Yesterday we contemplated the disaster that has overtaken the Australian Liberal Party as a result of its dalliance with the far right. But it’s not the only (nominally) centre-right party with this sort of problem. Last week’s local elections in Britain illuminated the troubles facing that country’s Conservative Party and, just possibly, may have given it some hope of finding a road out.
The headline result was grim. The far-right party, Reform, won 1,454 of the five thousand-odd local council seats being contested, well ahead of Labour’s 1,068. They were followed by the Liberal Democrats on 844, the Conservatives on 801 and the Greens on 587. But Labour still controls the larger number of councils: 28 (down 37), as against 15 for the Lib Dems (up three), 14 Reform (up 14), nine Conservative (down eight) and five Green (up five), leaving 65 where no one party has control (up 23).
Since it’s only a selection of wards or councils voting each year you can’t directly infer a national trend. (Wikipedia will give you a gloriously complicated explanation of just who was voting.) But the BBC’s extrapolation to national vote shares (not counting Northern Ireland) comes out at Reform 26%, Greens 18%, Conservatives and Labour each 17% and Lib Dems 16%. That’s very similar to the most recent opinion polling, although slightly more encouraging for the Lib Dems.
It hardly needs saying that results like that, if repeated at a general election, would produce a dog’s breakfast of a House of Commons – not to mention a bonanza for tactical voting. But since there’s no election due for another three years there’s no point fixating on the precise numbers. What matters is what they say about the predicament that the different parties face.
Labour’s problems have been getting most of the attention recently. Prime minister Keir Starmer is fearsomely unpopular and most pundits think that his days are numbered, although his replacement is not yet obvious. But leadership can only do so much. Labour’s main problem is structural: it is facing a future in which it cannot win a majority without help from the Lib Dems or the Greens, and it is in denial about that fact.
The Conservatives, however, have an equally serious problem. They have been trailing Reform in the polls since the beginning of last year and have yet to settle on a strategy to deal with the situation. They know, just like Australia’s Liberal Party, that the far right is out to replace them, but they can’t help trying to imitate its policies. As a result they are unable to answer basic but pressing questions about the relationship: Will they pursue some sort of electoral pact with Reform? Would they govern with it in coalition? What actual policy disagreements do the parties have?
First-past-the-post voting makes things more volatile, as a party’s vote can collapse suddenly if its voters decide it’s not in a winning position. (As happened to Reform, then called the Brexit Party, in 2019.) But it does give the Conservatives one advantage; they at least don’t have to have the argument about preferences that we’ve just seen in Australia. Preferences come down to the hard reality of marks on a how-to-vote card, but the questions about future co-operation with Reform can be fudged indefinitely – or at least until the election results are in.
Perhaps because of that greater capacity for ambiguity, the Conservatives can see some hopeful signs in last weeks results. They might be trailing Reform by nine points, but a year ago that was 15 points. For much of last year Reform was polling around 30%; while it’s still in the lead it no longer looks unstoppable. And Starmer’s woes inevitably reflect well on the Conservatives, who are, after all, the official opposition.
So Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, although she often looks out of her depth, seems to be in slightly better shape than Angus Taylor. But these days that’s a very low bar.
The World is Not Enough 
Some thoughts I’m working out.
The Liberals and the Conservatives seemed to be going on different paths in the first half of last decade. While the Australian party was opposing action on climate change, opposing same-sex marriage, and presenting a narrower vision of Australia’s population, the UK party was acting to change the UK’s energy sources, it had let the country on a relatively smooth path to recognising same sex marriage, and Cameron was trying to foster a party that represented more of the diversity of Britain. Whatever might have happened in the interim, Cameron’s work on the party makeup remains sharply visible: while the next two leaders after him were white, they’ve had a Hindu prime minister and their current leader grew up in Nigeria to parents of Nigerian background.
I find the apparent similarity between what’s happened to the two in recent years to be surprising. I think it deserves an explanation that goes deeper than just some vague “Australians and Britons are similar people” – as much as our history might relate to theirs, and as much as our politicians look to theirs for examples and theirs look to ours, I don’t think Australian and British voters really know much or care about what’s going on in each other’s country.
The Liberal party’s woes are usually traced back to Howard’s remodelling of the party, but that has been a generational shift. The Conservative party’s woes are usually traced back to their last period in government. When a party loses government, they usually suffer worse than they should, and it’s fun to believe that we’re in the middle of history and watching the collapse of something established, but then the party gets a grip and recovers and rebuilds and it’s just a thing to take in stride. If the Liberals are experiencing a generational collapse, it means there’s more and more Australians at each election who have never voted for them. The recovery by the Conservatives at these local elections compared to the last parliamentary election is an indicator.
In this perspective, the availability of Reform has allowed the Conservative’s vote to crash – but a good campaign could recover it. But in Australia, the Liberal vote began to spray first, before One Nation was able to start vacuuming it up. Reform and One Nation aren’t a pair by any means. They’re part of a landscape of parties that includes AfD, RN, PVV, the Republicans etc. That’s why the Conservatives’ lot is different this time than after a standard election loss: Britain’s political landscape was configured in a way that reflected international trends, and Farage has been able to take advantage of it.
So I think we can rely on the differences in diagnoses to come up with different prognoses. The Conservatives are weak: Reform could knock them out, but they will probably recover. The Liberals are dying: they might yet recover, but the next non-Labor government in Australia will probably be something new.
Therefore, I propose that there might be more similarity between the UK Conservatives and Australian Labor, and between UK Labour and the Australian Liberals, than between Australian and UK Labor or between the Conservatives and the Liberals.
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Thanks Casoar, that’s really interesting. Yes, there was certainly a time under Cameron when the Tories seemed to be going in quite a different direction. I think having been in opposition for so long gave them flexibility (you might call it desperation), whereas the Liberal Party at the same time was imprisoned by John Howard’s years of success. Malcolm Turnbull couldn’t modernise the way Cameron did, and even now the Liberals resist any suggestion that the Howard legacy should be re-examined. But Cameron’s program came to grief with Brexit, which may have put them in a similar position.
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the working class is flocking to Reform and ON because they listen to what these voters want and Max Mather, David Shoebridge/Lee Brown, Nick McKim and et al tell them what they should want and that they’ll get it anyway (Sue Higginson [GRN, NSW MLC] [paraphrased]: “There is more than the ballot box”).
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PK – Well if that’s true, they’d better enjoy it while they can. If Reform or One Nation wins a majority there won’t be another free election for a long time.
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