The Tory Calamity Part 1
Lessons from Australia
The 2024 UK general election dealt the Conservative party its worst ever result, in an electoral history that dates back to 1835.1 In addition to millions of Conservative voters staying at home, much as they did in 1997, this electoral calamity was also driven by the historically unprecedented performance of the party’s rival on the right, Reform UK. Whilst only winning 5 seats out of the 609 in which it stood, Reform came second in almost 100, and gained over 14% of the vote, much of it from disaffected, typically Brexit-supporting, voters who had supported the Conservatives in 2019. Had Reform not stood, it is highly likely the Tories would have done much better than the paltry 121 seats they ended up with.
Perhaps most significantly election ‘24 has signalled a fundamental change in political circumstance in the UK, and particularly in England, whose long-term impact is still to play out. Historically division on the right had always been intramural, with the Conservative party divided into factions - “wet” and “dry”, in the jargon of the 1980s. Whilst their disagreements were not always just matters of tone and presentation, but of substance, the mechanics of our first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system meant that each wing of the party understood that gaining and holding on to government required compromise, and a “broad church” approach. The same, of course, continues to be true of the Labour Party since it took over from the Liberals as the principal alternative to the Tories a century ago.
But, post-Election 2024, the right is now divided in a way it never has been before, so much so that at least for the medium term it may be impossible to put it back together again. No longer a division between two wings of a single party, it is now divided into two distinct parties, each with its own interests and electoral ambitions that, particularly if Reform UK win by-elections over the course of the current Parliament, risk becoming embedded. Reform’s party-political horse having bolted the conservative stable, for the foreseeable future it and the Tories will be engaged in a battle of mutually assured electoral destruction where, to the delight of their opponents, each will draw votes away from the other, and turn not just formerly winnable seats, but even safe seats, into unwinnable ones. Having delivered electoral calamity to the right in 2024, both parties are now set to spend as much time squabbling over its carcass as they are attacking opponents with whom they have even less in common.
The political history of a divided right: the case of Australia
Yet, even if this separation becomes permanent, it is no forgone conclusion that the future of the right will be one of electoral oblivion. And, unlikely as it may seem, looking at party politics in Australia at the beginning of the last century may suggest why. Indeed, despite the tyranny of distance and the passage of time, there are numerous, and in many cases quite uncanny, parallels between the right in Australia then and that in the UK now that also give pointers as to how a repeat of the calamity of 2024 may be avoided.
To see how, though, we first need to tell a quite extraordinary Australian political tale. It is one of naked political self-interest and ideological mistrust, of a divisive referendum campaign (sounds familiar?) and of devious legislation. It is also one of voting systems and the gravitational pull they exert on the evolution of political parties, and on the electoral strategies they must put in place to attain government and put their agendas into practice.
Whilst history dictates that the UK and Australia are similar in fundamental respects, conditions on the southern continent also mean that in others they are quite different. Most notably, in Australia rural and regional interests continue to figure heavily in politics, so much so that there is a dedicated political party, the National Party, to serve them. Indeed, in Queensland, the state with the largest proportion of its population living outside its capital city, the Nationals had even formed state governments on their own until relatively recently.
With the Nationals representing the right in rural and regional Australia, urban interests on that side of politics have been represented by the Liberal Party.2 Founded in 1944, “The Liberals” are the most recent of four major centre-right parties to have existed in the country since World War I.3 In Australia, then, and unlike the UK, the right has for over a century been represented not by one but by two distinct parties that, whilst ideological fellow travellers, represent different political constituencies. This notwithstanding, there also exists a longstanding coalition between the Liberals and the Nationals that beyond the formation of governments (on terms that often favour the junior rural and regional partner) has also involved each not standing candidates against the other unless the seat in question is vacant, or held by another party.
But it is not just the divided state of party politics on the right in Australia, mirrored now in the UK, that makes the situation there worthy of closer examination. The very origins of that division, and the way it has been dealt with ever since, offer important lessons for those interested in the future of the right in the UK. (If you are not interested in the future of the right, or delight in the prospect of it not having one, you may wish to look away now.)
Just as in the UK today, the origins of the divided right in Australia lie in a party-political split over a hot-button issue and the referendum that was called to resolve it. However, and as unlikely as it may seem, in Australia, it was a split on the left wing of politics that led to it, and ultimately to the Liberal-National Coalition that was and continues to be its solution. At the epicentre of these events was Pimlico-born Australian Labor Party (ALP) Prime Minister, Billy Hughes. In 1916 Hughes had presided over an extremely divisive internal party spat on the question of conscription in the context of WWI, much as the Tories were to over EU membership in the years leading up to Brexit a century later. Having more in common with the right on this issue than with his own party - the Prime Minister supported conscription whilst most of his ALP colleagues were against it - and similarly to David Cameron’s strategy to end once and for all the civil war in his own party a century later, Hughes sought to resolve Labor’s woes by holding a referendum on the issue in October 1916. (The reasons for ALP opposition were multiple, but the argument that neither Catholics nor the working class should be offered up as cannon fodder for Empire certainly figured among them. Indeed in one referendum campaign address Archbishop Mannix of Melbourne stated that Ireland had been more wronged by Great Britain than Belgium had by Germany.)
Of course, the referendum was not legally necessary, as the Constitution already bestowed the power on the government to introduce conscription. Just like the non-binding legal status of the Brexit referendum, what was in legal fact a plebiscite rather than a referendum was mainly symbolic, although of course the very act of public consultation would bring with it immense political pressure to honour the result, something which much of the UK Parliament did its utmost to avoid a hundred years later.
Shockingly, after an acrimonious campaign that, again like the 2016 Brexit referendum, saw members of the same party on opposing sides, Hughes ended up losing, and did so, curiously enough, by an almost identical margin to that which ended Cameron’s premiership in 2016: 52%-48%. Yet, despite now being deeply unpopular within his own party, and his authority irreversibly damaged, Hughes did not resign. Instead, he broke away before being ejected, and lead 14 of the ALP’s 42 MPs to form The National Labor Party, with him at its head, the following November.
Incredibly, and despite all that had happened, Hughes was not finished. Ever the canny politician, and eyeing an opportunity to remain in power, he subsequently formed a minority administration. But not with Labor. Instead, Hughes threw in his hat with the then opposition centre-right Liberals who had provided him the parliamentary support to get his conscription referendum bill passed months earlier. (One can only imagine the atmosphere between the defectors and their former ALP colleagues in the corridors and tearooms of Parliament House in Melbourne).4 Keen to formalise their arrangement and shore up their power, the NLP and the Liberals would eventually merge in February 1917 to form the Nationalist Party, again with Hughes at its head. Thus united, it was the Nationalists that would go on to win a large majority at the federal election the following May.
The Calamity at Swan
Until the controversy about conscription, and given the British roots of the Australian state, federal elections in Australia had been run on the same first-past-the-post (FPTP) system used in the UK. But, with every political action having its reaction - even for the gravity-defying Billy Hughes - that was all about to change.
The PM’s Labor origins prompted mistrust in rural Australia, particularly among landowners who feared that beyond the narrow issue of conscription his ideological instincts would tell in favour of the rural and regional working class. Crucially for our story about the electoral impact of a divided right, it was this mistrust which in October 1918 led farmers’ organisations to run a candidate of their own at a by-election for the then rural federal division (constituency) of Swan in Western Australia. As the Tories and Reform today are now all too keenly aware, the inevitable result of this under FPTP was a splitting of the right-wing vote that together accounted for more than 60% of votes cast, and the delivery of what should have been a safe Nationalist seat to Labor. In an another uncanny parallel to events this year in the UK, Labor secured victory over a divided right at Swan with… 34%:
Stung by this calamitous outcome, and seeing the threat that it posed, Hughes’s Nationalist government wasted no time in successfully introducing legislation - The Commonwealth Electoral Act of 1918 - to switch from FPTP to instant runoff or “preferential” voting for federal elections. First used in Queensland’s colonial election of 1893, and subsequently introduced post-Federation for state elections in Western Australia in 1907 and Victoria in 1911, preferential voting bears some resemblance to the system used in France. However, unlike that system, where voters return to vote a second time for their preferred candidate among those who passed the threshold to remain in the race after the first round, in Australia the elimination of candidates is done “instantly,” with voters ranking candidates in order of preference all at once on the ballot paper. If no candidate receives over 50%, the vote counters will consult the ballots that chose the candidate who came last as first choice, to see who was voted for as second choice. Those votes are then distributed to the relevant remaining candidates, with the process of counting, elimination, and recounting repeating until one candidate has more than 50%.5 In effect, the system introduced by Hughes, and which continues to be in use to this day in Australia, is “France, but without the paperwork.”
The benefits of preferential voting to the right were immediate. At the Corangamite federal by-election in Victoria, held barely two months after the self-inflicted wound at Swan, victory was delivered to the Victorian Farmers Union candidate over Labor on the back of preferences from the Nationalists, and despite the ALP candidate coming first by a very wide margin on first preferences:
The precedent was thus set to unify the right whilst respecting the reality of party political difference, and by the time of the next federal election in 1919 the Nationalists had concluded preference agreements with the various farmers’ and settlers’ parties across the country. The result was victory, although no absolute majority, for Hughes’s party, as well as 11 seats for rural interest parties in New South Wales, Victoria, and Western Australia. The latter would thereafter support Hughes in matters of confidence and supply, and would themselves merge in 1920 to form the predecessor to today’s National Party, the Country Party.6
It should be noted that despite resulting from a shameless act of electoral self-interest, preferential voting has also benefited the Australian left, particularly as it becomes increasingly divided between the ALP and the Australian Greens. Thus, in Australia the preferential voting system, born of an internal party split, a divisive referendum campaign, and ideological mistrust, has yielded a stable multi-party system, as opposed to the two party systems that French political scientist Maurice Duverger suggested are typically the products of FPTP.7 Most importantly of all, preferential voting has made it possible to have competition without electoral suicide between ideologically similar but organisationally distinct parties, and because of that the Coalition has remained in place ever since.
Lessons for the UK
It is here where the relevance of this episode in Australian political history to the UK becomes salient. Whilst to date it has been limited, the increasing electoral success not just of Reform (and its predecessor UKIP), but also of the Greens, in a system that until 2001 had prevented minor parties from winning English seats in Parliament entirely, means that even under first-past-the-post multi-party politics can take hold, and pose a threat to legacy parties of government, just as it did in Australia over a hundred years ago.8 Indeed, despite the inbuilt advantages of FPTP, at 57% the combined Labour and Conservative vote share at this year's election was the lowest since 1918.
What lessons may be drawn from the Australian experience by a UK with what now appears to be a nascent multi-party system, and particularly by those who stand to lose the most from it, the Conservatives and Reform? One option that we can almost certainly rule out is an Australian-style change of the voting system. Having considered and firmly rejected an alternative to first-past-the-post at the AV Referendum of 2011, and with a Labour government with a huge majority that stands to profit from division on the right, this option is almost certainly off the table, at least for the foreseeable future.
But there may be other options available. That will be the subject of Part 2 of this bonus post.
See UK Parliament, Results for a UK general election on 4 July 2024, by party. If the party’s factional predecessors are included, the 2024 result of 18.60% of seats (121 out of 650) is its worst ever performance in elections dating back to 1679, surpassing even the result of 1754, when the Tories won 106 seats out of 558, or 19% of seats.
In Queensland the Nationals would merge with the Liberals in 2008, just as their sister party, the Country Party, had done in the Northern Territory in 1974.
The result of a series of mergers between numerous parties in the first half of the twentieth century, the Liberals’ direct ancestors were the Liberal Party, founded in 1909, the Nationalist Party (1917), and the United Australia Party, into which the Nationalists and six rebel Labor MPs had merged in 1930.
Federal Parliament sat in Victoria’s Parliament House in Melbourne until 1927, when it was transferred to Canberra.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation, How does preferential voting work in Australia?, 20 April, 2022, accessed on 4 August, 2024
Whilst the 1917 federal election was significant for the inauguration of preferential voting, the Nationalists would have to wait until the 1922 for it to bear electoral fruit. That would come in the form of a Coalition government with the Country Party. And the price demanded by the junior partner? The resignation of the craftsman of the new electoral landscape, and old ideological foe, Billy Hughes.
“Duverger’s Law” holds that in first-past-the-post voting systems such as the UK or US, two parties tend to dominate. For a classic statement see Duverger, M., ‘Factors in a Two-Party and Multiparty System’, in Party Politics and Pressure Groups, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1972, pp. 23-32.
Parties representing nationalist and other interests in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales have long featured at Westminster, whilst independents - often former members of major parties - have enjoyed sporadic success since 1945. But consistent representation of non-nationalist, non-NI minor parties or independents has only occurred since 1997.