From the Conservative Party’s perspective, last night’s by-election result highlighted two important trends in the fragmentation of our party system. The first is definitely very bad; the second might (but only might) be good.
Let’s start with the bad. Even allowing for the usual factors which make it risky to overread national implications from a by-election result, Reform UK has clearly succeeded in establishing itself as a plausible repository for right-wing voters wherever it is best-placed to beat Labour. That has serious implications for the Tories, not only in any seat where they fell behind Reform in 2024 but also in those where Nigel Farage’s party has since swept the local elections.
Fighting in those conditions requires a very different style of politics to that which either of the traditional major parties are used to. If the Conservatives are no longer simply “the right-wing party that can win”, they will need a much sharper and more specific offer to voters. There is, as yet, little sign of their developing one.
It also puts the much vaunted “Kemi Bounce” in perspective. While her performance and standing with the voters has clearly improved, the Tories are still polling well below where they were when she took the leadership in November 2024 – and are still occupying territory where they could be absolutely hammered by tactical voting.
Yet developing a sharper, more defined appeal to right-wing voters is complicated by the other, and potentially more helpful, evolution of British politics on display in Gorton and Denton: the performance of the Greens.
If the Conservative Party has received one boon in the generally miserable period that has followed the 2024 election, it has been the election of Zack Polanski as Green leader. Historically the Greens, like the Liberal Democrats, have managed to be different parties in different places: radically left-wing in urban settings, comfortably environmentalist in rural ones.
There was until recently a perfectly plausible scenario where the Greens either leaned into the second image or simply continued to ride both horses, and in consequence were plausible challengers in a clutch of southern Tory constituencies at the next election.
With every high-profile victory for Polanski’s avowedly urban and left-wing iteration of the party (which barely mentions environmental issues at all), however, that threat recedes. At the same time, the Greens become a much more potent threat on Labour’s left, forcing the latter to pivot towards them and potentially alienating the sort of voter who switched from Conservative to Labour in 2024.
This boon is a two-edged sword, however. Just as with Labour, it is false to suggest that the Tories should be preoccupied with either the Greens or Reform. They are threatened by both. A Conservative Party which shored up its position with its traditional southern electorate, at the expense of the left-wing parties, would be a little further from extinction but nowhere near power. There is simply no evading the need to orient towards the historic catastrophe for the party which is a split on the right. But any pivot to the right makes it harder to capitalise on the territory Labour will be forced to vacate as it orients itself towards the Greens.
Labour, of course, faces a mirror-image version of the same problem. Being pushed into third in its 50th-safest seat is an existential risk, but Reform has demonstrated that it can secure a substantial right-wing vote in parts of the country which have, for historical reasons, long been immune to appeals from the Conservatives.
As such, the real character of our current political moment is of superficial upheaval which masks total paralysis. British politics is now a prisoner’s dilemma with five actors and too many potential defectors, making any genuinely radical agenda – which would involve confronting the voters with hard choices – impossible.
Instead, every party competes to present its own painless, fantasy prescription for maintaining the bits of the status quo its own voters like. For the Conservatives, this means ritual incantations about fiscal responsibility while committing to the pension triple lock and opposing cuts to the Winter Fuel Allowance. Intellectually contemptible, to be sure – but to do anything else would destroy them.
The other parties offer variations on a theme. Cracking down on immigration, squeezing the super-rich, getting the grown-ups back in the room; all fantasies. Perhaps the most egregious case in point is the Liberal Democrats, whose recent “growth plan” centred on relabelling vast chunks of revenue spending as “investment” and hoping for the best.
Yet this is a game with no prize. Any party taking office on such a platform will simply suffer the same fate as has Starmer, but more quickly. The public would hate Kemi Badenoch as prime minister, just as they would hate Polanski, or Farage, or Andy Burnham. Because prime ministers must confront the real decisions facing this country – and in those, the electorate is not much interested.
[Further reading: Kemi Badenoch isn’t working]
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Subscribe here to commentAs someone else said the voters in this country want a Scandinavian welfare state with American levels of taxation or a least someone else paying, since Reform have decided to become a Thatcher tribute act. Ironically British politics may become more European as parties try to form coalitions, but then we’ll need voting reform, possibly Labour and the Tories may enact it now if only to save their own skins.