Britain after the Conservatives?
They’re the oldest and most successful political party in the world. But, Nick Scott argues, the next general election could be catastrophic for them.
Photo from Wikimedia Commons, Open Government License 3
As we slowly approach the next general election, pundits have begun to ask what this could mean for a struggling Conservative party. Last month, an opinion piece in The Daily Telegraph speculated that the next general election might be more like 1992 – when John Major defied expectations to win a small majority – instead of 1997, which saw Tony Blair’s Labour Party triumph in a landslide. However, I would like to make the case for neither. While a lot could change in the two years before the next election has to take place, the Conservatives are facing a landslide much worse than 1997, and the destruction of the party is far from impossible.
Recent opinion polling has been dire for the party. One survey at the end of last year put the Conservatives at just 19% of the vote, far behind Labour on 45%, and other polling companies give Keir Starmer’s party leads of over 20 points. For context, in 1997, Labour won 43% of votes to the Conservatives’ 30% (with the Liberal Democrats on 17%). The 2019 election saw the Conservatives beat Labour by 12 points: 44% to 32%. Sunak’s popularity has also fallen since he took office amidst various controversies, with polling showing that the public now prefers Starmer for Prime Minister.
A vote share below 20% may seem unlikely for the Conservatives, but that will perhaps not be enough to save the party. The first-past-the-post electoral system used in British parliamentary elections (which the Conservative Party has ironically campaigned to keep) can cause parties to win far fewer seats than national vote totals would suggest they deserve. At the 1983 general election, the SDP/Liberal Alliance won over a quarter of votes, yet won only 23 out of 650 parliamentary constituencies. UKIP in 2015 provides a more recent example: 13% of all votes only won the party a single seat. There is also the possibility of tactical voting, with supporters of Labour and smaller parties teaming up to defeat Conservative candidates.
But I would also question whether a vote share of less than 20% for the Conservatives is really that implausible. After all, we only have to go back a few months to Liz Truss’s short tenure to find even worse polls for the party. One poll in October put the party aton 19%, with Labour aton an astonishing 53% of the vote; a different poll gave Labour an even larger lead of 36 points. Truss may be out of office, but it is still true that the Conservatives could fall further under an unpopular leader. Journalists speculate that Sunak could face a leadership challenge after an expected poor performance in the local elections in May. The party, in desperation, could send for Boris Johnson again, but it’s unlikely he would be able to reverse the Conservatives’ downward spiral – and he could even make things worse. Meanwhile, the right-wing party Reform UK has improved in recent polls, and even a small number of voters switching to the party could cost the Conservatives dozens of marginal seats.
The Conservatives have been described as “the world’s most successful party” – but their past victories don’t make them invincible, as an example from abroad shows. Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party won two general elections in the 1980s under a first-past-the-post system, but an unpopular leader, a poor campaign, and pressure from parties on the right and left resulted in the party falling from 157 seats to just 2 in 1993 (despite winning over 16% of the vote). The party subsequently dissolved and merged with another right-wing party. Back at home, the 2015 general election in Scotland saw Labour fall from holding 41 out of 59 seats to winning just one.
What would be the consequences of a Conservative collapse? For one thing, the party could fail to even win even second place, and lose the status of Official Opposition. The role could go to the Liberal Democrats, but one recent poll suggests the possibility of the Scottish National Party achieving this instead. A Scotland-only party having this title would be remarkable.
This same poll puts the Conservatives on just 45 seats (an eighth of their 2019 total). Can we really rule out such an outcome ? Or an even worse performance than this? Is there any sign that the party is prepared for the possibility? Labour, meanwhile, are predicted to hold a jaw-dropping 509 out of the 650 seats at Westminster. This would be by far the largest majority in living memory, well above the 400 or so MPs that Thatcher and Blair used to reshape the country. While the political ramifications of such a result are hard to predict, one thing is certain: Keir Starmer would have an unimaginable opportunity to transform Britain. But where are his radical plans for this? What would he do with this kind of power?
We may be eighteen months away from a revolution in British politics. It’s time for Labour and the Conservatives to act like it.