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August 15, 2024 - 7:00am
Six weeks after the election, surviving Conservative MP Neil O’Brien produced his own analysis of the result, highlighting the emergence of new dynamics in British politics. Unfortunately for the Conservatives, there may not be a comforting narrative for them to rely on. O’Brien has identified that now there are few three-way marginals, but instead two distinct groups of battlegrounds: around 300 seats where the Tories face Labour, and over 80 where Lib Dems and the Conservatives face off. Brought together, as he puts it, Labour and Lib Dems are forming an anti-Tory coalition.
The diagnosis is pretty accurate. The overriding narrative of the election was that it was about getting the Tories out. The problem for the party is that if 2029 becomes about keeping them out, this coalition could hold with brutal effectiveness. That, in turn, could make the next election harder than the recent one for the Conservatives.
Recent evidence suggests that winning back power is already difficult. In 2001, the Conservatives gained just one seat back from Labour. In both 1983 and 2015, the Labour Party went backwards after its first defeat. The Tories may hope that a more volatile politics helps them flip last month’s result in one term, but that very much goes against the precedent of previous majorities.
The solidification of an anti-Conservative coalition would make things much harder for the party. At present, Labour can focus on defending seats, while the Lib Dems might hope to pick off a few of the seats where they came close this time. If voters remain motivated against the Tories, this looks like a simple task. For one thing, voting tactically is easier if you have an incumbent MP to rally behind or where someone lost narrowly last time. In somewhere like Shropshire South, for example, it would only take 2000 Labour-Lib switches to flip the seat away from the Tories.
Some of the other trends of 2024 should also worry the Tories. Turnout was down, and many on the Left backed the Greens or independent candidates. Labour won a huge majority with nearly a million fewer votes than when they lost in 2019. This was partly fuelled by complacency about how the result would turn out, giving voters a sense it was “safe” to go elsewhere. If these voters fear a Tory return, they might be more motivated to get to the polling station and back Labour.
Underneath all this sits a huge structural problem for the Conservatives. Their vote is now heavily skewed towards the old, making it vulnerable to a more natural form of attrition. Statistics suggest that around a million Tory voters will pass away between now and the next poll, and at present, they are not being replaced among younger cohorts. The Tories have to win back a huge amount of people who deserted them this July just to stay still.
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SubscribeFive years is a long time in politics. However, I expect the Lib Dems to be at a historic high water mark, and they will go backwards significantly next time around.
Wishful thinking
Why so?
Not really – they will remain as irrelevant as ever (bar those few years of lying about – then conspiring to implement – tuition fees, followed by failing to build nuclear capacity). A less deserving bunch of carbon-wasters is hard to imagine.
Yada yada yada.
Let’s just wait until labour messes up and the scandals start piling up, then let’s talk again.
And, what are the Lib Dems again?
This article is a dud, locked into all the obvious assumptions about the 14Y Tories and the pre Starmer era. The first weeks have revealed that Starmer is no treading lightly and not offering standard issue mangerial technocratic practice. It is pursuing a hardcore almost revolutionary set of progressive and angi capitalist/socialist policies which threaten ruin and severe national crisis. Growth will vanish fast and he and Reeves will alienate millions – beginning with the tax battered private sector and middle class ‘unearners’ as they are soaked and punished. No society steered into such a GDR-like Big State v Free Enterprise direction can avoid stagnation and collapse. No society with such insane energy policies can stay stable. With welfare entitlement and joblessness both soaring, mass migration keeping the property market locked in its unaffordable bubble and attempts to concrete over the provinces with boxes destined to both alienate and fail, even Labour’s core supporters in the creaking broken public sector will not avoid pain. The fact of the UK’s de facto bankrupcy and need for IMF shock treatment hits home around 2028/9. Big State Starmerite ideology will be rejected. A brand new reformed centre right Tory party has the opportunity and duty to prepare for that crisis, not the status quo ante.
Quite a good summary in parts of what 14yrs of Right wing Neo-liberalism has left us with. The endeavour to ‘advance blame’ Starmer noted too but falls a bit flat given his inheritance. He will have to go some to do even worse.
It amazes me that somebody who subscribes to UnHerd is quite so uncritical in preferring rhetoric over reality. The Conservatives are of course are extremely tough on immigration (their rhetoric) and extremely loose (their practice). Any adult of reasonable intelligence who is determined not to be partisan can see the huge gulf between rhetoric and reality. Of course politically this seemed clever for a short period of time for the Conservatives but in the longer term has proven a disaster for them.
Never has a government gained quite so little kudos about almost any measure it takes. This might include for example the two pounds bus fare – a far more genuinely inclusive measure that any introduced by the socialist Scottish or Welsh governments. Not based on the identity categories of race, gender or age, but just assisting people who use buses, the great majority who earn lower than average income. Whatever the rights and wrongs of that policy – and it is very costly to the Treasury, it is a million miles away from some caricature Dickensian workhouse policy that of course “the Tories” always impose (you kind of wonder how they ever managed to get elected!).
We haven’t had anything resembling a free market policy for a long time now so yours is just a straw man argument. Taxes are at another 70-year high, not a low. Let’s just see if and how Labour is going to significantly improve even on the economic front. If not no doubt it’s supporters will keep talking about a Conservative legacy, or claim that the Labour Party is also a neoliberal party whatever that ill-defined “boo” term may by then mean!
I’m a pragmatist, but the claims of those people who just think the state should intervene more – and essentially make better decisions than private businesses – need to be challenged against the historical legacy. We tried industrial policy in the past in the 1960s. Perhaps we could have some kind of unifying feature based on the need for a much more competent central government, not just a bigger one. Poor old maligned Singapore (by the Left) – we really ought to learn something from that state! Already Keir Starmer has capitulated to the rail the train drivers who are out the least deserving group of people for pay increases you could imagine.
Haha!! Yes I remember those mad dog Thatcherite chainsaw wielding tax cutting anti lockdown anti Climate Change anti ESG maniacs, bashing welfarism and setting the poor NHS on fire with their brutal cutbacks!!! What planet are you on JW? The Tories were total fakes; they inherited huge unfolding structural catastrophes/bombs from the new Blairite/EU State of the 90s and proceeded to make all worse – by doubling down as if they were Big State Starmerites. To name but a few of the legacy crises; 875bn post banking crash QE and the zero interest rate lalaland – check, worsened. Magic money bailouts from empty State coffers – check, furlough insanity and Truss energy deal. The open border/free movement unplanned and uncontrolled wave of mass migration mega – check, worsened. The no build property hyper bubble and heist enriching the London and SE Elite – check, worsened. The 20 year sacrifice of energy security (no nukes, expensive unconnected green farms and destruction of North Sea Oil jobs) on the altar of EU climate religion – again, your Trumpist so called “Neo Liberal’ Tories bent the knee again. For the 1000th time; the Tories from Cameron to limp Runaway Rishi were weasly adjuncts to the established Progressive New Order. Their betrayal of every single conservative value is the reason Lanour’s shallow mediocrities have got their hands on power. See if those long lasting structural legacies do not devour them too.
You write as though the average punter will be thinking ” poor Kneeler-he was dealt a bad hand-lets give him another 5 years even though the Country has declined further”-they knew what they were taking on and so far they have effctively shut down the North Sea energy industry(just wait for the job losses and tax receipt collapse),given up on any coherent law & order approach-lets jail facebook warriors and release career ciminals after 40% of their sentence(I mean-wtf!!!),capitulated to public sector wage demands (watch the inflation figure at the start of next year),abrogated any responsibility for the levels of illegal immigration,agreed to let rip on compulsory green belt land aquisition together with no consulation win dfarms,solar fileds and pylons.
I reckon the next budget will be as about anti growth as you can get and with net debt=100 % gdp and a declining tax base it will accelerate the inflexion point after which debt interest exceeds GDP growth so such an extent that we go into freefall.
And Right wing Neo-liberalism?????????????…..lets leave aside the definition of “right wing” for another day and take the generally accepted definition of “neo liberalism”-ie free-market capitalism, deregulation, and reduction in government spending:
Yeah-we#v ehad 14 years of that!!!
27yrs
14yrsof Right wing Neo-liberalism.Hysterical. You need to increase the dose f your medication.
Anything constructive to say? No?
No for sure. A very rude and silly man.
Though I am centre right I am glad the Tories seem to be out for 10-15 years, if not more. Since Cameron’s time the party has been run by entitled upper class-incestuous fools. They have brought Britain to it’s sad state and allowed ideological lefties in to government to further harm the country. I see nothing but rivers of blood and penury for the British wrought by the Tories and finalised by Labour. The only thing that may save the UK is a move further right by the far left champagne socialists who live for good reviews from The Guardian. The Tories are not the answer.
The tendency to have private school types from privileged backgrounds running the Tories clearly doesn’t help and good you flag that, but it’s too easy for the Right to blame personalities and not grasp the fundamental problems with Neo-Liberalism. That continues to be almost too painful for the Right to admit.
What is “neoliberalism” in your view and how is it manifested in the United Kingdom today?
Its whatever “the Tories” have been doing whilst in power-its a highly malleable concept with no basis in reality other than an ex post rationale of failure-
Oh dear, your ignorance does explain much – ‘approach that favours free-market capitalism, deregulation, and reduction in government spending encapsulated originally in mid 19th century and fundamental part of the Thatcher/Reagan Neo-Liberal prospectus’
It’s key manifestation in the UK is the growth in inequality with the v rich gaining much, whilst public services and public realm has decayed. It’s also worsened the North-South divide. The failure of many key privatisations also being a classic example.
And so you see the working classes the Right wants to appeal to aren’t buying this approach has all the answers. Fundamental problem for the Right that it’s ducking, or possibly hoping to mask by wiping up ‘fear of the other’
You left out ‘free movement of labour and capital’.
He has absolutely no idea what the term means – or that it is embodied so perfectly in his beloved EU. That’s what makes this so funny.
the fundamental problems with Neo-Liberalism
(smacks forehead) JW, you are just about the most fundamentalist neo-liberal writing on these pages!! You don’t even know what it is, do you?
The article assumes Labour will not come to be seen as useless as or more useless as the Conservatives and that the Conservatives continue to offer the sort of flaccid Blairite policies with trivial nannystate additions that Labour have been happy to adopt. Will Labour become as hated as the Conservatives were by the next election? Quite possibly if they follow the path currently indicated and events can accelerate the process.
I recall all the commentary after Johnson’s overwhelming victory to the effect that Labour would be out of power for a generation and how difficult it would be for Labour to overturn the massive majority. Those predictions didn’t stand the test of time. Why should the predictions of this article?
You may be right, but there are some fundamental differences.
First on ‘character’ Starmer highly unlikely to commit the sins of a Johnson. Secondly Labour not wedded to the lies inherent in such a Policy as Brexit which was always going to slowly unravel and deflate Right leaning supporters.
To be fair Tories complete lack of sense in going with Mad Liz matched by Labour and Corbyn, but whilst I suspect Labour learnt from that not entirely certain Tories have yet.
Given Starmer’s behaviour when he went to Southport I am surprised you have a positive view of his character.
He arrived with a group of bigwigs, a people carrier having been parked behind to keep the plebs out of the way and create a backdrop. He failed to express the least empathy with the crowd, most of whom would have been “natural labour voters”. He didn’t even make eye contact. Having laid his wreath he scarpered as fast as his legs would carry him. When he arrived there was one man barracking him, when he left he had turned the whole crowd against him, with one woman who clearly knew one of the murdered dead children crying hysterically. Appalling behaviour, possibly contributing to subsequent events.
If he were wiser he would either have stayed away or said some comforting words to the crowd. King Charles, or many other politicians, would have known what was needed. Starmer is a cold fish and will rapidly become extremely unpopular.
Agree about the tories, they were worse than useless.
Were you there? Or maybe just seen the brief TV edit? If you actually physically present then I’m listening. If not you have a 2nd hand view don’t you?
That said these moments are crucial for a credible politician so would concur he has to handle these well.
Fair comment. I wasn’t there, so yes my description is based on the video someone else has taken and/ or edited and it could be biased. But the footage is taken from close to the bigwigs, and good quality, so likely to be from a mainstream media source, most of whom are not opposed to Starmer. And it would be surprising if there are not other videos in circulation taken by individuals, some of whom would be labour loyalists; at the moment they are the single most popular party after all. I’m not a user of X/ twitter (never have been) so perhaps I’m missing an alternative viewpoint, but if he’d done a walkabout I think we’d know.
Leaving out all the verbs doesn’t make you seem more authoritative, you know. Just pretentious.
Possibly the biggest fundamental difference is that Starmer is fully aligned with the so-called Blob, so wont be fighting rearguard actions on that front.
The Conservatives are paying the price for surrendering the education system to the middle class left. Had they introduced a voucher system when they had the chance this would be a very different and much happier country.
Its very simple. The British people want competence, good public services, not to pay through the nose on taxes, noticeably lower immigration and to be left alone. If any party can deliver that, they will likely win the next election. Labour have 5 years to mess up the above. My guess is they will do it in less that 2. The British public will notice.
‘…Labour have 5yrs to mess up the above’ – implies they’ve a rather benign inheritance which of course is far from the case. The bar is probably make all these a little better than they are now, and that is poss.
It’s true labour have inherited an unfavourable position, mainly due to COVID and lockdown. This position would have been much worse if labour had been in power, as they would have locked down harder for longer, or at least that’s what they said they wanted at the time. It’s too early to judge labour’s time in power, but it seems to me all the indications are that things are going to get worse, economically and socially. Time will tell.
To refine your comment, it’s more a case of whether they “believe” a party can/will deliver these things. That’s a very tall order in the case of the Tories.
No mention of the Reform Party here??
I hoped that Labour would win such an embarrasingly large majority of seats on a such a pitiful share of the votes that PR would be firmly in play for 2029. The first thing definitely happened, but nobody seems to be talking about electoral reform.
Maybe Labour rather like the idea of PR, to them, if it ain’t broke….?
Anyone making 5 year predictions given the huge volatility of politics and voting patterns over the past 5 years is a fool. Doubly so for doing so this early into a parliament.
It just highlights for me the idiocy of ‘tories bad, anything else good’ or its cousin ‘get the Tories out’. People really don’t have any detailed idea about what they like or don’t like in terms of policy from prospective governments, they just go on ‘feels’.
So If your peers all tell you that red should make you feel good, cause they are good, and blue makes you feel bad, because they are bad (or evil, depending who you ask) then that’s how you will vote.
I used to be absolutely convinced about the democratic franchise, that the demos can usually be trusted to return the correct result most of the time…now I’m not so sure. I think people are living inside echo chambers with tiny attention spans and a lack of critical thought. Let’s see what 2029 brings.
PS not to deny that the last 14 years of Tories were a shambles…but what we have now is possibly worse
For democracy to work you have to have a population educated in enlightenment values. This is why the left have devoted so much of their effort for the past fifty years on subverting the education system and excluding those values from what children are taught.
The Tories/The Right been in power 32 years out of last 50. As ever you seem to give greater credit to Left’s ability to influence public policy than the ‘time in actual power’ would indicate. 32 years Tories controlled the curriculum.
That said delighted you extol teaching of Enlightenment values. Concur. Maybe your Maths though needs bit of work?
you seem to give greater credit to Left’s ability to influence public policy than the ‘time in actual power’ would indicate
Governments have little or no control over what actually happens in schools (as you well know)
Well, the Tories could at least have tried a bit harder!
Some serious wishful thinking in this article by a contributor to the Cosmopolitan Globalist (prop: G. Soros).
Depressing, but probably correct. The Tories, even with the excellent Kemi Badenoch in charge (they’d be mad to bother with anyone else), will be heavily reliant on Keir Starmer’s Labour government becoming seriously unpopular.
There is little doubt that it will become a good deal less popular than it presently is, but that won’t be enough. I suspect that something on the scale of the banking crisis would be necessary to make it happen, and it would be reckless to wish for such a thing purely for partisan political reasons.
Unduly pessimistic, I think. Starmer got fewer votes that Corbyn. He’s not personally very appealing and his policy platform is so full of huge contradictions that his tenure is bound to be very rocky.
It’s true that the Labour seat majority is wide but shallow – ie propped up on individual seat majorities that would change with only very small swings in voter sentiment.
But it is also true that Labour can improve on its low overall percentage and entrench its majority: that’s the flip side of winning on a low turnout. And since the Tories and Labour in July 2024 were effectively competing to see who had the shinier marketing strategy around more or less the same prospectus, the Tories by 2029 have to construct a genuine centre-right alternative to Labour that can still command a majority, not put voters off with the inevitably-needed austerity measures, and still outfox Reform.
It’s not easy, even if this Labour government makes a pig’s ear of everything, which it’s already in the process of doing.
How can you discuss possible results of next election without even mentioning Reform voters?
How many extra seats would Tories had if Reform votes went to them?
I am sure someone calculated it.
What is really bad for Tories are possible electoral changes.
Like giving votes to 16 years old and non citizens.
Author argument about Tory voters dropping dead is nonsense.
We heard this for the last 40 years and somehow Tories were in power for most of this period.
Silly article….. a week is a long time in politics and 5 years are an aeon!
I don’t think many people seriously envisage the Conservative Party returning to power in five years, for some of the reasons discussed. If they are to return it will be a ten year project (at least) involving building a new grassroots organisation, a new central organisation, creating new party-led policy formation groups, and distancing itself from right wing ‘think tanks’ some of which have had a baleful influence. Above all, thinking about ways to reach and recruit younger voters and addressing their concerns as well as the middle aged, and the various groups within these demographics. It was done successfully before, in the inter-war years and in the 1940s, and can be again but it means big changes and unity of purpose, but does the party retain its survival instincts which served it so well in the past?
Tory vote dropped 7.2 million from 2019, 3.5 million went to Reform and 3.7 million stayed at home. Labour and LibDem votes also went down, although only slightly. This was the chuck the Tories out election for being incompetent, corrupt and failing across so many areas!
Well, we all know that! So what is your suggestion for getting them out of their mess?
My suggestion (if anyone cares) is to adopt the programme of the Social Democrat Party – leaning right on social issues, but left on the economy.
The anti Tory coalition on 4th July produced a situation where the Labour Party has an overall majority of 170 on 34% of those who voted. The implication from this article is that in future elections a similar situation will arise where the Liberal Democrats, Greens and Reform will also be in permanent opposition and thus as ineffectual as the Conservatives.
‘The 2024 election was the worst election result the Tories have ever had’. In electoral terms yes, but in broader political terms it should be seen as an opportunity to reset from a party of the past to a party of the future. Labour is already sowing the seeds of its future defeat; ideological restructuring of education into ‘social justice’, impractical and expensive ‘green’ policies, cronyism of appointments, public sector pay rises and impending tax rises to pay for them, 2 tier policing and justice with the demos, a worse immigration record. More will follow. This is the Tories chance to ditch its past poor policies and people, reform its constituency selection procedures, recruit candidates from a much broader demographic, with real world experience, and come up with an ‘offering’ based on the medium and long term health and success of the country, not short term popularity. The LibDems? Who?
The political slant of UnHerd is centre right mainly. Accordingly there is an inbuilt bias against centre left anything. Sadly, this begets illogical hysteria about Labour after only a few weeks in power. Starmer is a technocrat. He’s entered government with an actual zeal for competence. He is a bureaucrat through and through. He will analyze and then act. Boris Johnson was nothing more nor less than a clown on the make, or was it on the take? Probably both. Good riddance to the weak minded chancer, I say.
I, for one want Starmer to succeed, for the good of the UK. Too many on UnHerd just want him to fail so they can say anything Labour is useless.
I seem to remember reading that there are a bunch of Labour seats in the Red Wall where Reform came second. What happens if Reform inherits the Red Wall, Kemosabe?
All these stats were done when the Tories were in power, Cameroon conservatism won young for simple reasons. They weren’t Labour (who’d been in forever and mucked it up) and weren’t the (lying) liberals who raised tuition. Plenty of conservatives in gen Z and millennials who can’t stand woke and like the country. They just don’t think the Tories believe that, frankly I don’t I’m a Tory member. Given a minority of young people vote, and of those only around 20-15 % vote Labour (of all elidgible to vote only 70% register, only 60% bother to turn up less this election) meaning only 40% actually vote. Labour will lose the next election, it will not change anything substantially, the health service will continue crumbling, debt rising, immigration and crime tick up, authoritarian police tactics will continue, working class people will will be abandoned, men will continue to lose out. I could go on people will be more socially alienated. Plus the anti Tory coalition is on the Right just as much the left… reform is an anti Tory right wing party.