Reform UK, the Right-wing party set up by Nigel Farage, will hand Labour a huge majority by drawing millions of voters away from the Conservatives, polling suggests.
The former Brexit Party, now led by the businessman Richard Tice, will cost the Conservatives 96 seats, a YouGov poll predicts.
That’s without Nigel returning to lead it.
Mr Tice’s party is predicted to win 13 per cent of the vote,
Without concentrated regional support you need a few more percent than that to start winning seats. Start to go 5 and 6% above that and you start to win swathes.
So, what’s Nigel worth on the campaign trail? And will he run?
I’ve promised to buy him a pint if he does. Contrary to his projected image, it probably won’t be enough…
Penny Mordaunt, the Leader of the House, is one of several Cabinet ministers predicted to lose their seat thanks to a strong showing by Reform in her Portsmouth North constituency
Lol, goodbye fatty.
It is a similar story for Gillian Keegan, the Education Secretary, Victoria Prentis, the Attorney General, Lucy Frazer, the Culture Secretary and Johnny Mercer, the minister for veterans’ affairs.
The biggest showing for Reform is predicted to be in Ashfield, held by Lee Anderson,
Reform are taking out the trash like it’s Boxing Day.
I’ll vote for them anyway. But yes, Nigel returning to lead them would be the best political news of the year. Maybe of the century.
The Conservatives losing seats doesn’t necessarily mean Reform winning them. I think the impication is that Labour, and possibly the odd LibDem here and there will be the ones to benefit. The Conservatives though, need to blame themselves rather than the Reform party for their woes. The emergence of an genuinely conservative political party was a direct result of the actual Conservative party failing for decades to be actually conservative.
Doesn’t matter. The tory party needs to be utterly annihilated.
As does labour, but one at a time. Unless we decide to use the Guy Fawkes method.
I assume he’ll be back and the announcement will be made when it will cause the most mischief. Here’s hoping.
“… by drawing millions of voters away from the Conservatives”
FYI to media. The guy doing that is sitting in Number 10 Downing Street. It’s their own fault, not some evil plot to somehow steal votes by offering an alternative.
The sense of entitlement of the Tories is enough to make you vote for anybody but them.
They were warned that they had been “loaned” the votes and did sod all about it other than coming out with some empty slogans about levelling up and ignoring the wishes of the vast majority to curb immigration.
Until they start talking about why anyone should vote for them rather than against anyone else they should be ignored.
If the price of getting rid of the tories is suffering labour for a few years it’ll be worth it.
I emailed my MP last year, asking if he’d noticed an influx of non europeans to the area.
His reply : “As it stands, I have not noticed* the growing number of non europeans living now in Clacton”.
Well your fucking constituents have:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/01/13/cut-immigration-levels-voters-nine-of-10-constituencies/
“The most hawkish seat was Clacton, in Essex, where 67 per cent wanted greater controls over immigration and lower numbers”.
*So admitting there has been an increase but that you’ve chosen to ignore it.
There’s no point in voting for Reform unless they stand a chance of winning in the constituency in which you vote. Annihilating the Tories electorally would (1) only embed the left-liberal establishment even further, as Labour would probably remain in power for a generation (with the Lib Dems as the official ‘opposition’) and (2) would probably splinter the right-of-centre vote indefinitely because (a) Reform would prove as fissiparous as UKIP etc and (b) Reform’s programme would deny it an electoral majority unless it moved significantly towards the soggy centre – in which case what would the annihilation of the Tories have achieved?
BiW:
The tory party needs to be utterly annihilated.
Yup, though I’m sure they’ll fail to learn the real lesson which is that the British are desperate for a right-wing party to vote for, and will just double down on their ongoing shift to the left.
There’s no betting yet for individual constituencies but I’m hopeful the good people of Kingston and Surbiton will give Ed Davey a good kicking by electing the independent former deputy post mistress who will be standing against him
@Theophrastus
The point is that the conservatives are not going to win the next election regardless of how you vote. Seeing a big swing to Reform (even if Reform win no seats) will make them think about how they can win those voters back, and may actually see them get on board with proper conservative policies before the next election. If not, people will be more ready to vote for Reform
Theo – A large Labour majority would be dreadful, yes, but would it be that much worse than the hulk of complacent inertia of the present shambles? If it’s the price to pay in order to annihilate the Tories then so be it. Equally, an incoming Labour government’s room for manoeuvre will be seriously constrained and the support of the public sector (including the civil service, quangocracy, charities, obviously) will melt away when their “legitimate” demands aren’t met. The flagship policy of VAT on school fees will bite them seriously in the backside by raising a pittance in tax and destabilising the state education system.
The current poll predates the discomfiture of Ed Davey so perhaps the Lib Dems won’t have such a good election and voters looking for somewhere to park their vote might go for the Greens or Reform instead.
For the Tories in any event the old tribalism has died. Good.
The Conservatives losing the election will just prove to them that they haven’t gone far enough leftwared and will steamroller even further into state funding, money printing, state control, open gates, thought policing to make Stalin blush.
You’re probably right jgh. However I am getting tired of the Libs here in Oz continually creeping leftwards.
Perhaps I’ll even check to see if Bob Katter’s party has a candidate in my electorate. At least he wants to kill all the crocs.
Theo – Annihilating the Tories electorally would (1) only
Who cares? Our country died of AIDS and it’s not coming back. But we’re still here, so stop pining for the fjords and embrace Clownageddon.
Kick Tories.
Throw shit at Tories.
Give Tories Chinese burns.
Herd Tories into a spaceship and then fire it directly into the Sun.
Build a big memorial to the Tories, and then piss on it, and then demolish that.
“a man does good business when he rids himself of a tory” – King Edward I
Reform isn’t drawing voters away from the Conservatives, Conservatives are driving voters away from the Conservatives.
Even if the tories laid out a right-wing platform for the election they wouldn’t get my vote (in a constituency where their majority is among the highest in the nation). Because they are so bloody useless. They can’t organise anything, they can’t fix anything. They want to please the graun and the beeb, not the electorate. Their policies are designed to appeal to those who hate them viscerally.
If Labour wins, seriously what difference will it make? The country will still be controlled by the blob, and nobody has a plan to fix that.
We can all hate the Tories but given the long-term damage Blair managed to do with his constitutional wrecking ball, I doubt “a few years” of Labour – likely to be a lot of years, in practice – are going to get unwound easily. If all you worry about is, say, the green agenda, the diversity push, the nanny state, or the level of taxation, then “the current lot are as bad as Labour anyway, so I wouldn’t even mind a Labour government” is probably fair enough. But the capacity for a Labour government to really embed this stuff at a legal or constitutional level could make unwinding these changes much harder for any future right-wing government. Just like we’re now stuck with Scottish and Welsh devolution.
I’m not saying this in a “careful what you wish for when you vote” kinda way – the votes of a couple of dozen blog-readers are unlikely to tip the balance anywhere anyway. But there’s no point in wishful thinking that the actions of the next Labour government are going to get reversed just as soon as the next “real” right-wing government enters power in 10-20 years’ time. Some actions, like Northern Ireland leaving the Union (plausible in that time-frame if we have a UK government that’s happy to run a border poll but isn’t willing to make the locals a tempting counter-offer, and a more cash-flush Irish government either run by Sinn Fein or in fear of it) are simply going to be irreversible even to the firmest right-wing revival. Obviously not everyone here is a Unionist, and indeed the kind of hoped-for right-wing revival is more likely if England ends up as independent country, but ironically Labour domination might stave off Scottish independence for a while.
The hope for MPs might be a bit of wishful thinking too. Putting aside the real problems of organisational know-how and activist numbers, UKIP got 12.6% of the 2015 vote but only one MP. That one being a place they had a boost from incumbency. The Liberal/SDP alliance got 25.4% of the vote in 1983, but only won 23 seats. Inefficient vote distribution and the lack of incumbency advantage really hurts minor parties. In contrast, even in the worst plausible electoral scenarios, the Tories would retain dozens of strongholds to build back from. A revitalised right-wing force might feel compelled, from considerations of FPTP electoral strategy, to merge into the Conservative Party, and just hope they pull off an ideological reverse takeover. But in terms of party membership numbers, that would likely leave the old Tories as the dominant strain. (Optimists might argue that the Liberal Unionists left a significant long-term mark after they merged into the Tories, I suppose.)
And let’s suppose a radical right-wing force did emerge that manages to maintain ideological purity without such contamination. Would it remain immune to the same forces which shaped the current Conservative Party? The Tories didn’t reach their current state by accident. There will always be people on the up who want to be part of the establishment or have a taste for power, without total ideological commitment to the cause. There’ll always be people who look at the polling and think moderating the party’s positions on certain issues would be electorally worthwhile. And it’s likely the people who do the grunt work in the party’s policy department, or in the think tanks that policies get brought in from, are going to be disproportionately young, urban-dwelling graduates – even if they’re right-wing in politics, their cultural values are unlikely to be in lockstep with the party base. It would take a concerted effort to keep such a party headed in the right direction. Nige isn’t going to be around forever, and who else would be up to it?
Thinking along the lines of Conquest’s laws, it’s probably harder to keep a right-wing party genuinely right-wing than keeping a left-wing party committed to full-blown socialism – and even that’s hard enough for the leftie ideologues. When someone apparently credible pops up telling the party faithful (correctly or not is essentially irrelevant to my point) that they can enjoy power and relevance again after years in the wilderness, just so long as they drop a bunch of inconvenient or ostensibly unpopular items from their program, that message often has cut-through. And it tends to have more cut-through, the more time has been spent in opposition. So I’m not optimistic a long period of Labour domination will prove a fertile breeding ground for a future right-wing government even if it does spur a right-wing revival. The Labour Left enjoyed a resurgence in the 1980s but it wasn’t a good guide to the policy direction (at least economically) of the next Labour government.
Theophrastus,
The Conservatives are done at this election, regardless. It’s 45/22/10 for Con/Lab/Reform. If every Reform voter switched to the Conservatives, it would be 45/32. Even if Labour can’t get a majority out of that, they’ll easily form a coalition.
The question is, do you want to endorse this lot, so they just think it’s a temporary blip and carry on being New Labour II, or do you want them to get thoroughly annihilated as reform break a lot of seats and send a clear message that they’d better purge the wets if they want to get back into power?
I came to a realisation yesterday. It’ll be 35 years since I became eligible to vote this year, and in all that time I’ve never once voted for a winning candidate. (Yay for democracy.) I even tried voting tactically once for the Lib Dems, perpetual second-placers to Labour in my constituency. That was the year of the great SNP surge. They ended up third. Also, if by some small miracle, the Tories ever do manage to take the seat, it’ll be such a spectacular political earthquake that my tiny contribution isn’t going to make much difference.
So fuck it. Reform. I’ve got nothing to lose.
Looking at the polls, by the way, they seem to be taking as much from Labour as the Tories. I’d guess a lot of the Red Wall-ers aren’t ready to go back yet. The effect’s probably not big enough to prevent the seats from turning red again, but it’s interesting.
TMB
“A large Labour majority would be dreadful, yes, but would it be that much worse than the hulk of complacent inertia of the present shambles?”
It would be much, much worse. The Tory=Labour equivalence hypothesis lacks all credibility. The Tories may be inadequate, but Labour would be worse: on immigration, on wokery, on economic management, on foreign policy (Lammy as FS?), on Nut Zero, on Brexit (which would die the death of a thousand qualifications), etc, etc.
Annihilating the Tories – with right-wing Tories like Redwood, Anderson, IDS losing their seats – is not going to move the UK rightwards. Rather, it will leave the field wide open for left-liberalism and socialism.
Polling shows that the average voter wants left-of-centre economic policies and right-of-centre social policies. Reform is offering right-of-centre economic and social policies, and as such would never achieve a majority…
But the capacity for a Labour government to really embed this stuff at a legal or constitutional level could make unwinding these changes much harder for any future right-wing government. Just like we’re now stuck with Scottish and Welsh devolution.
We’ve just had 14 years of “conservatives” and they haven’t abolished a single quango.
They have fought tooth, and presumably fungus-infected nail, to preserve all of the Blair Terror in its entirety.
Stop thinking there’s a solution, because there isn’t one. Nobody’s coming to save us. We are completely disenfranchised in what used to be our own country, and our votes only count as spoilers. So let’s wreck shit and make the wankers cry.
Make Tories eat cat poo live on It’s A Knockout.
Anon,
“We can all hate the Tories but given the long-term damage Blair managed to do with his constitutional wrecking ball, I doubt “a few years” of Labour – likely to be a lot of years, in practice – are going to get unwound easily. If all you worry about is, say, the green agenda, the diversity push, the nanny state, or the level of taxation, then “the current lot are as bad as Labour anyway, so I wouldn’t even mind a Labour government” is probably fair enough. But the capacity for a Labour government to really embed this stuff at a legal or constitutional level could make unwinding these changes much harder for any future right-wing government. Just like we’re now stuck with Scottish and Welsh devolution.”
Explain to me what exactly was left behind by Labour that the Conservatives, with a majority of 80, and outside the EU, couldn’t annihilate by either cutting spending or with an act of parliament, within 4 years.
And right on cue, the sister in law of Baron Pigfucker of Greensill gets a comms role in CCHQ: https://order-order.com/2024/01/15/emily-sheffield-camerons-sister-in-law-gets-cchq-role/
@rhoda klapp – January 15, 2024 at 11:07 am
Even if the tories laid out a right-wing platform for the election they wouldn’t get my vote (in a constituency where their majority is among the highest in the nation). Because they are so bloody useless.
For me, it’s not just that they’re useless it’s that even if they laid out a proper serious conservative manifesto, assuming that the present bunch of no-hopers and “one nation” tossers were the candidates, I simply wouldn’t believe them.
That’s why they aren’t getting my vote.
@Theophrastus
There’s no point in voting for Reform unless they stand a chance of winning in the constituency in which you vote. Annihilating the Tories electorally would (1) only embed the left-liberal establishment even further, as Labour would probably remain in power for a generation (with the Lib Dems as the official ‘opposition’) and (2) would probably splinter the right-of-centre vote indefinitely because (a) Reform would prove as fissiparous as UKIP etc and (b) Reform’s programme would deny it an electoral majority unless it moved significantly towards the soggy centre – in which case what would the annihilation of the Tories have achieved?
We just gave the Tories an 80 seat majority. We got more crime, more wars, more illegal immigration, and a plandemic. They can fuck off.
I’d rather the country go down with Labour owning responsibility than bearing any responsibility for it myself.
The country is fucked, the west is fucked, all that’s to be done is to sit back and enjoy the show. As long as I live long enough to see the hordes breaking into parliament and Ceaucescuing the fucking lot of them I can die happy(ish).
It didn’t need to be this way, but something about soft easy lives creates ocean-going wankers, and that’s all there is to it.
“As does labour, but one at a time. Unless we decide to use the Guy Fawkes method”
Considering that members of both parties will soon be enjoying lavish hospitality at Davos, perhaps Mr Putin could be persuaded to “accidentally” point one of his Ukraine bound missiles in that direction. It would have the added bonus of getting rid of Klaus Schwab and his WEF buddies…
“Because they are so bloody useless”
And even if they weren’t bloody useless, deeply embedded left wing control of all our public services would make meaningful change extremely difficult, if not impossible…
– So, what’s Nigel worth on the campaign trail? And will he run?
If the Reform polling is real rather than clickbait then there’s no need for Farage to stand and he would be very sensible to stay out of it. He can serve himself better by remaining a pundit. There’ll be a lot of bitterness and regret after a Labour landslide with massive mandate. A long hard dose of hard left is coming and people will be looking for anyone but themselves to blame.
A long hard dose of hard left is coming and people will be looking for anyone but themselves to blame
I blame the Tories, because they’re scum.
Sam Duncan
I was wryly thinking to myself. I just missed qualifying for the 1983 election and so first voted in 87. I have only ever once voted for a winning candidate and that was Angela Rumbold in 1992. And I wasn’t even in the country, I had to do it via a proxy vote !
“Vote Tory or Labour will get in and be awful” no longer works as a threat. To all intents and purposes, Labour never left office. Today’s Tories have continued Blairite policies and policy direction. The only difference is Brexit, which they were forced into and have now deliberately fucked up.
I am not as pessimistic about the future as some here, but I do know that there is no future for conservatism if the Conservative party endures in its current form.
If, in some Kafka-esque nightmare, your wife was replaced by a bearded chap in a dress, the only sensible option would to get divorced ASAP, even if that leads to an indeterminate period of lonely wanking. @Theophrastus is arguing you should ignore the beard and shag the bloke in your wife’s nightie.
“There’s no point in voting for Reform unless they stand a chance of winning in the constituency in which you vote.”
That, dear Theophrastus, is actually defeatist bovine excrement, while missing th ewhole point of the UK FPTP system.
Sufficient bleeding of votes from the Tories in the right constituencies has a very direct effect on the very people who made a mess of things, as pointed out in previous remarks about BigWigs losing their position because they’re not even going to be elected again.
This can be seen as a Good Thing™. And probably very satisfying to some here.
And yes, it will mean Labour will get Government for a while.
Which triggers the old adage: “People will get what they vote for.”
And with Labour in power, they will get it good and hard. And hopefully start questioning their choices.
And the fun bit is… Labour will see an election win as a Victory, and completely miss the point that if they keep ignoring the common people and simply push the Agenda of them and the Blob, they’re actually assembling their own coffin while tolling the bell..
And even if they have an attack of Common Sense, the organisations and EcoNutters backing them most certainly won’t …
It’ll be Interesting Times.
And the fun bit is… Labour will see an election win as a Victory, and completely miss the point that if they keep ignoring the common people and simply push the Agenda of them and the Blob, they’re actually assembling their own coffin while tolling the bell..
Labour will make sure the immigrant invasion gets to vote, along with 16 year old children. The new electorate should keep them in power more or less forever. (As a country we’re already on borrowed time so “forever” isn’t that far off – maybe 10, maybe 20 years?)
The Tories – if there are any left – will watch and masturbate, as usual.
@Steve
Re the quangocracy: in some respects, Cameron/Osborne made it even worse (Office for Budgetary Responsibility being a prime example).
“Stop thinking there’s a solution, because there isn’t one”
I’m not proposing a solution. I’m not even saying “vote Conservative, voting Reform is a waste of your vote!” I see a decent amount of merit in the posts that Rational Anarchist and TMB made above. If the Tories are still the main right-wing force after the next election, and to me that seems a probable outcome for now, the existence of a large pool of Reform voters at this election will at least give some inducement to keep rightwards rather than triangulate towards the centre. Whether that direction can be sustained until the Tories have a genuine election-winning chance again is a trickier question. For the reasons I stated above, I expect them to go wobbly before then.
https://www.timworstall.com/2024/01/likely-likely/#comment-1297664
I do think Labour’s next run of government is going to come at a cost (if @TMB’s forecast above is correct, one of the things that might hold Labour’s feet to the fire is the almost complete collapse of England’s rather effective private schooling system, and knock-on effects on the state education system – in a sense I think TMB meant it optimistically, but that’s a heck of a lot of collateral damage) but right-wing floating voters don’t have a lot of power to prevent that happening anyway.
My post was mostly aimed at those who think we are going to have a re-run of the Canadian situation, where the implosive power of FPTP means Tories are going to be so wiped out (like the UK Liberals post-WWI) and Farage and friends will have a chance to reconstitute the political right. It can’t be eliminated as a possibility, but I do think it’s far less likely than they think, and like I said, in 10-20 years’ time how do you prevent whatever modern mind-virus has eaten into the current Tories just infecting the New Right as well? That kind of rebadging exercise would render the Tory apocalypse pointless.
@Western Bloke
“Explain to me what exactly was left behind by Labour that the Conservatives, with a majority of 80, and outside the EU, couldn’t annihilate by either cutting spending or with an act of parliament, within 4 years.”
Do you honestly think the UK government could simply have rescinded Scottish/Welsh devolution? Technically, as a matter of constitutional law, yes they could. Even NI devolution would have been doable (at least in domestic law, I think in international law it would involve breaking some treaty commitments), but the response from the US and EU would have been off the scale. It’s not just about whether something’s legally possible. It’s whether it’s politically possible – not just as a matter of having the iron will to deliver it, but the ability to cope with the blowback. Westminster scrapping the Scottish parliament while independence was still doing well in the polls would have been a great way to accelerate a political crisis of some sort – whether that ends up in a foiled Catalan-style UDI or an Irish-style “armalite and ballot box” strategy, who knows, but I don’t see how it could have ended well.
What about bringing back the hereditary peers? Maybe it would have increased the soundness coefficient in Westminster. But could you really go into an election campaign with that on your manifesto and expect to be treated seriously? You’d end up looking like a weird dinosaur.
Then there’s a whole bunch of stuff which probably would have been doable like unwinding the Supreme Court and reverting to the Law Lords, which might have undone an act of vandalism but had no pressing urgency. So it ends up ossifying into a new tradition.
You also can’t reverse demographic change (though you could help yourself by not adding to it of course…) short of stripping people of citizenship and deporting them. Would that be electorally viable?
I suspect that if Labour cuts the voting age to 16, it will get baked into the system the same way the reduction to 18 did. The ratchet effect is real.
@Anon
You also can’t reverse demographic change (though you could help yourself by not adding to it of course…) short of stripping people of citizenship and deporting them. Would that be electorally viable?
Er, yes. Very few people think that rapists, terrorists and ‘hate preachers’ shouldn’t be kicked the fuck out of the country.
If we can’t kick them out, because they were born here, we genuinely, genuinely should stick them on South Georgia, where they can live a religious life according to the precepts of their prophet – because we all know who we’re really talking about – free from the temptations of uncovered western whores etc.
the almost complete collapse of England’s rather effective private schooling system
I wouldn’t worry about that too much. The top tier (Eton, Roedean etc.) could fill all their places 10x over without taking a single UK student, and the second tier (e.g MGS) would be fine, too. It’s the lowest tier – places you’ve probably never heard of unless they’re nearby – that would suffer, and they could easily be reconstituted as and when times change.
Anon,
“Do you honestly think the UK government could simply have rescinded Scottish/Welsh devolution. Technically, as a matter of constitutional law, yes they could. Even NI devolution would have been doable (at least in domestic law, I think in international law it would involve breaking some treaty commitments), but the response from the US and EU would have been off the scale.
It’s not just about whether something’s legally possible. It’s whether it’s politically possible – not just as a matter of having the iron will to deliver it, but the ability to cope with the blowback. Westminster scrapping the Scottish parliament while independence was still doing well in the polls would have been a great way to accelerate a political crisis of some sort – whether that ends up in a foiled Catalan-style UDI or an Irish-style “armalite and ballot box” strategy, who knows, but I don’t see how it could have ended well.”
Why would you rescind devolution? Where’s the support for that? Most English people think that’s up to the Welsh and Scots, and I don’t see a lot of appetite to end it in either country.
As you say, this is not a politically popular thing, not what is something that is driving 13% of voters to Reform.
“What about bringing back the hereditary peers? Maybe it would have increased the soundness coefficient in Westminster. But could you really go into an election campaign with that on your manifesto and expect to be treated seriously? You’d end up looking like a weird dinosaur.”
Again, you’re dealing with something that no-one cares about.
“Then there’s a whole bunch of stuff which probably would have been doable like unwinding the Supreme Court and reverting to the Law Lords, which might have undone an act of vandalism but had no pressing urgency. So it ends up ossifying into a new tradition.”
Well, that is something they could have done without any political upset. But they haven’t.
“You also can’t reverse demographic change (though you could help yourself by not adding to it of course…) short of stripping people of citizenship and deporting them. Would that be electorally viable?””
Of course not. That’s not the change that we’re after. People have been granted citizenship under Blair? I’ll grumble about it BUT what’s done is done on that. We’re stuck with them. But what has been done since 2010, or 2020 (if we want post-Brexit). What’s net migration since then? What have they done to annihilate waste in the public sector? To cut tax? To make us freer? Go on… make a case for why anyone who wants something other than New Labour should vote Conservative, and without resorting to Less Shitty Than Starmer.
You also can’t reverse demographic change
Why waste time writing all those words then?
I don’t mean that to be rude, but you’re talking as if there’s some kind of future for this country and its dead, gay institutions that we have some sort of a stake in.
Nah, there ain’t, and narp we don’t.
We’z Red Injuns now. Where we’re going, we won’t need roads (because you won’t be allowed to drive). We’ll be lucky if we can retain 24/7 electricity supplies. For you, Tommy, the politics is over. But that shouldn’t be a cause for despair, it should be a relief. The old is irretrievably broken, we need new things.
Interesting that in Canada there’s starting to be enough push back on immigration and impact on housing, education and health etc government (1milion+ is this years plan) is actually discussing looking at the issue, of course they are proposing to limit foreign students who at least bring money into the economy rather than something useful, but the fact it’s being discussed at all is serious shift .
Like California for the first time ever the west coast province of BC has seen more people leaving than coming in, Canadians are moving out of the cities to smaller places as well just to be able to find a home. As this was my retirement plan and it’s pushing up prices that kind of sucks
There is nothing that the Tories have (not) done that a Labour could not make far, far, far worse!!!
Voting for right-wing Tories to ensure they don’t lose their seats makes sense. Voting Reform in Labour strongholds makes sense. Voting Reform in the one or two constituencies where it could win makes sense. Voting Reform to let in a leftist is deranged!!!
Interested
“We got more crime, more wars, more illegal immigration, and a plandemic…I’d rather the country go down with Labour owning responsibility than bearing any responsibility for it myself.”
But you’ll get even more of that from a Labour government entrenched for a generation! As well as Brexit nullified! And there won’t be any reassembling of the right, or a ‘populist’ revolt against wokery and socialism – because (a) the non-Tory right is as fissiparous as leftist groupuscles, and because (b) the electorate can be very docile (eg covid masking).
@ Theo
If getting to piss on the fetid corpse of the Tory party requires a massive case of cutting off your nose to spite your face then that’s what I’m going to do.
They are beyond redemption and need to be annihilated.
Factio Conservativa delenda est
@Steve
Well if we’re all doomed, what’s the point of doing anything? I just scribbled something down because I felt like having a rather dull rant, that’s all. I don’t expect it to change anything, even anyone else’s minds. I’m not faulting your logic though. If we’re all gonna burn, might as well be at the hands of our enemies than our so-called friends – fine, if your analysis is that we’re trapped in a doom loop, I get where you’re coming from. And on your assessment of us being stuck in such a loop, I can’t point to any especially convincing evidence that we’re not.
It’s the optimists I’ve got it in for. The ones who think this is some necessary, even glorious purgative process in which the true right-wing forces of this country will be reborn, can break out of the withered shell of the Tory Party and metamorphose into something new and beautiful and competent. That they’ll fight their way to power and find that magic undo button that wipes out whatever crap the so-called “right side of history” progressives have heaped upon us in the meantime. Nah, not gonna happen. Not like that. The very best you can hope for is something messier and more mundane. Maybe more along the lines of @RA or @TMB’s comments above. Probably not even something good enough to convince the likes of Steve that the doom loop’s been escaped or even seriously postponed.
@ Theophrastus
Reform won’t win any seats. They will take Tory seats and give them to Labour. That’s the point Labour are going to win anyway. The vote for Remain is a clear signal to the Tory party of how they need to change in order to win the following election. If they don’t heed the message then Reform will win seats in following elections.
Well if we’re all doomed, what’s the point of doing anything?
Le sigh.
I wish I were a better communicator, like Ronnie Regan. The Yanks called him the “Great Communicator”. Which is better than our future PM’s nickname, “Jimmy Savile’s Friend”.
I didn’t say we were doomed, we are still alive by the grace of God. And you’re never doomed if you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. Can I get a Hallelujah? Amen.
The current socioeconomic structure of the society we are currently a part of is doomed, however. This is manifest in “birth rates, wot birth rates?”, plummeting armed forces recruitment, multi-trillion pound debts, a growing rejection of rational thought among all social classes (just one example: Extinction Rebellion – the posh kid’s movement to dismantle industrial civilisation your local police force, council and vicar agrees with). Ok, I’ll stop.
You’re talking about politics, but we’re living through history. Unfortunately it’s something like a gay cyberpunk kakotopia version of the Bronze Age Collapse. Today, for example, we’re cheerfully involved to varying degrees in three major wars which could escalate to who knows where. But tomorrow, Rishi might appear on telly to announce he’s banning chips. Nobody knows what might happen, but it’ll probably be stupid.
What we do know is, like a battered wife who stood by her man for far too long, the British electorate has put the Tories into Downing Street in every general election for well over a decade. And to repay us for those votes, the Conservatives have trashed our economy, doubled the national debt, imported the largest human invasion these islands have ever seen in their history, allowed hordes of weirdo groomers to take over secondary education, and had sexual contact with pigs.
So, we’re going to kick the Tories in their tiny little balls. That is the plan.
“So, we’re going to kick the Tories in their tiny little balls. That is the plan.”
BLM burning down their own neighbourhoods…
Government blowing up power stations…
Transmaniacs hacking off body parts…
Just Stop Oil stopping, um, oil…
Extinction Rebellion demanding extinction…
Everyone’s doing it; might as well join in.
@Western Bloke
You expressed scepticism there was anything a Labour administration could inflict that a sound and competent right-wing administration couldn’t slash with the stroke of a pen or a few votes in Parliament. My point was that a lot of changes are irreversible. I picked examples to show that the ratchet effect is real, and operates across various spheres of life – constitutional/legal, social/demographic, institutional, and I should have added others, some physical like constructing or demolishing buildings and infrastructure, others economic like the long-term effect of fiscal commitments.
I also deliberately picked some examples I thought you’d be okay with what Labour did because I think they’re a good illustration of the “dinosaur” mechanism – another good one is gay marriage, which 15 years ago even a politician well-regarded in progressive circles might umm and ahh about whether it was worth expending the political capital to bring in, but which now even arch-conservatives offer no fight over. Because wanting to get rid of gay marriage, or restore 1000 years of tradition with the hereditaries, or restoring a sensible voting age marks you out as a dinosaur. (Re age: I think 21 worked fine but that makes me look mad now – before long you may know how I feel, as you tell anyone who’ll listen that 18 was a perfectly sensible age and the change to 16 was madness, while progressives point out they’ve been arguing for years that “expert evidence” and “good practice” prove it should be 14 or even less, so really 16 is far too high.) The dinosaur mechanism is also a political trap. Sometimes conservative governments walk into it – an Australian example is reinstituting knighthoods after they had been effectively abolished, and looking like some kind of paleo-medieval muppet.
People often talk about the “constitutional wrecking ball”, less often about the petty vandalism. Constitutional graffiti and “broken window” theory. Again, maybe you find it hard to get wound up about the binning of literally a thousand years of tradition with the Supreme Court and “separation of powers” doctrine replacing our long-held tradition of “fusion of powers” – but the fact you’re not wound up is part of my point. This stuff’s cruft. It accretes and becomes immutable. Each bit is small. There’s just so much of it – endless layers, too much for anyone to bother getting bogged down rolling back. Some of those little changes are annoying. Some are dangerous. Some does get removed – there was a degree of legal surprise when royal prerogative got restored, thankfully, for general elections. Fixed term parliaments were a hangover from the Coalition rather than Labour years, but even though the act was a piece of short-term expediency, constitutional scholars weren’t sure whether the previous situation could be restored. But there are all manner of bodges that have stuck around long past their sell-by date. Aside from the legal examples, a lot of tinkering with organisations and institutions also belong in this “too hard to reverse due to weight of numbers” category.
Some changes are inherently one way, like loss of territory – is NI safe? Is Chagos? Once something’s built you’re lumbered with it – or even if you shut it down, you’re stuck with the bill. Demolish something, and it’s gone. If @TMB is right that the bulk of the private school system is going to fall apart under Labour’s VAT plans, then a lot of institutional knowledge is going to be lost forever. Demographic change is basically permanent – and due to the role of family reunification, marriage to people from the Old Country, and people seeking opportunities through their diaspora networks, previous migration patterns tend to set the pattern for new ones. We can probably expect far more Afghans in 2050, lucky us. (Not saying this as an excuse for for the Tories’ migration record. What happened since they came to power is on them, and if, as seems likely, it drives a lot of their 2019 voting coalition towards Reform, then that’s their own stupid fault. All I’m saying is the consequences of these policy decisions are long-lived, with no undo button.)
And some changes are almost irreversible because they’re totemic. Undoing Britain’s EU membership was a lot of hard work, but got (mostly) done in the end. Getting rid of the ECHR/Human Rights Act would be totemic. Undoing devolution would be totemic. Pulling out of the legal regime surrounding UK climate change commitments would be totemic. You might not care about some or even any of these, and some are even Tory own goals, but they’re all examples where deep political commitment would be required: aside from the expenditure of time and energy in parliament/government to get it done and manage the fall-out, they’d all be political grenades that could blow up in a party’s face on the campaign trail. There are plenty of things Labour could add to that category. Take Britain back into the Single Market? Sign up to some supranational “pooled sovereignty” (hah) arrangement for carbon emissions? A fundamental constitutional change like meddling with the electoral system? (To some extent, a reformed House of Lords or disestablishing the Church of England would also count as “dinosaur if you oppose” kinda changes.)
Btw, re devolution, yeah, there’s not a lot of popular appetite to scrap it. But it has been a big deal among Ukippers (see the Senedd in particular). And it is one of the Blair era changes that has most obviously destabilised the UK. Certainly failed in its mission of “killing nationalism stone dead”. As Wales and Scotland diverge from England, the long-term prognosis for the union gets worse. Even changes like Scotland adopting a tuition fee policy that favours home students have long-term effects, as they put up barriers to the populations mixing so much and seeing other parts of the UK as less “foreign”. Increasingly different legal systems, health systems and political cultures are only adding to that sense of foreignness. If you identify strongly with the Union, that’s not a good sign. Now, there are a decent number of energised, angry young right-wing people who may form the activist base of any future right-wing resurgence, and for those with an explicitly British nationalist perspective, devolution is one of their bugbears. (Look on the edges of the Extremely Online Right or Weird Right and you even come across ultra-trads who’d love to bring the hereditary peers back to run the place, or endow the monarchy with substantial political power. Some people seem destined to remain on the fringes.)
With regards to totemic changes, there are many who wish we could just rewind to the past and prevent it happening there and then, but wouldn’t dare to try undoing it now it’s established. Some are up for the fight though. It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that in 15 years’ time you’ll be yelling at your screen, wishing the currently most viable right-wing post-Tory insurgent would stop banging on about stuff she/he sees as a core issue from a national or ideological perspective, whether that’s devolution or some arcane constitutional point or whatever, and focus on what you see, no doubt based on firmer evidence, as (a) actually attainable, (b) electorally far more relevant. And when you tell Post-Tories you know about this view, you may well get regarded as a “pragmatist” (not a compliment), a “wet”, or even, worst of all, “a Tory”. Problem is, people get energised or worked up by different stuff. People with strong ideological backbone (which you might generally like) often get het up about some very random stuff (which you’ll like rather less). UKIP’s policy offerings were often mad as a box of frogs, and Nige struggled to whip them into something more credible (or alternatively, just to get candidates to shut their trap). The young people I’ve seen who regard themselves as the base for the post-Tory Right are a similarly mixed bag. To be honest, this pool they’re drawing from is one reason I’m sceptical the Tories are going to get eclipsed by an alternative force from further on the Right, even if they do take a battering for the next few elections. Should I be wrong about that, though, we’re in for interesting times.
Anon: The very best you can hope for is something messier and more mundane.
I think I’m probably one of the optimists. Not one of those who thinks that the Conservative Party can rise like a phoenix because John Redwood with scorched plumage won’t do. Indeed, looking at his blog from time to time one has to admire how he rails impotently at the policies of his own government but influences little or nothing. The future lies elsewhere.
In 2024 the UK will elect a Labour administration with even more deranged Green and Libdem voices chiming in from the left. The VAT on school fees policy will come in early in 2025 and make a complete hash of state education without yielding a fraction of the revenue that Starmer has committed elsewhere and several times over.
As expectations dissolve into disappointment everything that has been left-leaning since Blair will kick up a fuss at what they will see as a betrayal and years of tumoil will take us through till such a time as Starmer’s mandate runs out or civil unrest forces an early election.
What Reform achieves for the Tories this year, Reform or something derived from or evolved out of Reform will achieve for Labour in the years ahead but equally resoundingly. Labour will be trashed. Theo’s idea that Starmer’s majority will guarantee him at least two or three election victories is absurd (sorry, Theo) because the experts said the same about Johnson in 2019.
It will get a great deal better but not for a while, Steve, so go and train some Lions in the meantime like a good chap and stop being such an infernal bore.
TMB:
The one difference is that the Blob will do everything it can to cover for Mr. Starmer just as it did everything it could to destroy Boris Johnson. And there being a State Broadcaster that’s part of the Blob to propagandize for the stuff will make it harder for Not Labor to get back into power.
As an example, look at Canada, where the vapid Justin Trudeau should have been a one-term PM.
TMB
Your predictions of future governance are misplaced and fanciful. For example, the last Nu-Labour ‘tyranny’ did huge damage with the devolution disaster, to pensions by over-regulation, by the sale of gold reserves (at the market bottom), by indoctrination in education, by the Human Rights Act, by the Equality Act….A further decade of such governance would produce a largely compliant socialist society, with younger people and settled immigrants voting Labour….Meanwhile, you, Steve, Interested et al will be whining furiously about how ghastly this is…
Letter in the DT:
SIR – Rishi Sunak’s attempts to scare former Tory voters away from backing Reform UK at this year’s general election – for fear of letting Labour into government through the back door – are a waste of his breath.
We’ve heard it all before.
We were taken for granted by David Cameron; taken for fools by Theresa May, who was out of her depth; and, although it pains me to say so, deceived and grossly let down by the underperforming, pantomime PM that was Boris Johnson – a failed messiah if ever there was one.
All betrayed our trust with breathtaking displays of arrogance and downright dishonesty, which have left lifelong Conservatives and Leavers like me feeling exploited and abused.
There’s no reason to believe that Mr Sunak’s promises will be any more trustworthy than those of his three immediate predecessors. His pleas will not stop us voting for Reform UK, whatever the short-term cost may be. The day of retribution is upon us.
It’s time for this soulless and gutless shell of a once-great Conservative Party to be either dismantled and reconstructed or replaced – while Labour spends the next five years demonstrating its innate and ruinous incompetence to yet another starry-eyed generation of soon-to-be disappointed and disillusioned youngsters.
Adrian Barrett
Haywards Heath, West Sussex
You know how the Tories occasionally float some idea they think will get the voters salivating – like Nadine Dorries promising to abolish the licence fee by 2027? Remember that one? Anyway, they were at it again a few weeks ago, promising to end inheritance tax. Angela Rayner was having none of it. She just said Labour would reverse that as soon as it came back into office. Bless her. That’s the way to do it. And they do.
When do you ever hear a senior Tory talk like that, and then act on it? Think back merely as far as the late 1990s:
* Racism exists when a complainer complains of it (cheers, Macpherson)
* Racially aggrvated offending
* Malicious comms Act
* HRA
* Ban on fox hunting
*Minimum wage
That is just off the top of my head, and for starters (and actually you can do the same thing right back at least to the 1940s).
The Tories accepted all those changes as engraved in stone since forever. None of this, ‘we don’t believe in it so we’ll reverse it if we get back into office’, thereby setting out their stall, putting distance between themselves and Labour, emboldening their natural supporters, offering hope, providing choice to the electorate, standing by what ought to be some core Tory beliefs, making arguments and trying to win them.
Nope, none of that. No making of an argument, no peeping out from their rabbit hole to denounce the Blair terror, no defiance, no challenge. No fucking opposition at all.
So when it came to Cameron and the prospect of a nominally Tory govt, and no commitment to – just for instance – repeal the CCA or the Equality Act – who could be surprised?
(the only halfway decent thing about the 2010 election was that it showed enough natural Tories even then saw through them to deny Cameron a majority against a Labour PM who’d demonstrably trashed the economy and possessed all the electoral charm of Stafford Cripps).
13 years on, we’re 27 years into full-blown Blairism, changes it is harder and harder to unravel – and where, btw, is any legacy of Thatcherism?
So, yeah. Difficult now to make arguments about the HRA (1998) when several generations of school children have grown up to be educated believing that without it we’d soon descend into Weimar Germany. Same with all the other examples I have given.
The best time to make those arguments was between 1998 and 2010. And the cowardly craven fuckers just gave up. So now it is much, much harder, and much harder than it ever needed to be. Whereas, to return to inheritance tax, Labour is always consistently sure to hold the Tories’ toes the flames with stuff like that.
For me, if the basic, abstract uselessness of the Tories was not enough, at a mundane, personal level I have kids in school whose English teachers, geography teachers and history teachers are trying to ideologically indoctrinate them to turn them into social justice warrior communists who hate their country. I can and have complained, but they just carry on because they are public sector and unaccountable and I know it would be the same at other schools.
So this is the clincher: given that this is happening under the Tories, where do I turn? What redress do I have? These teachers are implementing Tory government policy.
Voting for more Tories certainly is not redress. They can go and fuck themselves, and so can anyone who continues to stand by them.
@Theophrastus
Interested
“We got more crime, more wars, more illegal immigration, and a plandemic…I’d rather the country go down with Labour owning responsibility than bearing any responsibility for it myself.”
But you’ll get even more of that from a Labour government entrenched for a generation! As well as Brexit nullified! And there won’t be any reassembling of the right, or a ‘populist’ revolt against wokery and socialism – because (a) the non-Tory right is as fissiparous as leftist groupuscles, and because (b) the electorate can be very docile (eg covid masking).
1. A bit more shit in your sandwich is neither here nor there – I don’t want to eat any sandwiches with shit in them.
2. I want to be able to look myself in the mirror and say, ‘At least I didn’t vote for the wankers.’ Currently I’m looking in the post-80-seat-majority era mirror, saying, ‘What kind of fool am I that I was taken in by them again?’
3. I think the country is fucked. But it’s definitely, definitely fucked if all we have is a choice between two parties which are driving us towards the same clifftop, only at (very slightly) different speeds. The only hope we have is either for the destruction of the Tories and the birth of a new actually conservative* party (or just possibly as new Tory party with actual conservatives in it) OR the near-destruction of the country such that the slumbering masses wake up and destroy Labour and the rest of their filthy ilk. I rate our chances of either of these at about 2%, but that’s better than the 0% we have if these utter, utter cunts get in again.
*Actually, we need radicals now, who will change everything, rather than conservatives – but you understand my point.
Anon,
“You might not care about some or even any of these, and some are even Tory own goals, but they’re all examples where deep political commitment would be required: aside from the expenditure of time and energy in parliament/government to get it done and manage the fall-out, they’d all be political grenades that could blow up in a party’s face on the campaign trail. There are plenty of things Labour could add to that category. Take Britain back into the Single Market? Sign up to some supranational “pooled sovereignty” (hah) arrangement for carbon emissions? A fundamental constitutional change like meddling with the electoral system? (To some extent, a reformed House of Lords or disestablishing the Church of England would also count as “dinosaur if you oppose” kinda changes.)”
And the problem is that the Conservatives don’t have a deep political commitment, or frankly, even a shallow political commitment. I don’t believe it’s that hard for a government with a budget of billions and a majority of 80 to ram legislation through that will be ironclad, impossible to defeat in the courts to get even 1 person on a plane to Rwanda. You lose in court, you get lawyers in a room, you work 60 hours a week fixing it, and you get it into parliament within a week, and if the Lords give you any trouble, just use the Parliament Act.
The truth is that most Conservatives are just dicking around and hoping that bullshitting the public will last. “this time, we’ll sort out immigration, HONEST” for the millionth time. Go and look at the websites of most cabinet ministers. They have plenty of time to spend on local bus routes, post offices and opening factories. That’s what they care about, not the things they claim to care about.
Ted,
“The one difference is that the Blob will do everything it can to cover for Mr. Starmer just as it did everything it could to destroy Boris Johnson. And there being a State Broadcaster that’s part of the Blob to propagandize for the stuff will make it harder for Not Labor to get back into power.”
Well, that’s the Tories fault. They’ve had 13 years to annihilate all the sockpuppet “charities” that receive government funding, and to clip the wings of the BBC and not even bothered.
I need to bookmark this thread, and the many others like it, so that on the day after the next election, when Mrs Starmer is measuring the curtains in no. 10 and the tory party has 3 MPs (I can dream…) I can print it out and post it to all the tory ex-MPs.
I doubt the realisation will dawn even then, but I can enjoy the thought of them getting to experience the sheer visceral contempt in which their former voters now hold them.
I voted for Mrs T in the college mock election, at 17 in 1983. I voted for here for real at every opportunity.
I now realise she was the exception, not the rule.
I need politicians who believe in a small state which is a meritocracy, who believe in markets, and know where to shove Net Zero, DEI/ESG, and all the corporatist bollocks.
This lot can just fuck off and die. And then fuck off some more.
” For example, the last Nu-Labour ‘tyranny’ did huge damage with the devolution disaster, to pensions by over-regulation, by the sale of gold reserves (at the market bottom), by indoctrination in education, by the Human Rights Act, by the Equality Act….”
Yes, and 13 years of ‘conservative’ government has done the square root of bugger all to reverse any of them. Devolution I’ll give you is hard to over turn, but all the others could have been legislated away over the last decade or more, and the Conservatives have in fact not only not reversed these policies they’ve actually promoted them. Green nonsense, immigration, wokism, all have grown exponentially under the Tories.
So fuck ’em all. I wouldn’t piss on a Tory MP if he was on fire. If the Tory incumbent comes around here canvassing in a few months time he’s going to get a piece of my mind.
From Peter Hall, an Unherd reader:
I have been a Conservative voter since 1979 and have donated over £800,000 to the Party and Vote Leave. I will never vote for the Party again and believe they must be utterly destroyed so comprehensive has been their betrayal of Conservative values and their shameful incompetence. £2 trillion added to the national debt, millions immigrants with none vetted for quality, no reform of the parasitic welfare state leading to 5.3 million out of work and on benefits, irreducible fiscal deficits and collapsing services, shameful and corrupt travesties of justice such as Rotherham, the post office and Greensill and no action to support the enterprise economy as evidenced by increasing current account deficits and weakening competitiveness. The worst government in British history.
Another:
Like you I want conservative voters to strike the Tory Party with an electoral Extinction Level Event.
The Liberal Party never came back from the general election result of 1926, it can be done again.
Let’s stop calling them the Conservative Party because that is a false claim, the word “Tory” can be delivered with the ferocity of an expletive and that is what they deserve.
And another:
They have no idea of the reckoning that is coming. And I think most pundits don’t either.
Their voting coalition is irrevocably fractured and both elements are irrevocably alienated.
I’m a former party member and I’ll never vote for them again, and so far, I’ve heard from none that will.
The Conservatives must now be replaced. Their time is up.
There are many similar comments, at Unherd and the Telegraph, from people who are by inclination and circumstance “conservative” but who are so angry at the betrayals of the Cons that their most fervent wish is the utter destruction of the current Party and the sowing of its lands with salt.
Theo – it was kind of you but not altogether necessary to point out some of the glaring shortcomings of Labour administrations. I think I’ve previously hinted that life under a Starmer Government will not be a bed of roses and our main point of difference is that I believe Labour will be swept away after five years (or sooner if the country becomes ungovernable) however big their majority after the general election. The old psephology no longer holds when a party with an 80 seat majority can be reduced, as seems likely, to a rump with roughly 80 seats all told.
Ted S – our UK blob is certainly socialist-progressive as are all blobs everywhere. What differentiates ours from the rest is that it considers itself neither beholden nor affiliated to any political party and will give Starmer a very hard time for failing to satisfy its aspirations which of course he’s bound to do.
On the question of dismantling devolution, I’m less convinced than others that this can never happen. A future Westminster government pledged to a smaller state with less regulation might make this a popular model for Scots and Welsh folk to want to emulate. This is not for London to impose but for local populations to campaign for in the fullness of time.
Nothing is immutable.
You fellows make your upcoming election seem like a disaster, partially due to the incompetence of your Conservative Party, but mostly due to the deep state/blob.
Well over here we have a vegetable head of state pretending to be running things when all but the progressive left know that the deep state and their friends the unions are running things to their financial advantage. Some are in it for the power, of course. They are a small percentage but the most incompetent. Hillary, Wray, Rice, Blinken, Garland, etc.
These people are going to cause WWIII. Giving the Iranians billions is madness!
Chris
You’re at present exchanging shots with the Houthis, but you’re also providing the vast bulk of the money that supports them. And you pay them taxes to give it to them too.
Good old Trump at least declared them terrorists, so it’d be illegal under US law (so I understand) to give them money. But of course Biden the brainless cancelled that when he seized power.
I do hope Don gets in. Then he could stop you subsidising your enemies.
And who knows. Maybe he’d finally cut off subsidising the Palestinians as well.