U.K. Election: The Fight on the Right

With two weeks to go until polling day (July 4) in the U.K., the main story continues to be how low the Tories will go. No one seriously doubts that Labour (which, incidentally, is considerably less centrist than is now being portrayed) will secure a majority so large that it will be able to do more or less what it wants. Labour was always in line for one of the biggest majorities in British parliamentary history, but now it is being handed a bonus by the way that Reform, the Tories’ rival to the right, has been given an immense boost by Nigel Farage taking over as the party’s leader. As the Conservatives sink and Reform rises, the right is now badly split. In a first-past-the post system (FPTP), that means disaster.

To dust off my math from the other day:

If in a given constituency a Conservative wins 30 percent of the vote, a Reform candidate secures 30 percent, and the Labour candidate takes 40 percent, the Labour candidate will become the MP, even though the combined right had a 60 percent share and the left 40 percent.

And now a new poll has, as young people say, “dropped.” It comes via People Polling, a firm owned by Matt Goodwin, an analyst who has over the years moved into the right-of-Tory camp. Labour came top on 35 percent, followed by Reform (24 percent), and then the Conservatives (15 percent). Next came the left-of-center Liberal Democrats (12 percent), with the Greens at 8 percent.

This poll (I suspect) is an outlier, but other polls have shown Reform at, near or just above the Conservative total. That may not leave Reform as well placed as the numbers seem to suggest. Even beyond Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, voting is, in many respects, local, with each party normally having concentrations of support. Reform’s problem is, that, like UKIP (U.K. Independence Party) before it, its support is spread widely but thinly across England. It has few potential redoubts, meaning that its haul of seats will likely underperform its share of the national vote by even more than the brutal math of FPTP would imply.

If, however, Reform can overtake the Conservatives by enough in national polling, that may be enough for them to flip the Tories’ strongest argument — that a vote for Reform is a vote for Labour — against them. Reform would then argue that a vote for the Conservatives is a vote for Labour. If they can convince enough Tories that that is the case Reform may get additional seats. It wouldn’t be be a huge haul (Reform would still win fewer seats than the Conservatives), but it would be the parliamentary bridgehead Farage would need (assuming that he is one of those successful Reform candidates) if Reform is to have any chance of either replacing the Conservatives or taking a leading position in a merged Reform–Conservative party.

Reform has been given its chance by the way in which the governing Conservative Party has combined remarkable incompetence with a shift to the left. The latter began as a pragmatic maneuver designed to take the Tories into power after years in the wilderness during the Blair era but ended up, for much of its leadership, as a matter of conviction. Today, many members of its parliamentary party are “conservatives” (sort of) on the dismal Angela Merkel model, but without her political savvy. Merkel was fortunate that the shambles she had left behind only reached a critical point after she had left office. The Tories have not been so lucky.

Reform’s key philosophical problem is that the remodeled Thatcherism, which is, roughly speaking, the preferred choice of Nigel Farage, may not appeal to many of the formerly Labour Brexit voters the party has targeted as a key constituency. Maybe Reform’s tough line on immigration will, after the Tories’ colossal failure in that area, be enough to bridge that gap, especially when accompanied by other measures to appeal to voters appalled by the grip that progressives have, thanks to the Tories’ indolence or tacit consent, secured over so much of British life.

Reform’s “contract with the people” (Farage does not want to call it a manifesto) may not always add up, but that does not, at this point, matter too much. Labour will form the next government, not Reform. The Conservatives won’t form the next government either, but they still have to maintain the pretense that they might. Reform’s “contract” is better seen not as a guide to how it would govern in a few weeks’ time, but as an exercise with two main purposes. The first will be to see how much it can extend the appeal of a right-wing party to voters that the Conservatives can no longer reach. The second is to set out a stall designed to appeal to many Conservative loyalists both before and, in some ways more importantly, after the election.

There will be many Conservatives who, horrified by the prospect of a Labour landslide, will decide that now is not the time to jump ship. That calculation may well shift after an election in which the Tories are reduced to a rump in which the Merkelite wing is, because of the distribution of the safest Tory seats, even stronger. Under those circumstances, a Reform Party which has established a foothold in Parliament and is, among other topics, talking about cutting taxes (at a time when, under the Tories, the tax burden has risen to a post-war high), insisting on “net zero” immigration (a clever touch, that), increasing spending on defense, and scrapping existing decarbonization targets may look very attractive.

One wild card: The U.K. votes on July 4. The first round of a highly polarized French election takes place on June 30. How will a strong showing by either Marine Le Pen’s RN or a NFP running on a far-left platform play with British voters?