We now have a left wing Labour government. If we are on the right our task is to defeat Labour and elect a right wing government. How are we going to manage to do this? It’s really a matter of simple arithmetic.
Labour won 411 seats with 33.7% of the vote. Support for Labour increased only 1.6%.
Conservatives won 121 seats with 23.7% of the vote. Support for Conservatives decreased by 19.9%.
Reform won 5 seats with 14.29% of the vote.
If you add 23.7% to 14.9% you don’t get 126 seats. You win a landslide.
So what is the cause of us having a Labour government with a massive majority? It is not that support for Labour has massively increased. It is only just higher than it was in 2019 and much lower than it was in 2017 when it won 40% of the vote with Jeremy Corbyn leading.
So what is the change between 2017, 2019 and 2024? The answer is that in 2017 and 2019 there was no large scale voting for an alternative right wing party either UKIP or the Brexit Party. This is the reason the Conservatives were able to form a government after each election.
In 2024 however the right wing vote was split. 23% went for the Conservatives 14% went for Reform. The result was a Labour landslide with a paltry 33% of the vote.
Worse the Lib Dems won 72 seats with 12.22% of the vote. In order to get a right wing government we would need to overcome those seats also. The Lib Dems would be happy to form a coalition with Labour. So there is at present an overwhelming left/centre majority in parliament?
How do you overcome that?
You can continue to do what we did in 2024. Let’s say Reform doubled its seats at the next election and then doubled its seats at the election after that. By the time Reform wins a majority we will all be dead.
Perhaps Reform will completely destroy the Conservative Party and take over all the Conservative voters? But Reform was supposed to destroy the Conservative Party in 2024 and failed. The Conservatives are the opposition. Reform is with the others. The Conservatives have 25 times the seats of Reform.
So it is unrealistic for Reform to expect to overtake the Conservatives. If Nigel Farage ceased to be interested in Reform/UKIP/Brexit Party or his smoking and drinking caught up with him then Reform would retreat again to 3-4 %.
Even when the Conservatives were truly awful they still won nearly 24% of the vote. This is the Tory floor. It isn’t going to change.
So if we continue as we are at the next election Reform and the Conservatives might just take some vote share from Labour and the Lib Dems. We will all be sick of Labour by then. But it won’t make any difference. Labour will still win and if it doesn’t win outright it will still be able to form a coalition with the Lib Dems.
So what do you do? You can either have an electoral pact between the Conservatives and Reform or the two parties can merge or one can cease to exist or become so tiny that it doesn’t matter.
Reform voters and right wing Conservatives hold almost identical views. We are Thatcherites. The best hope for Thatcherism still lies with the Conservative Party. After all it was the Conservatives that gave us Thatcher. The membership of the Conservative Party is still right wing. After all, it chose Liz Truss. She blew her chance, but someone else might not have.
Ours is a two party system and will stay so as long as we have First Past the Post. The last time that changed was 100 years ago when Labour replaced the Liberals, because Labour was offering something radically different to liberalism. But Reform is not offering something radically different. It is offering Thatcherism, which many Conservatives already agree with. You can’t expect to replace the Conservatives with conservatism.
I don’t think the Conservatives will give way to Reform or make a pact or even an informal deal. Why should they? They are the opposition. You have 5 seats. It would be like the Conservatives merging with the DUP. That’s just not going to happen.
So unfortunately we are going to have to reproduce the 2024 election until Reform voters learn simple arithmetic. One splitting the right wing votes gives you a Labour government. Two having 5 seats stops precisely zero rubber dinghies crossing the Channel.
The far left got nowhere with the Socialist Workers Party, but was able to take over the Labour Party and came close to making Jeremy Corbyn Prime Minister. The task for the right is not to create a right wing equivalent of the Socialist Workers Party called Reform, it is to take over the Conservative Party and make it Thatcherite again.
Unfortunately explaining this to Reform voters is like explaining simple arithmetic to infants, they struggle for a while but eventually they get it. Meanwhile the rest of us have to endure a permanent Labour government.
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