The Tory Catastrophe

National Review Online

Monday, July 08, 2024

 

When (then) British prime minister Rishi Sunak called a snap election for July 4, five months or so before the last possible date, there was surprise that he had decided to lead the Tories, trailing badly in the polls, so quickly to the slaughterhouse. Channeling Mr. Micawber, “something” might have turned up to help the Conservatives between July and December: The economy was improving, Nigel Farage might have become preoccupied with the U.S. election campaign, and so on.

 

As it was, Sunak’s decision, taken by a small cabal and opposed by his campaign manager, took a bad position and made it worse. The party was not prepared — many seats did not yet have candidates, and fundraising had a long way to go. Adding to the Conservatives’ misery, Sunak proved to be a remarkably inept campaigner. And then, heaping more coals on Tory heads, Nigel Farage, who, however polarizing he may be, is the most effective political campaigner in Britain, took the helm of the populist-Right Reform U.K. Party, a party well placed to take advantage of a revolt against the Merkelism that has characterized the Tories for years. The Right would thus be badly split, which under Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, meant catastrophe.

 

Catastrophe duly arrived. The Conservative Party suffered the worst defeat in its history, and Labour won an immense parliamentary majority, taking 64 percent of the seats with 33 percent of the votes, roughly doubling its share of seats in the 650-member House of Commons — from 201 to 412 — despite only increasing its share of the vote by two percentage points. At the other extreme, Reform won 1 percent of the seats with 14 percent of the national vote. In a constituency-based, plurality-rule system, the nature of its support — wide but shallow — counted against it.

 

Even if Labour was elected without much popular enthusiasm, under Britain’s parliamentary system, the party now has a mandate to do (more or less) whatever it wants, which will be the pursuit of a center-left-to-left agenda, more “redistribution,” more regulation, more wokery, and, critically, further institutionalization of the cultural and extra-parliamentary hegemony enjoyed by Britain’s Left, a hegemony that, shamefully, the Tories never seriously tried to dent, a failure that contributed to their defeat.

 

Unlike Tony Blair in 1997, new prime minister Keir Starmer will not be able to exploit an economy reinvigorated by nearly two decades of Thatcherite (or near-Thatcherite) rule. In 2024, Britain is heavily indebted (not least thanks to the pandemic and its legacy), the country’s tax burden is at a post-war high, and GDP growth is anemic. All of this is before the damage caused by the commitment to net zero — endorsed by all parties other than Reform — has really begun to bite. The Conservatives were (very) tentatively suggesting the need for a rethink on net zero, but Labour will press on hard. The economic and, ultimately, political bill for that will be steep.

 

The new government will ease the planning restrictions that have held back the homebuilding needed to tackle the acute shortage of affordable housing. The U.K. population has grown by some 5 million to nearly 68 million since 2010, mainly because of immigration, an increase far exceeding the number of homes built. The anger of millions of Brits, forced to remain renters for far longer than they expected, was one important reason for the Conservative collapse. Appropriately enough, the housing shortage is inextricably linked to the Tories’ abysmal failure to rein in legal and illegal immigration, a major reason for the swing to Reform. Labour will be hobbled by the ideological qualms of many of its supporters to the extent that it does try to control immigration. This will set the stage for major trouble ahead.

One of the legacies of years of immigration, a large Muslim population, has now led to the return of significant sectarian voting to the British mainland for the first time in 60 or 70 years. “Pro Gaza” independents not only won four seats (as did Jeremy Corbyn, no longer a member of the Labour Party and an active supporter of the same cause), but also cut Labour majorities in many others. While under Starmer, Britain looks set to be a reliable NATO ally, Labour’s able electoral strategists will be keenly aware of the need to win back Muslim voters, and Israel should expect London to start keeping more of a distance. Britain’s new foreign secretary has already said that he wants “to get back to a balanced position on Israel and Gaza.”

 

As for the Right, it must get its house in order. Reform, a party with no infrastructure and unhealthily dependent on one man, might wither away in the meantime, leaving the Conservative Party to pick up its remnants, but what if that does not happen? First-past-the-post voting is going to endure, and a continuation of the split between Reform and the Conservatives will ensure another disaster in 2029. A pact splitting constituencies between the two would be too complex, leaving only a merger as an alternative option. But this won’t be easy. Fusion between the two parties may well be the remedy for what ails the British Right, but that requires a baseline consensus on what things are shared in common, what things are worth compromising on, and what are not.

 

The Tories also lost former supporters in their traditional heartlands to the Liberal Democrats on the left, thanks in no small part to lingering anger over the split from the EU. Winning those voters back while simultaneously partnering with hard Brexiteers of Reform will be tricky. And then there are the divisions within Reform. Its leadership is (sort of) Thatcherite, but many of its members still retain much of the thinking that comes with their old Labour roots. Resolving all this will take political skills of the highest order. Whether there are people within the Reform and Conservative parties who possess them remain to be seen. We must hope so.