Why vote Tory but not Reform? Why vote Reform but not Tory? These questions are of growing relevance to British politics the closer we get to a general election. There was a time not long ago when political commentators would happily add up the polling score for both parties, get a number in the high forties, and confidently declare that the future of British politics belonged to the right.
But it has become ever clearer that the two voting groups are not interchangeable. A significant and growing number of people who support the Conservatives say they would refuse to lend their vote to Reform, and vice versa. The goal for each party now is to break the polling impasse, which has them both stuck in the low twenties, and destroy their opponent by winning over their voters.
This attritional war has many fronts: the appeal of their leader, their stance on legal and illegal migration, their approach to foreign policy. Now fighting has moved to the economic front thanks to some flashy new policy commitments during this year’s party conference season.
First there was Reform’s pledge to raise the personal allowance threshold to £15,000 per year, an effective tax cut for millions, paid for by up to £80bn public spending cuts, mainly to welfare.
Then it emerged, first in the pages of the New Statesman last week, that the Conservatives are planning the possible abolition of inheritance tax.
Cue a public row between Reformers and Tories about which is the better policy. Robert Jenrick, Reform’s economic spokesman, has said abolishing inheritance tax would be “morally wrong” at the present time because it is an effective tax cut to the well off (inheritance tax begins at wealth of £325,000 but often only kicks in at £1m). He described the Tory plan as “out of touch”. Meanwhile, Conservatives have criticised Jenrick’s personal allowance plans as a route to a heavier share of the tax burden falling on higher earners. And then there is the fiscal wonk Dan Neidle, a self-described “tax realist”, who has derided both proposals as nice-sounding but wrong-headed.
Reform started this parliament with a prospectus quite different from the Conservatives – they pledged a range of tax cuts with little idea of how they could pay for them while taking a distinctly more pro-welfare line than the Tories on, for example, the two-child benefit cap.
Throughout 2025 and 2026 the parties moved closer together. Reform dumped its tax cut bonanza after fears that “Liz Truss 2.0” attacks would cut through with the public. Then when the Tory defector Robert Jenrick joined and took on the economics brief for Reform, he spent a lot of time moving the party closer to old Tory orthodoxies, for example by pledging to reinstate the two-child benefit cap and meeting with bond holders to provide reassurances about the plausibility of Reform’s plans for the Treasury.
If that was the consolidation phase, the announcement of the personal allowance threshold rise policy at the party’s annual conference early in September marked the beginning of expansion. Over the past few days, Jenrick and Badenoch undertook one of their social media spats on X in which they threw previous comments at each other as evidence of ideological impurity.
As Jenrick tries to increase the wedge with the Tories, he has taken to saying: “Reform is the party for workers. We’re not for benefits street – that’s the Labour Party. We’re not for Belgravia – that’s the Tory party. We’re for the 80 per cent that are working hard than ever and getting less back.” Beyond the rhetoric is the raw political calculation that the personal allowance pledge appeals to more swing voter than anything the other parties are offering.
[Further reading: Whatever happened to the Good Friday Agreement?]
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