There's no doubting some on the right wing fringe of the soon-to-be-reduced Parliamentary Conservatve Party are shipping a post-election tie-up between Reform and the Tories. Just as the election was announced, Lucy Allan called for a vote for Reform in her Telford seat. A move that saw her expelled from the party. This last week Andrea Jenkyns has been caught pushing official party literature featuring her and Farage in a chummy photo. And trying to cash in on the sentiments of the Tories' thinning membership, Suella Braverman has said the Tories "should welcome" Farage into the fold.
From within the situational awareness of the Tory weltanschauung, this is not entirely mad. As argued before, the Tory obsession with race and immigration can, if you squint hard enough, be seen as an election winner. If the gate was opened to Farage and he was swept to the leadership of the Tories, his garrulous character and "truth telling" would contrast favourably with the lefty cultural Marxist wokery of Keir Starmer, and the party could quickly return to viability. After all, Brexit was won an anti-immigration politics, Boris Johnson won on anti-immigration politics, and the reason Sunak is flailing badly is because of his softness on immigration. Just take the Tory and Reform percentages and do the maths. A united right could see Labour down.
Provided Farage does get into the Commons, it's obvious there is a faction of the Tories - egged on by the press - that would happily have him. And if admitted and shenanigans don't get in the way, it's surely odds on the membership that voted for Liz Truss would endorse Farage as leader. This place has long forecasted a rightward turn for the Tories post-election as a means of cohering themselves following a shattering defeat. Just as they did after 1997. But this is not entirely nailed on. According to an analysis of Tory selections by Conservative Home's Paul Goodman, few new hard right candidates have been selected for the safest seats. With a lot of this wing getting taken out at the election, this might make for a more centrist - and I use that term advisedly - parliamentary party than has been the case for some years. And this changes things somewhat.
Just as a lot of Tories think going right can save the party, there are those who think a more centre-oriented pitch is the path to recovery. With the Lib Dems set to do well, abandoning more centrist positions and indulging every right wing hobby horse only strengthens the yellow party. If the Tories go hard right and/or get under the covers with Farage, the Lib Dems can choose between pitching to the left to capture discontent with Labour or start occupying land abandoned by the Conservatives, effectively presenting themselves as the grown up natural opposition to Starmer. Because Tory curious/right-leaning swing voters aren't going to be on board with a Farage or Farageist party, this could focus the minds of enough Tory MPs to block any leadership bid. And if that happens, with a semi-viable Reform party the Tories could well split with Farage taking some MPs and lots of members.
It's funny. Thinking back to writing the first draft of Falling Down during the first Covid lockdown and into that summer, I thought the thumping victory Johnson had achieved would stymie the Conservatives' long-term decline, and as such the process would only slowly take hold. The Tories would be competitive and could win against a lacklustre Starmer in 2024, but become progressively more difficult after that. But with Party Gate and Johnson's defenestration, the Truss debacle, and Sunak's do-nothing premiership, each of these moments have sped up the decomposition. Now this election, Farage standing, the D-Day clanger, and the possibility of post-election footsie that could rip the party to shreds, the rate at which the Tories are unravelling threatens to break the speed of causality. The only question left is there anything now, anything at all, that can make this happen even quicker? Recent history suggests it would be foolish to rule that out.
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7 comments:
Thanks for the analysis makes a difference from the usual press diatribe.
"A united right could see Labour down." Under FPTP it is true a united right would win a larger share of the votes than Labour and as a consequence be a majority in Parliament, but on a minority of the votes cast overall. Despite this glaringly obvious unfairness the Labour leadership will not use the majority, they will undoubtedly win, to introduce proportional voting. Even though in the future it would be to their advantage.
I'd have thought there would be more space for the Lib Dems to attack Labour from the left myself. Let's hope they become the official opposition!
I was talking to someone who thought it would be bad for democracy for there to be no opposition to Labour. I do agree, but not from the Tories. The optimum number of seats held by them must be zero.
The Right have no chance of winning a majority of votes, or seats. However, the main reason the reactionary petty-bourgeois vote went from the Tories to Blue Labour, is the fact that the Tories are covered in sleaze and a smell of death, much as in 1997, and they had nowhere else to go credibly, much as Starmer hopes with Labour's progressive w-c vote.
FPTP, however, means that if the Tories collapse more, and Reform picks up that vote rising significantly above them, they could get a proportionally greater haul of seats, and the Tories lose proportionally more. It exacerbates the collapse and move to Reform. But, it also undermines the basis of that reactionary petty-bourgeois vote for Blue Labour, too. Reform doesn't have the same tinge of sleaze and death about it as the Tories (though it has plenty of stench of sleaze in other ways), and so becomes a more likely vessel for that vote, rather than Blue Labour.
As the Tories collapse, its rump conservative element will have an incentive to switch to the Liberals, particularly on the basis of tactical voting to keep out either Blue Labour or Reform. So, the Liberals are likely to rise in the polls, and more so in the actual vote, in seats where they are most likely to win, as previous by-elections etc showed. At that point, the Blue Labour vote of that progressive w-c base, may also see, tactical advantage in various seats in voting, Liberal, or even Green, Plaid etc.
Blue Labour will win by a huge margin of seats, but may get fewer votes, and certainly a smaller proportion of the vote than Corbyn won in 2017!!! Starmer is trapped by his reactionary, nationalist narrative, and if as I expect the ruling class, post-election engineers a merger of the remaining Conservatives and Liberals, that poses a problem for Blue Labour, as he faces, like Corbyn did, a large bloc of disaffected Blair-Right, pro-EU MP's, opposing his continued Brexitism, and voting with, or regrouping with that new, ruling class, centre-right party.
«But with Party Gate»
My usual note here: it is astonishing that the photos at the "work meetings" were taken by tory politicians amd passed to tory newspapers (and all faces but Johnson's were fuzzied), that instead of writing a page 17 short note then mounted in concert a long front-page anti-Johnson campaign.
«and Johnson's defenestration, the Truss debacle, and Sunak's do-nothing premiersh tip»
If these are the main reasons why the Conservatives are going to lose an 80 seat majority then truly tory voters do not vote on class interests but on their whims as to values and ideas, or politics is but a contest of personalities, just like student politics (which do not affect class interests).
«the Tory obsession with race and immigration can»
Sometimes I think that wokesters are more obsessed with attributing to the tories an obsession with "shameful" topics. I reckon that while the tory mwmbership talks a lot about those topics, tory politicians know better.
«From within the situational awareness of the Tory weltanschauung [...] the reason Sunak is flailing badly is because of his softness on immigration»
I hope that few tory politicians really believe that (and indeed since 2016 tory politicians have made immigration boom and yet the Conservatives got 14 million votes in 2017 and again in 2019): sure for tory voters lower immigration is a "nice to have" but most actually vote on their "must have" which is their class interests. There may be "ideological" tories but most are focused on their wallets, and immigration makes their wallets much fatter.
Reform are the hard right, more toxic equivalent to the Greens, they both tap into some legitimate concerns, both are dishonest about the consequences of their 'policies', both use magical thinking to wish away the real world problems with their analysis and solutions, both attract people who place emotive feelings above real world practicalities.
I do wonder if there is an opportunity here for the emergence of a reformed moderate centre right Conservative Party from all of this, a genuine 'liberal (small c) conservative, One Nation, style set-up? After the last financial crash lots of financial institutions created 'toxic' banks or similar financial institutions to take all the shit assets and liabilities, maybe that could be Reform's role? The headbangers who push 'stab in the back' myths of how Brexit wasn't enough of a car crash, the WEF conspiracy nutters, the vulgar libertarians and assorted charlatans can be decanted into a party which then wages 'culture wars' against those factions of the comedy left centred on identity politics and grievance grifting.
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