France is not the only country with an early election coming up: its neighbor and historic rival, the United Kingdom, goes to the polls next week, on 4 July. The election was not due until December, but prime minister Rishi Sunak, facing apparently inevitable defeat in any case, decided to go early for fear that things were only going to get worse.
Sunak took the job in October 2022 following the implosion of his predecessor, Liz Truss, but although he steadied the ship of state he has never been able to retrieve his party’s position in the polls. The Conservatives have consistently trailed the Labour opposition, led by Keir Starmer, by around twenty points. Although the media have made occasional attempts to project a sense of uncertainty – John Lyons this morning at the ABC inexplicably says “of course it’s possible that the Tories will win” – there is no doubt at all that Labour will win by a very large margin.
The interest is mostly in two (related) things: the size of Labour’s majority, and the subsequent state of the parties opposed to it. In 1997 Labour under Tony Blair won 418 of the then 659 (now 650) seats in the House of Commons for a majority of 177; Starmer may well beat that record, although it’s also likely that he would regard such a huge backbench as something of a mixed blessing.
The other noteworthy thing in 1997 was the rise of a third party: the Liberal Democrats won 46 seats, their best result since the 1920s, although the electoral system still worked strongly against them. Since then their fortunes have waxed and waned; they are now polling in the low teens, well off their 2010 peak of 23.0%, but tactical voting may still yield them a respectable share of seats. This time, however, there is another potential third force, philosophically the antithesis of the Lib Dems: the far-right Reform UK, led by Brexit architect Nigel Farage.
Although Britain was a member of the European Union for 47 years, it always remained something of an outsider, and its politics often diverged from the European pattern. But there were similarities as well, and they have persisted since it left the EU four and a half years ago. The most obvious one is the rise of the far right, and the way that it benefits from a protest vote when government is not at stake.
Last week I outlined the difference between the French far right’s performance in national and European elections. In Britain it’s very much the same story. In the 2009 election for the European parliament, Farage’s party (then called UKIP) won 16.0% of the vote, but in the following year’s British election it was just 3.1%. The 2014 European election saw its vote jump to 27.5%, but in 2015 nationally it was back to 12.6%. In Britain’s final European election, in 2019, what was then called the Brexit Party* won 30.5%, but in the British election later that year it could manage only 2.0%.
As in France, the voting system is part of the story: European elections were held under proportional representation, but national elections are single-member district. (In fact that effect is even more powerful than in France, because Britain has first-past-the-post rather than two-round election.) But there is clearly also something about European elections that encourages a protest vote, whether it’s a by-election effect or perhaps the salience of the EU as an issue for an anti-European party.
And while national differences are clearly visible, there are also very obvious similarities between Reform and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. Neither likes to be called “far right” – Farage, aided by Britain’s absurd libel laws, even managed to get the BBC to apologise for doing so – but there’s no doubt that the term fits. Both have enjoyed Russian patronage and faithfully repeat Vladimir Putin’s talking points (although Le Pen offered token criticism of the invasion of Ukraine), and both instinctively regard the EU as the enemy.
And both, of course, are obsessed with immigration, especially Muslim immigration. What might once have been dismissed as a fringe issue has come to occupy centre stage, largely thanks to the willingness of mainstream politicians to give it air. They, of course, are driven not primarily by their own beliefs (Sunak’s personal inclinations as to immigration seem relatively liberal) but by pressure from the grassroots of their own parties. As traditional party structures have degenerated, centre-right parties around the world have become increasingly captive to small numbers of unrepresentative activists, egged on by Putin’s money and by the poison of tabloid media.
But conceding policy ground to the far right has not stopped its rise. If the polls are right, Reform will get close to the Conservatives in terms of votes, although the voting system will probably still prevent it from winning many seats. It may be that what people are telling the pollsters is also a form of protest vote, and its performance on the day will not match up – but either way those protest voters will still be there when the dust settles, aiming to drag the Tory Party further and further onto Reform’s territory.
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* Technically this was not just a change of name; UKIP still existed (indeed it still does) but had faded to irrelevance after Farage left; he then formed the Brexit Party, which in 2021 was renamed Reform UK.
The World is Not Enough 