The mistakes that have led the Conservatives towards annihilation, and Labour copying them

 

Despite what you read, we have been here before. In the 2019 European Election, Farage and his Brexit party won over 30% of votes, with Labour on 14% and the Conservatives 9%. That directly led to the Conservatives adopting populism by electing Johnson as its leader. The Conservatives under Johnson ticked most of the boxes that define right wing populism: an all powerful leader, endemic lying, attacks on our pluralist democracy (e.g. suspending parliament), sidelining expertise (the second and third Covid waves), culture wars, corruption and so on. The one box he didn’t tick was reducing immigration, which is one reason the Conservatives lost big in 2024 and why Reform has now taken their place. [1]

To some extent the elections last week told us what we already knew, which is that both the two main traditional parties are very unpopular. It emphasised this unpopularity, however, because both Labour and Conservatives underperformed their current national polling as many of their voters didn’t bother to turn up. As the Liberal Democrats and the Greens also did very well, last week was about Labour and Conservative unpopularity more than the popularity of Reform.

If last week’s vote shares were repeated in a general election Ben Ansell calculates that Reform might win an outright majority, but with a bit of tactical voting a Labour/LibDem coalition is more likely. But neither result is that surprising when you see that the same calculations give the Conservatives just 10-20 seats. The Conservatives are in annihilation territory, with Reform taking their place.

Reform gets most of its voters from the Conservatives, and Farage sees the future of Reform as replacing them, so it is instructive to see why the Conservatives have so far utterly failed to stem the Reform tide. Under Sunak and Badenoch their line seems to have been: we agree with Farage on the key socially conservative issues and their importance, which is why you shouldn’t vote for him. It was Farage who first popularised the issue of what he termed an ‘invasion’ of small boats, and the Conservatives who invented a crackpot scheme to deal with them.

By adopting largely the same rhetoric of Farage on asylum and immigration, but failing to change things, the Conservative government set themselves up to lose large numbers of votes to Reform. Worse still, by adopting the language of Farage they alienated those Conservative voters who were economically right wing but socially liberal, and so in the General Election they lost a large number of seats to the Liberal Democrats.

There seems little chance that Badenoch will change this failed strategy, but equally there seems little chance that the strategy will suddenly come good. Put simply, their record on both immigration and asylum will over the next few years weigh more heavily with voters than their Farage-like rhetoric. So why would a voter who really cared about these issues vote for the Conservatives rather than Reform?

On the other hand, the success of the Liberal Democrats has a less secure foundation. If the Conservative party moved away from trying to beat Farage on socially conservative rhetoric and policies, and instead started to sound a little more liberal and less populist, then there is the potential to squeeze the LibDem vote in a general election. The Conservatives' not unreasonable argument would be that voting LibDem would keep Labour in power, because the Liberal Democrats are clearly not against cooperating with a minority Labour government while Reform could not.

To make that transformation the Conservatives would need a new leader, and here they have a problem. James Cleverly is the obvious alternative leader to achieve such a switch, but while a ballot of MPs might put him first, his main rival Robert Jenrick is far more popular with Tory members. These members, who are largely sympathetic to Farage and his agenda, have the final say in choosing a leader and will not want to choose someone who sounds more liberal.

The Conservatives seem to be hoping that over the next few years Farage and Reform lose some of their current appeal. That could occur if Reform makes a mess of running some councils and that gets media coverage, but would that coverage ever be extensive enough to influence predominantly low information Reform voters? Is there any other reason why the media might start subjecting Farage and Reform to proper scrutiny, when they have largely avoided doing so until now. The right wing press is increasingly acting as the media arm of Reform rather than the Conservative party.

Equally it is quite possible that, with more Reform politicians at the local level, we will see more internal dissent within the party. But that has happened already, and it doesn’t seem to have done Reform any harm at all. This is partly about media coverage, but it is also about the nature of a populist party where the leader is king, and unlike the Conservatives there is no means for the king to be deposed.

It is therefore not obvious why what happened to the Conservatives last week will not continue to happen over the next few years, and they will be facing wipe-out at the next general election. For this reason they will be desperate to do some kind of deal with Reform, but equally there is no obvious reason why Farage should cooperate. The final card Conservative MPs have is to offer Farage a merger that included his leadership of their party, which takes us back to those 2019 European election results. Conservative MPs dealt with that existential crisis by giving the leadership to their own right wing populist, when most MPs knew full well that he would be a terrible Prime Minister.

The possible death of the Conservative party is such a momentous milestone in UK politics that you would think the other main traditional UK party, Labour, would be doing everything they could not to make the same mistakes. Yet incredibly Labour seem to have decided to follow much the same strategy that failed the Conservative government so badly. They too are employing rhetoric and making policy that says Farage is right about small boats and immigration. This is alienating parts of their core vote just as the Conservatives alienated its southern heartlands.

The only way a Labour government can avoid a similar fate to the previous Conservative government is by having a really good (in the eyes of social conservatives) record on immigration and asylum. A record that was Farage proof. To see why that is very unlikely to happen, they just need to remember Cameron’s immigration targets.

What Labour, the Conservatives and Reform will not admit is that measures to directly reduce immigration have clear economic costs. If you stop granting visas during a period, like now, of low unemployment you create labour shortages that will reduce output in the short term, and may move jobs, output and therefore income overseas in the longer term. If you stop overseas students going to UK universities you will bankrupt some (with big losses to the local economy) and require government money to help others out. That is on top of the fact that cutting immigration makes the public finances worse. [2]

There was a reason why Cameron didn’t try to hit his targets for immigration. But the fact that he had targets which he missed played into Farage’s hands, who blamed free movement under the EU. Is Labour really prepared to reduce real incomes and growth to hit low levels of immigration? Even if they did, small boat numbers are largely governed by events overseas over which the UK government has almost no control. By mimicking Farage on these issues they are laying the ground for their failure in the eyes of voters.

Will Labour see sense on this? The FT’s George Parker writes: “Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff, will pore over the results on Friday and is likely to conclude that he is right to pursue a “Blue Labour” strategy to address the populist threat — a policy which is already starting to be deployed.” Parker is probably right, unfortunately, but hasn’t this strategy already been deployed since Labour were elected, and for some time before that as well? Are last week’s results more a comment on the failure of that policy?

Or George Eaton in the New Statesman: “expect an increasing number of MPs to demand a “reset” – greater action to reduce immigration (one of the defining issues in Runcorn) and an avoidance of further austerity measures.” Except as any Labour MP should know reducing immigration will increase the need for austerity measures given Labour's fiscal rules, or do these MPs believe the Reform party politicians who falsely say the opposite?

And this, suggesting Labour’s unpopularity is all the fault of Ed Miliband and trying to save the planet! And this. Many Labour ministers, MPs and advisors seemed to have learnt nothing from the demise of the Conservative party.

As I have argued before, it would be far better if Labour started developing a more distinctive line on immigration issues, which didn’t just parrot Farage. Crucially they need to start relating immigration to the jobs immigrants do, and start talking about the causes of high UK immigration at the same time as showing why crude targets are either pointless or damaging. On asylum they need to talk about international fairness and establish safe routes. As yet there is no sign of any of those things happening. [3]

[1] Even earlier, right wing populism achieved its first majority win in the UK with the Brexit referendum.

[2] Migrants tend to be young, so pay taxes but put below average demand on public services. In the short term it is what the OBR does that matters, and here is their analysis.

[3] Unfortunately the Labour government is not just copying Conservative strategy on immigration and Reform, it is in danger of effectively doing so on growth and public services too. In the General Election the Conservatives lost so badly not just (or even mainly) because of immigration but because living standards were stagnant and public services had been run into the ground. There is some evidence that, in terms of losing voters to Reform in Runcorn at least, these issues mattered more than immigration.

On growth and public services Labour wants to do much better than the Conservatives, but they have not as yet put the resources in place to do so. Joining the EU’s customs union and harmonisation of standards would lead to significantly higher growth quite quickly, but Labour are moving much more slowly because they don’t want to upset social conservatives. By pretending they can make Brexit work they are not using one of their strongest weapons against the man who championed it during the referendum.

On public services Labour have stopped the ridiculous additional cuts the Conservative government had pencilled in, but they haven’t raised taxes enough to significantly improve service provision compared to levels they inherited. Hence their very unpopular decisions to end the winter fuel allowance and cut disability benefits. As I note here, planned total current public spending in four years time is slightly below the level it was at the end of the previous Conservative government.

Labour say that they have taken unpopular decisions to enable improvements that will come good over the next few years. If they believe that then they are in serious danger of deluding themselves. The reality is that they have taken unpopular decisions for very little money, so the big danger is that voters will not see future benefits and will decide that a Labour government is little better than a Conservative one, and vote for something different.