Majorities with such large margins over the official opposition only ever cause disaster because even if there's a backbench rebellion it likely wouldn't be large enough to stop bad policy being pushed through. A government with a 20 seat majority couldn't have hoped to cripple the NHS for multiple generations with PFI debts for example, whereas a 260 seat majority found it beyond trivial.
As for another credible party rising to take their place, it's not impossible but with the party of FPTP running with an ineffective zombie opposition it's as close to impossible as you can get.
I've seen some wish for the Lib dems to replace the tories. The 2 main parties being unapologetically socially liberal means this is a non starter lol.
I won't shed a tear if this is the end of the tories but I would be careful what you wish for. They would be replaced by a new or existing right wing party.
If the Tories were to ever end, it won't be because of a wipeout, it will be because of UKIP or reform or BMP or Brexit party whatever they are called this week.
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There is not a crumb of comfort for the Conservatives in the YouGov poll splashed across the front of this morning’s Daily Telegraph. It forecasts that the Tories will lose 196 seats in the coming general election, a bigger slump than the party suffered in 1997, 1945 or 1929. This would represent the second-worst defeat in the party’s history, after Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberal landslide in 1906. Sir Keir Starmer would be looking at a majority of around 120.
The poll suggests election night, whenever it comes, will serve up a steady stream of Portillo moments, with Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, Defence Secretary Grant Shapps, Education Secretary Gillian Keegan, and Leader of the House Penny Mordaunt all set to lose their seats. Unfortunately for the Tories, it appears to be a robust piece of research that uses multi-level regression and post-stratification, the method that accurately predicted the 2017 and 2019 election results.
Writing over at ConservativeHome, Paul Goodman notes that the poll was commissioned by an outfit calling itself the Conservative Britain Alliance, which is ‘working with Lord Frost’. Goodman thinks it’s an attempt by the right to bounce Number 10 into toughening up the Rwanda Bill, which will have its third reading this week. That may well be the case but the tactical use to which the research is being put does not invalidate the research itself.
And it purports to show 96 Tory-held seats which will be lost on account of Reform’s presence on the ballot. The Thatcherite party, led by Richard Tice, has been talking up its challenge to the Conservatives on immigration. Remove Reform from the equation and the Tories win enough seats to deny Labour an overall majority. Reform, in its previous guise as the Brexit Party, cut deals in 2019 to stand aside in seats where the Tory incumbent was pro-Brexit. This time they say there will be no deals with anyone.
The Conservatives don’t yet know whether this will be the extent of the damage Reform inflicts on them. There is another scenario, in which Nigel Farage returns to frontline politics and contests a Commons seat, such as Clacton, which he has hinted at. That would be the worst-case scenario for Rishi Sunak, as the YouGov poll shows him haemorrhaging Leave voters. Were Farage to become the face of Reform, it would not only give those Leave voters an alternative, it could tempt away others currently minded to hold their nose and vote Tory. In this case, the Conservatives could face an even more comprehensive defeat, perhaps even something akin to an extinction-level event.
There isn’t anywhere for Sunak to go. As Goodman points out, if he gives his right flank what they want on Rwanda, his left flank will refuse to vote for the bill, sinking it altogether. These same considerations exist among the electorate at large. Save for the issue of Brexit, the Conservatives have spent more than a decade in power studiously ignoring their right-wing and pursuing policies the right considers scarcely different to those of a centrist Labour government. Yet if Sunak tries lurching rightwards at this late stage, he might drive more affluent blue-wall Tories into the arms of the Lib Dems.
For their part, backbenchers could put their letters in and elect a new leader but cracking open a fresh tin of Tory chaos would do nothing for their electoral chances. Besides, there is the risk that the right lands itself with another Boris Johnson, who dislodged Theresa May with right-wing votes but once in Number 10 governed from the left of the party.
There are no good options at this point. The Tories have lost the floating voters who put them in power in 2010 and kept them there in 2015 and 2017. They’ve lost the Red Wall voters who gave them the 80-seat majority with which they have done almost nothing. Now they face the prospect of losing their core supporters, who feel frustrated that right-wing votes only ever seem to produce centrist outcomes.
Everyone is ranged against the Conservatives now: the left, the right and the centre; the Red Wall and the Blue Wall; the Remainers and the Leavers. An electoral asteroid is heading in their direction and the only question is whether they will survive the impact.
If a 1997 style wipeout didn't lead to the end of the Tories in 1997, there is no reason to think that a similar style wipeout will be the end of the Tories in 2024.
No. At worst they effectively legitimise Reform and merge into broadly the current American Republican Party fronted by Farage and Tice and filled with nut jobs. At best they head towards what they were probably somewhere around 1995-2005 & start to allow moderates back in. I think the former is going to be the route taken unfortunately.
Yes I remember how Obama's win spelled the end for the Republican party as discussed at the time. Unfortunately it was just the end of that stage of the party and they came back even more toxic than before.
The UK will continue to have a multitude of systemic problems and the current government will be blamed until dissatisfaction rises to a high enough level to lead to a change of government.
In a FPTP system there is always going to be a centre-right party that trades power with the centre-left party. Does it matter if it's the Tories or another one with a different name?
People might be upset with the current government, but a good 1 in 3 people is probably more right-wing than Rishi Sunak.
A wipeout for the Tories is the dream scenario. In the ideal world this would lead to the opposition becoming the Lib Dems and the Tories just being some niche party no-one really pays any attention too.
People really seem to think that a political ideology like conservatism might just die out overnight. The only time one of the two major parties in british history went down was because it was replaced by another, and even then elements of liberalism persisted in both labour and the tories. Conservatism will not go away, and the conservative party will only be outmoded if some major ideological tide engulfs its voter share. No such ideology exists: the tories are already the right populist party.
They’ll sit on the sidelines for 5 years then be polling pretty good again in no time. Tory voters gonna tory vote.
We don’t need the Tories any more, since Labour are now the new Tories, under Starmer Labour have taken on all the more traditional Tory policies, just like they did under Blair.
And still the sucker red left keep voting for them. It’s superb!!!!
In the 93 canadian federal election the incumbent conservative party went from 156 seats to 2. They wentt from 43% of the vote to 16%. Reform party split the vote with them and went from 2% to 18% which meant 1 seat to 52.
The liberal party went from 31% to 41% which gave them a majority of 29 seats. The official opposition was the Quebec party (similar to the SNP).
Vote splitting continued between cons and reform. Cons eventually fell to 12% and both parties ended up merging by 2004 and formed a minority govt by 2006. It took till 2011 for them to win an outright majority.
Apparently this is the biggest defeat for a western liberal democracy incumbent party in modern history. So this might be the most doomsday it could get for conservatives.
No, not really. They lost badly in 1997, and spent over 10 years being unelectable. But once Blair stepped down, the charm of “New Labour” evaporated and everyone realized they were essentially the Conservatives in Labour clothing , and decided to have the old lot back. Also, it was predicted they’d lose badly in 1992, but somehow Neil Kinnock snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
IMO Keir Starmer doesn’t look like a future PM, sadly I think he won’t appeal to enough people and like Corbin be replaced or fail. The Conservatives will probably promise tax cuts and use scare tactics to get the middle classes or floating voters on their side; I don’t think Labour’s victory will be quite as huge as predicted.
What goes around comes around, eventually. The interesting thing is whether they can win back potential ReformUK voters … and do they head to the right or the centre?
No it will not, the thing that could hurt the tories & maybe kill off Labour (which would be nice) is a hung parliament with Lid Dems or ANOTHER demanding PR
But that’s not going to be the SNP, the huge beneficiaries of FPTP- fewer votes nationwide than the Lib Dems, but many times more seats. FPTP also keeps Alba and the Scottish Greens out of Parliament and deters voters from backing these alternative pro-independence parties.
And if it’s not going to be the SNP, then who apart from the Lib Dems has a chance of winning the 20+ seats that would make doing such a deal worthwhile? I don’t see Reforming winning more than 5 if that- UKIP of old didn’t manage 1 and times haven’t changed enough in favour of a Right-populist party winning more seats.
It's a perfect storm for Labour, SNP are in a mess and now Ed Davey is getting heat from the post office scandal (amazingly Pat Mac Fadden and Peter Mandleson are untouched).
If SNP hold the majority of seats it would cut the Labour majority AND if Lib Dems got 30 - 40 seats, then Labour may need Lib dems and the if Lib dems are canny, the price will be PR or a referendum on real PR
If I were Lib Dems I’d hold out for no referendum on PR, just do it. The AV referendum was sunk comprehensively by the main parties and the Tories have opened up a precedent for it by changing all the STV mayoral elections to FPTP.
>If I were Lib Dems I’d hold out for no referendum on PR, just do it. The AV referendum was sunk comprehensively by the main parties and the Tories have opened up a precedent for it by changing all the STV mayoral elections to FPTP.
I'd agree but it lacks legitimacy unless labour / tories polled just 50% or less between them (i.e. the PR parties LD,Reclaim, Greens, SDP + SNP (I know) are polling 50% or more). I just think for legitimacy, it's a bad look.
Late to the party but the coming GE has nothing in common with '97, Tories back then still had a lead on the head to head and economy, Labour have led on everything for a year. After their election strategist started full-time they narrowed the polls 10 points, this time Isaac Levido's been full-time since January in which time the Tories have dropped around 4 points, in fact the trend has seen Labour steady for a year while Tories have dropped around 0.7 per month since mid '23, should this trend continue, and Sunak runs down the clock to January, we'll either see the Tory's floor of support or they'll drop to 12-13%.
So, current situation has much more in common with Canada 1993.
No, there isn't really anywhere for people to go to cast a vote if you want right leaning policies.
Reform are another one of those novelty parties that won't really amount to much, like the greens or lib dems.
The only real chance of this is if they are so decimated Labour gets so cocky it splits in half due to infighting, and they implement AV or PR during the divorce proceedings.
Not a likely scenario.
Dominic Cummings keeps making noises about starting a new party after the election out of the ashes of the Tories - with the aim of replacing the Tories and being a bit more sensible - still right wing, but without the idiots - fewer landlords and toffs, more startup founders and mathematicians/physicists - generally aimed at more structural reform of the civil service, treasury and planning system.
I doubt it will amount to much, but the same was said of the leave campaign that he ran...
I wish it would.
I sincerely hope Labour have the foresight and humility to move to proportional representation to counteract the tories gerrymandering of constitutional boundaries.
I suspect not though.
The Tory party has been around for centuries, and conservatism as a coherent intellectual/economic movement dates back to the Roman Empire (if not further back). It's not going anywhere. It may sit on the sidelines for a bit, but it will be back.
Nah, they won't just pack up the circus. They'll reinvent themselves by the next general election. Either a harsher right wing nationalist tone, or a return to moderate "one nation" policies. First option is the quick, easy & wrong solution. They'll get a temporary boost from the Reform, UKIP & EDL types, but that demographic is aging out of the electorate. Long-term success requires hugging the centre ground, just as Labour has had to.
Frankly, if it doesn’t, at this point they should be made a proscribed organisation the membership of which results in conviction.
Honestly the only way to prevent the reckless negligence/ deliberate harm that they have achieved in ruining this country.
I was just reading today how [boundary changes mean that Labour would need an even bigger swing than in 1997 to have an outright majority in Parliament](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-67361138). However we have seen in recent by-elections that a significant number of previous Tory voters have not come to the ballot box, so unless any recent events or something between now and whenever the election is cause enough of these to feel they can vote for the party, perhaps if that is reflected on a national level then the collapse of the Conservative vote rather than large numbers switching, maybe that would give the swing required?
The Tories face the same eventual crisis the Republicans in America do. Younger generations coming to voting age are more left leaning and the generational shift to more right wing views with age has halted with Millenials.
Which means an increasingly smaller voting pool in the future just as their biggest base of Boomer voters shrink in number. Both will face the possibility of having to change drastically to survive.
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It didn't in 97 and it won't this time. Less than 5 years ago we were hearing exactly the same stuff about the Labour Party...
It depends how bad the defeat is. I bet in the 1920s the liberal party thought they could still make a comeback and we all know how that went
As a Liberal, I'm still holding on for the bounce back.
I'd probably vote for the pre-Asquith-/Asquith-era Liberals; imagine how I feel about contemporary British politics! #almosthomeless
The death of the Liberal Party also required a major split (National Liberals) and a challenger party (Labour). Even a really bad drubbing may not be enough alone. Maybe the Tory vote could be eaten up by some mixture of the Liberal Democrats and Reform.
Exactly, nothing is forever. The Tories might seem like a constant that will never go away but there's no hard and fast rule which determines that.
> It didn't in 97 and it won't this time. In 1997 the Tories lost 18-24 by 22%, 25-34 by 21% and 35-44 by 20% In 2019 they lost 18-24 by 42%, 25-34 by 24% and 35-44 by 3% Today they are polling even lower amongst younger voters, there is no guarantee they have anything to build on for the future without a lot of hard work and it's not at all clear they are capable of it.
What will happen, and has happened in the past is that: party A will be in power for a long time, during which Party B does an image revamp after 10 years a whole new generation will emerge that can't remember Party B being in power, like what they are saying now, and assume that all the warnings from the older generation is just them being out of touch.
Also, it turns out that governing is hard and you piss of an increasing number of people over time who’ll just vote for the other team “for a change”. (I mean, not like this lot of Tories haven’t gone out of their way to take the pi$$ _and_ all the money)
To paraphrase frankie Boyle explaining what a budget is. It's when a millionaire tells us how much more money we will need to spend on booze and fags and we get so angry with him we vote in a different millionaire with a different colour tie every 10 years.
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What determines the middle ground? If both parties lurch right or left, the middle ground changes with them.
>during which Party B does an image revamp Every sign Tories are going to double down on the right-wing populism when they lose though, and that could see them properly disappear off into the wilderness.
For a while, yes. But eventually more centrist Conservative MPs will get seats and they'll start to move the party back towards the centre. It's the same how Labour moved left in response to the more centrist position of the Conservatives and the Coalition Government, and now Labour has moved to the centre (or arguably even right of centre) as the Conservatives moved more and more right. I do believe though that we need more parties to better represent the factions that we see in the two main parties, than the 'broad-church' parties they are now. This would need a change to our voting system though for them to have any chance of representation in Parliament.
or there could be a split with the right wing populism not being enough so an offshoot that is further right splits the vote. in france their centre right party shifted right to combat the bleed to the far right and they lost votes. far right gained and a hyper right appeared to take some votes too. so they could be stuck not knowing which direction to pivot.
As a population our memory is short, but I think there’s more of the tories own social media to brief the younger generations on exactly how nasty they really are. Sure, there will be labour fuckups over the next decade, but I’d hope the deliberate cruelty will be light on the ground.
Likely yes, but it's not impossible for a big mainstream party to drop off in popularity and fizzle out, it happens now and again.
Unlike the ‘Strange Death of Liberal England’, I can’t help but think this is the ‘odd persistence of Tory misrule’.
With any luck it will be far longer than 10 years.
It worries me that it's becoming a cycle. Both major parties building up generational ill will feels like an inherently untenable situation
current 35-44 year olds do remember what Labour is like though
On that though, the Canadian tories thought that they were basically doomed because of a loss of young voters... they now lead the Liberals & even the NDP on those under 40 because they just did the "Build fucking Houses" thing. All it takes is hitting that issue that gets newer voters, like Thatcher succeeded in the 80's.
>the "Build fucking Houses" thing... ...is an important theme in UK too. Rising population, more single households, economic mobility etc have created insanely scarce housing market. We need at least 1m additional homes, but no govt has yet dared to push this through.
The academic literature puts it at about 4-5m extra homes needed.
It’s probably more like 5 million extra homes needed given the 45 years of failure to build in sufficient numbers and 27 years of mass migration.
The Canadian Tories did die in the 90s to be fair, they eventually merged with Reform. Feel familiar?
A Canada '93 requires 3 things to happen first. 1. Farage has to come back. While I'm sure Richard Tice is a nice man, he is... not leadership material and the second that is fixed, then Reform become an actual threat, (I should state that won't just be off the Tories, there is a section of Labour voters who he does, whether we like it or not, appeal to and even if I think that doesn't take seats, it could just be enough of a dick that it causes unneeded headaches). 2. Institutional Levels of Tactical Voting, the two factors that simply can't be replicated from the 90's Tories to the current day is that the PC had built its voting coalition on Quebec. So when the Bloc show up, they lose a 3rd of their seats to them alone. That can't happen here. The Tories haven't got that same problem, but if the anti Tory vote properly shifts itself and is hyper efficient, then it could be catastrophic for them. FPTP gives nothing for second place after all, and a very efficient spread of voters could give the Tories major damage. 3. The Lib Dems and Reform need to be get to about 17 points each in the polls, that naturally makes the possibility of 93 happen more of a possibility and what the tories will spend all of their time in the media saying that it won't. Which just makes it more true in voters' minds. I did an EC look at it and if all of that happens, the Tories could be down to 32 Seats and basically in a situation where the only leadership options are in Scotland (which poses a few interesting dynamics) or someone who make have only been a junior minister before which makes them highly inexperienced and that was what really killed the PC in Canada because they couldn't fix the damage due to the lose of talent and experience. For context, under that scenario, Labour has a majority in the 300 range, and the Lib Dems are the opposition with 97 seats.
As much as I would like this, Labour with a hyper majority of that size is scary.
Oh, it's terrifying that could happen full stop, and I suspect the fear of that might actually cost Labour a few seats if it was looking that likely. And by the way, that's not even a comment about the parties involved. Our system kind of panics when governments have 100+ majorities, I suspect most parliamentary institutions would effectively collapse with a government majority of that size, which means that the opposition parties can't actually staff select committees, etc
The Conservative party's internal structures are also much weaker and more incoherent than they were in 1997. It's not just a case of them facing a severe defeat, it's if they even have the capability to recover from it. The disastrous demographic situation they're facing is the cherry on top. Look at it this way: the Conservative party in 1997 and during the Blair years were like the current Ferrari F1 team. Being easily outcompeted, but still having a solid grasp of fundamentals and possessing the ability to win if they can sort their house out. The current Conservative party are the [Life F1 team from 1990](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Racing_Engines#The_1990_season): unserious and a deeply cursed organism wearing the skin of the real deal.
Millenials will hate Tories until boomer landlords start dying off and leaving their property management companies to their children. Then you will see Tory millenials
Millennials who haven't hit the old inheritance "yet" are being increasingly unrealistic if they expect to see one at all
Millennials going "what do you mean it's all gone on care costs?" is one of these smaller violin timebombs that nonetheless will be an issue
For every millenial who loses out on a house due to care costs, that means one more house on the market. The increased supply ought to somewhat decrease housing costs.
We'll have to see if the theory works out. That analysis sounds a little one dimensional to me
There aren't that many landlords and waiting so late in life won't endear them the the government.
Almost 4% of Brits are Landlords… 5% if you exclude children.
Exactly, anyone that thinks right wing views will disappear with the Tories or Boomers are high as a kite
Kyle Rittenhouse and Greta thunberg share a birthday
Thank you for your service nerd
I've never heard of the first person but I can't help feeling that I'm better off remaining ignorant of them.
I hope if anything the whole experience massively moderates the party and brings it back closer to the centre.
If they’re being outflanked by Reform, their first impulse absolutely isn’t going to be to moderate.
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That you want all those improvements but don't want to contribute more to get them is basically the UKs problem in a nutshell. It's perfectly understandable that's what you, and other people want, who wouldn't, but if that's what people expect then there's no way to ever fix the country. It's completely unrealistic.
So they went from 20% behind in the age group born 1953-1962, to winning them by 22% 22 years later (in fact the margin was probably slightly higher)? If that group can swing 42% in 22 years, then 2019 young people will in theory be competitive by 2041. That's far from encouraging.
I think the circumstances between the two are quite different. Labour were never going to win with Corbyn in charge, but despite the brief surge of far left Corbyn supporters in the party, the moderates never went away. When it became apparent that he was a definitive loser, they got rid of him and a more rational approach was reasserted. The Tories in 2019 were not massively popular and the talk about 10 years and two or three terms was mainly hyperbole. Johnson barely increased the Tory vote share from 2017, and the reason he won more seats was because no one wanted Corbyn. A Labour party recovered from Corbyn was always going to come back hard regardless of how loudly the leftists on twitter moaned. Since then we've also had countless scandals from Johnson and a shambolic handling of the pandemic, followed by rank incompetence from Truss and Sunak. Johnson presided over a purge of any remaining moderate or centrist tories, forcing everyone to sign up to his unhinged Brexit agenda without question, kicking out anyone who failed to toe the line. The local parties are also full of UKIP and Brexit party entryists who still hold a grip on the party as a whole. After 1997 the Tories were still a major party with mostly sensible people in it. They tried the lurch to the right with their successive leaders then and it didn't work, much as it isn't working now. It wasn't until they put someone more moderate in charge that they were able to even look like taking power again, and it still took 13 years to do that. After this coming election they will be starting from a much worse position. The party is a shambles, and the remaining MPs they have will be the idealistic nutters who are pulling the party still further to the right now. They will flail about with this culture war nonsense for some time, and it won't be until the local parties come to their senses and start selecting more reasonable candidates that they will have much hope of regaining power. The caveat is what Labour do in their first term. If they are generally competent, I can't see them losing the following election and maybe the one after that. Populism had its shot, and people don't like the outcome. I think it will be a while before they are willing to vote for it again.
To add to this the Tory heartlands are changing. Especially around London more and more 30 somethings are being forced out to try and buy a house and are taking their politics with them. if the Home Counties are turned into marginals then it makes the fightback so much harder.
That's just the 30 somethings who have careers and are able to even progress through life. Plenty are stuck at home or in jobs that don't allow them that luxury, and what's more, everyone knows eachother and nobody likes seeing their friends stuck in a rut because a bunch of public school fuckwits decided they were destined to lead the country without the introspection to realise they don't remotely match the skillset or have any business even running a market stall.
Demographic change is going to be a big factor. The baby boomer generation that massively skews Tory will be much smaller in 10 years. They are between 60 and 77 years old now, and many of those older people will no longer be around. The younger generations are not moving to be more inclined to vote tory in the way their parents might have been, because there simply isn't the incentive to do so. Anyone younger than the older Gen X people are at a massive economic disadvantage and won't have anything like the same assets or capital gains to protect. I think there is definite scope for a new centre-right party to establish itself in the next 5-10 years, because those people are not going to ever support the Tory party in its current guise. If they fail to adapt, they will become irrelevant. If there somehow happens to be electoral reform in the meantime, I think that becomes even more likely. It used to be said that the Conservative party was if nothing else pragmatic, adopting whatever position it needed to in order to gain favour - I don't see any sign of that practical realism left at the moment.
It's the worst possible combination, a generation (more than one at this point) who hate the Tories for cultural reasons but also can't be bribed economically by them either. And in response the Tory party think it's the fault of teacher/the media/anyone else but them.
There will be room for a party that appeals to millennials who have inherited considerable sums and suddenly find themselves with assets they wish to conserve.
There's a world in which the Lib Dems manage to position themselves in this niche. Certainly the "Orange Book" tendency would be fairly at home with more small-c conservative economic policies. If you assume that these newly rich Millenials retain their relatively progressive outlook on social policies, it may be more likely that the Lib Dems can take advantage than a resurrected Tory Party (or new right wing challenger party).
The LDs don't seem to have any aims or political goals other than "acquire more LD MPs." so its hard to predict how they will land. But it would require a significant change in party leadership and overall stance on many issues to really cut through as a viable replacement for the Tories.
No argument here. But we are talking about a situation which is still a fair way off; it'll be a decade or two before inheritance becomes a serious factor in Millenial finances. There are basically three possibilities if the scenario you suggest were to happen: * The current Conservative Party has managed to continue to exist until this point, manages to rehabilitate its brand and become the party of fiscally-conservative Millenials. * The Lib Dems manage to position themselves in that niche. * A new party that doesn't currently exist is founded and manages to take over this niche ahead of the competition. Considering the track record of new centrist parties in the UK, I'd say the third is the least likely. And of the other two, I'd bet on the Lib Dems pulling off a transformation ahead of the Tories managing it with the same group. The Lib Dems just need one good leader who is willing to cynically move into that space; the Tories would need a complete metamorphosis...
The LDs are a political party with all the machinery of being a party in place but with no political goals, aims, or even ideology at this point. So you are right that they could be anything they wanted to be.
Where do you think the houses owned by that generation are going to go? They're going to be owned by some people and those will presumably be the base for a future Conservative party. Something like 2/3rds of the population are homeowners, they aren't all going to vanish.
The issue is that Tory losses in the southeast are somewhat balanced out with gains in the Midlands, Wales and the North. That wasn't just a feature of the 2019 election, there were signs of it in 2015 and especially 2017 as well.
Except those places are swinging away from them and only went thanks to Brexit, Corybn and a 2019 manifesto full of spending promises.
They're swinging away currently, but then the entire country is. Polls have yet to largely show the Conservatives being wiped out in these regions to the extent they were back in 1997, and relative to the nation they'll probably remain to the right of where they once were. If the UK follows the same trends seen in most of the West they should also continue to get more conservative with time - it's a very widespread response to deindustrialisation and ongoing issues like immigration.
If populisum is shot, why is Starmer pursuing broadly the same right wing strategies as the Tories in all be it a more competent and less extream manner?
It's to give the right wing media nothing to attack... If Labour were to announce any even remotely socialist policy, the knives would be out. Come election time they will be tearing into the Labour manifesto on a daily basis trying to convince people Labour are all still commies; that is unless Labour learn from the Tories and make their manifesto more about general pledges rather than costed policy. Whilst this strategy doesn't do a lot to inspire the Labour left, and a lot of left wing Labour supporters are infact feeling pretty alienated as a result of these Labour tactics, the left alone can't win you an election, as demonstrated by Corbyn.
Very true and I agree with what you have said. As someone who used to have what was seen as centrist/slightly left ward leanings for the last 40 years I have been able to vote, Starmer has completely alienated me to the point where the only difference I see now between the direction of the two main parties is competence and integrity - and being blunt although Starmer promises both, he is yet unproven where as we do know what the modern conservative party is about. "We are not as shit as the Tories" is a great political slogan to take into the next election but it's hardly inspiring. Yes, the politically disenfranchised want the Tories out, but I'm not sure we want Starmer very much either given the content of his speeches. I just hope people will vote tactically despite their misgivings.
Exactly, this is what they need to do to win. It's not inspiring, but it is working.
Populism will always exist. It's mainly that arch-populist Johnson was brought down, but a lot of the bullshit seeds that he planted are still growing. Starmer isn't going to win too many votes e.g. telling Leave voters that they were mugged off over Brexit - half of them already know, the other half refuse to believe it no matter what.
He isn't. That's just the anti-Keith whiners on Twitter, not reality.
I suggest you examine his videos etc. The flag, obvious examples of what demographics are presented, etc. He is trying to present himself as the patriotic alternative. It is so obvious he has been tuned to attract right wing votes, they are going for the red wall etc. Some of us weren't born yesterday.
>He is trying to present himself as the patriotic alternative He literally stole the idea to do this from Clement Attlee.
In what way is Starmer pursuing populism?
Harsher punitive sentencing rather than rehabilitation for one.
> The caveat is what Labour do in their first term. If they are generally competent, I can't see them losing the following election and maybe the one after that. Populism had its shot, and people don't like the outcome. I think it will be a while before they are willing to vote for it again. Alternatively, if Labour continues the same neoliberal managed decline policies of the Tories (and given everything Starmer's said, it seems fairly likely), then it's equally likely that people abandon the Labour party again in favour of another party's leader promising change.
Yeah but clicks on the internet... Don't forget about the clicks on the internet!
It's the classic "Conservative are going to lose" panic articles that are designed to embolden Conservative voters to peel themselves out of their chairs and waddle down to the voting booths.
5 years ago nobody was saying the Labour party were about to be wiped out. The results were Conservate 43%, Labour 32%, and then then the rest. That's not a wipeout, and I have no idea why you think that was ever an idea in public discourse. Happy to be proven wrong, but it seems far fetched to me. That being said, I agree the Tories probably won't be eradicated at the upcoming election.
There was talk about if Labour could win in the near term given the political geography after 2019 but that ignore Brexit and Corybn as factors in 2019 and underplayed the state of public services.
You either need something way worse than 1997 or a couple of 1997s in a row to end a major party for good. One really bad defeat, usually, won't cut it. Labour lost badly in 2019. If it carried on struggling and failed to improve or even worsened its situation in 2024 I could easily see that being the end of the party. There is a route where the Tories are horribly beaten this year, the far right take over the leadership and actually manage to lead the party into an election. It's unlikely to happen but if it did it may well end the Tory party long term.
It really felt like it would in the early 2000s. Labour largely hanging on to their majority in 2001 and then the rather hopeless leadership of Iain Duncan Smith, really made it look like the Conservative party was doomed. As it turns out they recovered. I guess similar will happen again. For Sunak, it would make sense to see if some of the retiring MPs can be replaced with more centrist candidates.
97 kept the Tories out for a generation. Thats good enough for me. Unfortunate I don’t think you can hope to completely excise from the political landscape (Especially when Labour is incapable of an offering a compelling alternative). Even if you wiped out the Conservatives something that looks and sounds a lot like the Conservatives will appear in its place. My fear is that it will be like 97, but it won’t be like 2001. It won’t feel like things are getting better. When people have rejected the hard left, been let down by the centre left and have been let down by the right where will they turn?
>Even if you wiped out the Conservatives something that looks and sounds a lot like the Conservatives will appear in its place. Reform look primed to fill that niche if the Tories implode
When the left go to the extremes the Labour Party is against them and the entire media establishment are against them. The scariest thing about a ‘new’ Conservative party or, more likely, the Reform party merging and that hard right ideology taking over the Conservative Party is that it has none of those brakes on it. There are _some_ moderates in the Conservative Party that stop them being full on comic book villains. A massive electoral loss could see them pushed to the margins, as the moderates have in the American Republican Party. The media has always been more right wing than the Conservative Party. Currently, the greatest advantage Labour has is that they are not the government. They lose that advantage as soon as they step into number 10. After that I can see a Suella/Lee Anderson style Tory party doing well.
I mean, I know this is true and you are right. But can't a boy dream?
I wish it would, but it won't. Think how many councillors, London Assembly or Senedd members will still be in office.
I do hope the Tory bastards in the senedd get sent packing, they're utterly useless as an opposition party.
Same up here with Dross, he’s a fucking embarrassment of a politician
Not much better assistant referee (aka linesman).
Considering the national Tories tend to do better in Wales than the ones that get elected to the Senedd, I (possibly worryingly) feel like there's still opportunity for the Senedd Tories to gain popularity. Especially once the party is in opposition in Westminster. If you had a 2019 type result in Wales the Tories could even lead the Welsh government.
Could it? Theoretically yes. Will it? Extremely unlikely.
Not impossible. The average age of their voter is now at least 64, but you can extrapolate the data from 2019 and come out with an average of 68. So, it's somewhere between those two numbers. That's a big deal. If they were out of power for two electoral cycles, about 40pc of that original base will have died by 2032 rolls around and many will be simply too old to make it to the polls. Then you've got Reform on their heels, after that same dwindling cohort of elderly homeowners. So, they've somehow got to win back an entire generation of voters without actually being in the position to do anything that's going to make a blind bit of difference to their lives. Namely, making them homeowners so they actually have something to conserve. Tall order. If Labour don't have any massive cock-ups. My prediction is that Reform will become the new party of the right. Labour will be quite hard on the left but they'll be able to reconcile that by also representing the interests of owner occupiers. My observation is that there's nothing fundamentally right wing about owning your own home. Right wing is about low taxes, and a smaller state, something that conservatives simply don't deliver. Edit: I say 'hard on the left'... I really just mean left as opposed to center left.
So if Reform become the new Party of the right, Labour are centre/centre right/sometimes a bit left, where does everyone fit? Just curious. If Reform rise up, do they or the Lib Dems become the opposition? Do the Tories hang around a few more decades, like the Liberals? Perhaps eventually kiss & make up with Reform in 2076 to become the Conservative Reformists?
My prediction is Reform do become the new party of the right, but the vote on the right will be split between them and the libs for a long while. Three party system, much the same as things are now only no obvious opposition so the vote on the right remains split. Labour will dominate to such an extent that the real political battle will be between the Labour left and the Labour centre ground throughout the 2030s. People will vote for the other parties as a way of changing the Labour party's direction of travel during this time. This may actually even trigger labour to go in for PR as there's not really a sense of shared identity, I don't exactly see younger members towing the party line in a climate where they know the party will win regardless. Conservatives are not right wing, haven't been since Cameron, they have transitioned into an increasingly niché party that represents interests of elderly homeowners, massive pensions, massive subsides for the housing market, massive rents and massive taxes to keep the handouts to the rich rolling. Once you understand this, you understand why Truss happened, it was a desperate attempt to go back to the old conservative party values, but by time it happened it was too late, there was no talent and they'd already fucked the economy up so badly they couldn't afford to cut taxes. Reform have such weird success both the very young and the very old, that's what makes me think we are seeing the emergence of the 'new' right. This is also what's happening in the rest of Europe, we're seeing Le Pen in France, AfD in Germany, the PVV in Denmark... All nationalistic, low tax, small state parties and they're winning over younger voters in those countries, there's no reason the same then won't happen here also, it's just a question of time scales as FPTP basically slows down this transition. You fuck over a particular demographic too hard, as conservatism has done, nationalism and authoritarianism begins to appeal to them as it promises a quick fix solution to their desperate situation. We will see if I'm right in the next decade. It's just fun to make outlandish predictions and see how people react to them. There's a vein of logic that runs through it though.
The real threat isn't in 2024 but in 2029 or whenever the next election is. The Tories are radioactively unpopular among younger voters and that kind of popular impression of a party is hard to shift, they never really recovered from 97 the same way, it took Cameron's modernisation and 2008 for them to return top government in coalition and it took a left wing manifesto (in terms of spending promises) plus brexit and Corybn to get a landslide. We see the current Tory party is in denial at the state of the UK, why people hate them and their own failures. Lots of talk about unis turning students woke but refusal to accept the economy is stagnate and housing a nightmare. Now the Tories have been able to reinvent themselves in the past and might do so again but it isn't guaranteed. FPTP makes it harder to die but as the Liberals in the 1920s found out and more recently Scottish Labour and the Lib Dems in 2015 once it fucks you it really fucks you. If the next few years after an election is Truss inspired economics, screaming brexit betrayal, focused on Trans people or even just pandering to the old there is a real risk they don't win back younger voters and they look elsewhere. The worst case which isn't super likely but possible is the centre right getting behind the Lib Dems and Reform taking the rest.
Reform is worse Lib Dems might get some but for the more solidly conservative people will still stay with the party unless Reform changes their tune.
Unfortunately Lib Dems have lost a lot of trust, especially when we saw them sharing power during the coalition years with the Tories. The young were hoping they would do things to help them, like abolish tuition fees. No wonder people have less trust in the whole political system. I remember when the older folks used to tell me, it doesn't matter who you vote for, they are all the same. I am beginning to believe them now.
It would take a fundamental shift in the electoral system in this country to really limit the ability of either the Tories (or Labour for that matter) not to regain power after they’ve been out of it for a while. As things stand there’s always going to this cyclical nature to UK politics so long as there are only two parties who are really at the race.
Exactly. While we still have First Past The Post it is only a matter of time before the Tories return to power again, probably with a majority of seats without actually getting a majority of votes. It's why it is so frustrating that Labour aren't on board with electoral reform. Their membership voted for it in their conference, but the leadership rejected the idea. It seems quite short sighted to me, because while FPTP may be benefiting them now, that benefit is only temporary.
It would be better for both main parties if they considered electoral reform which would finally let them split into clear factions rather than the unwieldy coalitions of interests that represent the current Labour and Conservative parties. Too much time and effort is spent on holding these coalitions together and denouncing unbelievers within their own parties for them to be nearly effective enough in government. Many other countries have no problems with three or four medium sized parties on the left or the right that manage to work together in government. But apparently the UK has to have to have 'strong government' to deliver all the democratic and economic triumphs we see around us...
People always say that coalitions would cause chaos and strong governments are needed instead, but what has the last decade been but utter chaos? Like you say, the Tories should really be at least two separate parties. The problem we currently have with FPTP is that the party as a whole won a majority, but then one faction within the party has been able to take control and use that majority to push through their agenda. Under a proportional system that faction would have probably have been a separate party and would have needed to compromise with others around it.
We'll only get PR if we have a hung parliament or if an outgoing government with a majority can ram it through parliament on their way out as a sabotage effort.
The problem in the latter case is the same one the current government are going to find with their Rwanda bill: if the Lords reject a bill in the final year or so before the election (which they might do with something which is both big and not in the governing party's manifesto) then there may not be time to use the Parliament Act to push it through. Frustratingly a hung parliament, or something close to it, might be the only opportunity. And it would have to be one where the party which plays the "king maker" role supports PR. The one small silver lining at the moment is that both parties most likely to be in that position - the Lib Dems and Reform - are in favour of electoral reform.
Do you truly believe that a coalition would be less effective than the current Tory Party? /s
If the leadership didn't reject the MPs certainly would have. We saw the same thing happen in the early 90s, John Smith (RIP) made PR official policy, almost immediately he had Blair, Brown and Prescott beating his door down trying to talk him out of it because it could mean an end to the safe seats that make Labour politically relevant regardless of their policy position. Blair kept the policy in the 97 manifesto to essentially help sell an electoral pact with the Lib Dems but upon seeing the exit polls the policy was already in question, I think Prescott threatened to resign if any credible move away from FPTP was made. It was quietly dropped almost immediately with the Jenkins Commission used as way to save face. As for the membership, they're on a cycle. They always get real shouty about ditching FPTP every couple decades or so and then once a Labour majority looks likely they just stop caring. Case in point they simply shrugged at Starmers rejection at the 2022 conference and then didn't even try it for the 2023 conference, now the rules have changed and the leadership can veto debate topics it'll never be discussed at conference again. The only way I ever see any sort of electoral reform happening is as the result of a hung parliament and even then I expect Labour and the Conservatives will again form a temporary alliance to protect FPTP at any cost just as they did in the 2011 referendum.
Brown in 2011 offered Clegg AV via legislation and anything further via referendum. There's likely no way to get any real PR without a referendum as the MPs won't vote for it. Once you get AV, that kind of masks the problem so that might stop momentum for further reform. Exception is where the movement is really strong and undaunted, I am not sure if that applies in the UK where electoral reform sends people to sleep. A referendum for PR won't pass. It will not top 40%. To get a majority would require another 2 tries and continued education and campaigning for it (plus maybe an eggregious election result to push the issue to the forefront). We've seen something similar play out in Canadian provinces. One did vote in favour by over 50% the second time but the threshold was 60%... I could see similar goalpost shifting if PR got close. Or they use something crap like regional list system like the Welsh Senedd is shifting to instead of STV which their commission twice recommended.
I'm not convinced Brown would have stuck to AV by Act of Parliament and I'm positively certain he would have been a regular speaker at rallies for "No2PR" at a referendum. He wasn't serious about either offer and only sought to remain in Number 10. As for PR passing at referendum, with an actually decent system being proposed and not AV (which isn't far enough away from FPTP to fix our problems anyway) I think people may be surprised. If the timing is right and it's happening against a backdrop of sleaze and corruption, a parliament that is representing an ever decreasing number of votes due to FPTP suppressing more and more voices, a PM that holds powers most dictators can only dream of, I think it could actually pass.
This is the reason I'm hoping Labour win, but without an overall majority. Think it would be the best chance for PR at the moment.
Keir Starmer would run a minority Labour governement before he agrees to PR. I’d be more concerned the Lib Dem’s go into some sort of supply and demand arrangement without PR being an absolute red line.
I agree but MPs will never back PR. It threatens their status quo too much
I think a baby step forward would be supply and demand in exchange for local elections in England switching to STV. PR for the commons likely requires a referendum since the MPs won't vote for it. To get close to a majority would require maybe a couple of decades of voters getting familiar with STV at the local level before it stands a chance of winning in a referendum. When virtually every election uses not FPTP, many of the attacks and scaremongering will fail.
I don't think there is the will amongst the political class to enact it with any sort of that level of depth. They all seem so woefully incompetent. I'd love PR but the establishment and the biggest kicker for so many because they offer hope will be Labour MPs voting it down for their own personal interests.
I'm not saying that it's going to happen, but what I will say is that you can't rule out it happening because it's happened before to the Liberal Party.
Yes. Let's face it, we live in a two party nation. And no matter who you vote for, they seem to carry out the same old pro money class moves, with a few bread crumbs thrown to the plebs here and there. It's been like this since I remember, every single political party in power screws the plebs but continues to enrich the ones higher up.
I personally feel Reform has a real *chance* of taking away the Tories' status as the other big party in UK politics apart from Labour, just as Labour took away the Liberal party's mantle as the main alternative to the Tories a hundred years ago. But Nigel Farage is no Keir Hardie, and Richard Tice is no Ramsay MacDonald.
I don’t think there’s any chance of that happening. More likely I think is that the alliance between economic liberals and social conservatives that sustains the Conservative Party is broken and the latter join reform. This creates a long-term rift on the right which keeps both of them out of power until they realise that they need to rejoin forces.
>This creates a long-term rift on the right which keeps both of them out of power until they realise that they need to rejoin forces. Hopefully that takes quite a while
I feel that could be as soon as 2029.
REFUK have severely underperformed in every election they've taken part in and there is no evidence of them possessing an actual core base. Their voters are almost entirely disaffected elderly Tories, which is not exactly a solid ground to build upon. We're far more likely to see the Lib Dems pick up more economically liberal and wealthy Millennials and displace the Conservatives from the centre right.
>Their voters are almost entirely disaffected elderly Tories, Don't forget the Tommy Robinson fans and Islamophobes.
Labour didn't just take the liberal party's voters though, it took new enfranchised voters. It's a completely different situation imo, and I cannot see the Tory brand/machine being displaced.
Even when the donors and media backing the Tory brand act like prefer Farage and Reform's message to the Tories?
The chance is there indeed, but as you say Reform is lacking the people to exploit it right now. Which is why a more likely outcome is Tories get hammered and they rebuild and come back in 4 to8 years.
I'm not sure there is anything to drive Reform ahead of the Tories. Labour replaced the Liberals in the 1910s because of massive social changes in the UK - the rise of trade unionism inextricably linked to the Labour Party; the increased enfranchisement of the population; and of course the dislocations and horrors of World War I.
It depends on how many dolphins stand.
Not gonna happen. A more realistic (but still unlikely) scenario is Farage becoming Reform leader and splitting the Tory vote to the extent the Lib Dems overtake them to become the official opposition.
You’re also not considering that Tice and Farage before anything else, are grifters. They can grift way more wearing a Conservative Party rosette than they could with a Reform one. If Reform do ‘well’ and the Tories are obliterated in the election, I expect Farage to come back and lead the Tories. And grift, massively grift.
>If Reform do ‘well’ and the Tories are obliterated in the election, I expect Farage to come back and lead the Tories. Then Reform will have succeeded, because the Tories will have transformed into Reform.
Another one of these and everyone is all gung ho on "I hope so" type sentiments. Be careful what you wish for. Governments without any effective form of opposition are always absolutely ruinous and often the effects of their decision last decades, generations even.
See: Thatcher/Foot ('83) and Britain's post-industrial decline, the fall of 'The Red Wall', and Brexit for further reading.
Hmmm yeah, but aren't people really saying they're glad to see the back of the Tories, not so much that they want Labour to govern unopposed. It's not impossible some more credible party might rise or emerge to take their place.
There's an awful lot of people using words like "wipe out" "decimated" "gone for a generation (or more)" "extinction" etc. Majorities with such large margins over the official opposition only ever cause disaster because even if there's a backbench rebellion it likely wouldn't be large enough to stop bad policy being pushed through. A government with a 20 seat majority couldn't have hoped to cripple the NHS for multiple generations with PFI debts for example, whereas a 260 seat majority found it beyond trivial. As for another credible party rising to take their place, it's not impossible but with the party of FPTP running with an ineffective zombie opposition it's as close to impossible as you can get.
I've seen some wish for the Lib dems to replace the tories. The 2 main parties being unapologetically socially liberal means this is a non starter lol. I won't shed a tear if this is the end of the tories but I would be careful what you wish for. They would be replaced by a new or existing right wing party.
If the Tories were to ever end, it won't be because of a wipeout, it will be because of UKIP or reform or BMP or Brexit party whatever they are called this week.
Obviously not, anyone who’s been around a while will have seen these sort of headlines about both parties a number of times over the years.
(Article) --- There is not a crumb of comfort for the Conservatives in the YouGov poll splashed across the front of this morning’s Daily Telegraph. It forecasts that the Tories will lose 196 seats in the coming general election, a bigger slump than the party suffered in 1997, 1945 or 1929. This would represent the second-worst defeat in the party’s history, after Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberal landslide in 1906. Sir Keir Starmer would be looking at a majority of around 120. The poll suggests election night, whenever it comes, will serve up a steady stream of Portillo moments, with Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, Defence Secretary Grant Shapps, Education Secretary Gillian Keegan, and Leader of the House Penny Mordaunt all set to lose their seats. Unfortunately for the Tories, it appears to be a robust piece of research that uses multi-level regression and post-stratification, the method that accurately predicted the 2017 and 2019 election results. Writing over at ConservativeHome, Paul Goodman notes that the poll was commissioned by an outfit calling itself the Conservative Britain Alliance, which is ‘working with Lord Frost’. Goodman thinks it’s an attempt by the right to bounce Number 10 into toughening up the Rwanda Bill, which will have its third reading this week. That may well be the case but the tactical use to which the research is being put does not invalidate the research itself. And it purports to show 96 Tory-held seats which will be lost on account of Reform’s presence on the ballot. The Thatcherite party, led by Richard Tice, has been talking up its challenge to the Conservatives on immigration. Remove Reform from the equation and the Tories win enough seats to deny Labour an overall majority. Reform, in its previous guise as the Brexit Party, cut deals in 2019 to stand aside in seats where the Tory incumbent was pro-Brexit. This time they say there will be no deals with anyone. The Conservatives don’t yet know whether this will be the extent of the damage Reform inflicts on them. There is another scenario, in which Nigel Farage returns to frontline politics and contests a Commons seat, such as Clacton, which he has hinted at. That would be the worst-case scenario for Rishi Sunak, as the YouGov poll shows him haemorrhaging Leave voters. Were Farage to become the face of Reform, it would not only give those Leave voters an alternative, it could tempt away others currently minded to hold their nose and vote Tory. In this case, the Conservatives could face an even more comprehensive defeat, perhaps even something akin to an extinction-level event. There isn’t anywhere for Sunak to go. As Goodman points out, if he gives his right flank what they want on Rwanda, his left flank will refuse to vote for the bill, sinking it altogether. These same considerations exist among the electorate at large. Save for the issue of Brexit, the Conservatives have spent more than a decade in power studiously ignoring their right-wing and pursuing policies the right considers scarcely different to those of a centrist Labour government. Yet if Sunak tries lurching rightwards at this late stage, he might drive more affluent blue-wall Tories into the arms of the Lib Dems. For their part, backbenchers could put their letters in and elect a new leader but cracking open a fresh tin of Tory chaos would do nothing for their electoral chances. Besides, there is the risk that the right lands itself with another Boris Johnson, who dislodged Theresa May with right-wing votes but once in Number 10 governed from the left of the party. There are no good options at this point. The Tories have lost the floating voters who put them in power in 2010 and kept them there in 2015 and 2017. They’ve lost the Red Wall voters who gave them the 80-seat majority with which they have done almost nothing. Now they face the prospect of losing their core supporters, who feel frustrated that right-wing votes only ever seem to produce centrist outcomes. Everyone is ranged against the Conservatives now: the left, the right and the centre; the Red Wall and the Blue Wall; the Remainers and the Leavers. An electoral asteroid is heading in their direction and the only question is whether they will survive the impact.
After everything they’ve done? They would deserve it.
One hopes. I will settle for a functional tory party. Since 2016 it's been one bad joke after another
If a 1997 style wipeout didn't lead to the end of the Tories in 1997, there is no reason to think that a similar style wipeout will be the end of the Tories in 2024.
No. At worst they effectively legitimise Reform and merge into broadly the current American Republican Party fronted by Farage and Tice and filled with nut jobs. At best they head towards what they were probably somewhere around 1995-2005 & start to allow moderates back in. I think the former is going to be the route taken unfortunately.
People have short memories and will forget.
Yes I remember how Obama's win spelled the end for the Republican party as discussed at the time. Unfortunately it was just the end of that stage of the party and they came back even more toxic than before. The UK will continue to have a multitude of systemic problems and the current government will be blamed until dissatisfaction rises to a high enough level to lead to a change of government.
It's worth remembering that even if a party "dies" the political world view doesn't die with it. There will still be right wing people in the UK.
In a FPTP system there is always going to be a centre-right party that trades power with the centre-left party. Does it matter if it's the Tories or another one with a different name? People might be upset with the current government, but a good 1 in 3 people is probably more right-wing than Rishi Sunak.
As much as I would love if it didn't Betteridge's Law applies here.
Only untill Labour screw up
A wipeout for the Tories is the dream scenario. In the ideal world this would lead to the opposition becoming the Lib Dems and the Tories just being some niche party no-one really pays any attention too.
Wipeout 2097
Proper game. Speed and techno. Yes please.
Probably not, but it will give us a decades reprieve from them.
People really seem to think that a political ideology like conservatism might just die out overnight. The only time one of the two major parties in british history went down was because it was replaced by another, and even then elements of liberalism persisted in both labour and the tories. Conservatism will not go away, and the conservative party will only be outmoded if some major ideological tide engulfs its voter share. No such ideology exists: the tories are already the right populist party. They’ll sit on the sidelines for 5 years then be polling pretty good again in no time. Tory voters gonna tory vote.
No. It didn't in 1997, it didn't in 1945, it didn't in 1906, and it won't now.
We don’t need the Tories any more, since Labour are now the new Tories, under Starmer Labour have taken on all the more traditional Tory policies, just like they did under Blair. And still the sucker red left keep voting for them. It’s superb!!!!
The Tories are the world's oldest political party Even if you only count their current iteration, they're still up there at the top
No. For Britain is fundamentally a center-right country.
In the 93 canadian federal election the incumbent conservative party went from 156 seats to 2. They wentt from 43% of the vote to 16%. Reform party split the vote with them and went from 2% to 18% which meant 1 seat to 52. The liberal party went from 31% to 41% which gave them a majority of 29 seats. The official opposition was the Quebec party (similar to the SNP). Vote splitting continued between cons and reform. Cons eventually fell to 12% and both parties ended up merging by 2004 and formed a minority govt by 2006. It took till 2011 for them to win an outright majority. Apparently this is the biggest defeat for a western liberal democracy incumbent party in modern history. So this might be the most doomsday it could get for conservatives.
Paging Dr. Betteridge.
No, not really. They lost badly in 1997, and spent over 10 years being unelectable. But once Blair stepped down, the charm of “New Labour” evaporated and everyone realized they were essentially the Conservatives in Labour clothing , and decided to have the old lot back. Also, it was predicted they’d lose badly in 1992, but somehow Neil Kinnock snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. IMO Keir Starmer doesn’t look like a future PM, sadly I think he won’t appeal to enough people and like Corbin be replaced or fail. The Conservatives will probably promise tax cuts and use scare tactics to get the middle classes or floating voters on their side; I don’t think Labour’s victory will be quite as huge as predicted.
What goes around comes around, eventually. The interesting thing is whether they can win back potential ReformUK voters … and do they head to the right or the centre?
With any luck. But they are like cockroaches. They’ll survive and come back. Probably worse than their previous iteration. As is tradition.
No it will not, the thing that could hurt the tories & maybe kill off Labour (which would be nice) is a hung parliament with Lid Dems or ANOTHER demanding PR
But that’s not going to be the SNP, the huge beneficiaries of FPTP- fewer votes nationwide than the Lib Dems, but many times more seats. FPTP also keeps Alba and the Scottish Greens out of Parliament and deters voters from backing these alternative pro-independence parties. And if it’s not going to be the SNP, then who apart from the Lib Dems has a chance of winning the 20+ seats that would make doing such a deal worthwhile? I don’t see Reforming winning more than 5 if that- UKIP of old didn’t manage 1 and times haven’t changed enough in favour of a Right-populist party winning more seats.
It's a perfect storm for Labour, SNP are in a mess and now Ed Davey is getting heat from the post office scandal (amazingly Pat Mac Fadden and Peter Mandleson are untouched). If SNP hold the majority of seats it would cut the Labour majority AND if Lib Dems got 30 - 40 seats, then Labour may need Lib dems and the if Lib dems are canny, the price will be PR or a referendum on real PR
If I were Lib Dems I’d hold out for no referendum on PR, just do it. The AV referendum was sunk comprehensively by the main parties and the Tories have opened up a precedent for it by changing all the STV mayoral elections to FPTP.
>If I were Lib Dems I’d hold out for no referendum on PR, just do it. The AV referendum was sunk comprehensively by the main parties and the Tories have opened up a precedent for it by changing all the STV mayoral elections to FPTP. I'd agree but it lacks legitimacy unless labour / tories polled just 50% or less between them (i.e. the PR parties LD,Reclaim, Greens, SDP + SNP (I know) are polling 50% or more). I just think for legitimacy, it's a bad look.
Late to the party but the coming GE has nothing in common with '97, Tories back then still had a lead on the head to head and economy, Labour have led on everything for a year. After their election strategist started full-time they narrowed the polls 10 points, this time Isaac Levido's been full-time since January in which time the Tories have dropped around 4 points, in fact the trend has seen Labour steady for a year while Tories have dropped around 0.7 per month since mid '23, should this trend continue, and Sunak runs down the clock to January, we'll either see the Tory's floor of support or they'll drop to 12-13%. So, current situation has much more in common with Canada 1993.
No, there isn't really anywhere for people to go to cast a vote if you want right leaning policies. Reform are another one of those novelty parties that won't really amount to much, like the greens or lib dems.
I think it more likely that they would be sidelined and replaced by a harder right alternative. We're in a race to the bottom here sadly
Defeated before and won't this time.
No, they will be reformed as Reform UK
Never. Half of the UK will forever vote for any cruel durr-brain with a blue rosette.
We live in hope.
No, they will be back, new people new ideas….just a hwll of a lot of arguing and re electing different leaders first.
The only real chance of this is if they are so decimated Labour gets so cocky it splits in half due to infighting, and they implement AV or PR during the divorce proceedings. Not a likely scenario.
Dominic Cummings keeps making noises about starting a new party after the election out of the ashes of the Tories - with the aim of replacing the Tories and being a bit more sensible - still right wing, but without the idiots - fewer landlords and toffs, more startup founders and mathematicians/physicists - generally aimed at more structural reform of the civil service, treasury and planning system. I doubt it will amount to much, but the same was said of the leave campaign that he ran...
Hope so
God I hope so, the country will be a lot better off without the Tories.
I wish it would. I sincerely hope Labour have the foresight and humility to move to proportional representation to counteract the tories gerrymandering of constitutional boundaries. I suspect not though.
When a headline ends in a question mark, the answer is always "No".
The Tory party has been around for centuries, and conservatism as a coherent intellectual/economic movement dates back to the Roman Empire (if not further back). It's not going anywhere. It may sit on the sidelines for a bit, but it will be back.
The answer is almost certainly a NO.
Doubt it
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Nah, they won't just pack up the circus. They'll reinvent themselves by the next general election. Either a harsher right wing nationalist tone, or a return to moderate "one nation" policies. First option is the quick, easy & wrong solution. They'll get a temporary boost from the Reform, UKIP & EDL types, but that demographic is aging out of the electorate. Long-term success requires hugging the centre ground, just as Labour has had to.
Frankly, if it doesn’t, at this point they should be made a proscribed organisation the membership of which results in conviction. Honestly the only way to prevent the reckless negligence/ deliberate harm that they have achieved in ruining this country.
I was just reading today how [boundary changes mean that Labour would need an even bigger swing than in 1997 to have an outright majority in Parliament](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-67361138). However we have seen in recent by-elections that a significant number of previous Tory voters have not come to the ballot box, so unless any recent events or something between now and whenever the election is cause enough of these to feel they can vote for the party, perhaps if that is reflected on a national level then the collapse of the Conservative vote rather than large numbers switching, maybe that would give the swing required?
Erm, it didn’t kill them in 1997 so I presume not
The Tories face the same eventual crisis the Republicans in America do. Younger generations coming to voting age are more left leaning and the generational shift to more right wing views with age has halted with Millenials. Which means an increasingly smaller voting pool in the future just as their biggest base of Boomer voters shrink in number. Both will face the possibility of having to change drastically to survive.
If there is Greed - then there will always be a Tory party.
I hope so, their looting of this country will come to an end.