Remarks on the 2025 Local Elections in England
The Tory Calamity: Part 4
(UPDATE 3 MAY: Today's Daily Telegraph has a number of pieces full of wishful thinking about a Tory-Reform electoral pact (Kemi and Nigel must do a deal to stop Starmer; Tories split over pact with Reform after elections wipeout).
The piece below, written before polls had closed on May 1, explains why that horse may have already bolted.)
First-past-the-post, three-cornered politics, and the UK right’s “Calamity at Swan”
Today’s local and mayoral elections in England, and the Runcorn and Helsby parliamentary by-election, represent the first electoral temperature check on something approaching a national scale since last year’s general election. With that, and all the usual caveats in mind (local elections are not general elections, turnout is significantly lower, seats contested are not representative of all seats), today’s elections will give us a good idea on how far 2024’s surprise package, Reform UK, have progressed since last July, and the implications this may have as we head towards the end of the Labour government’s first year in office.
The central theme of last year’s series on the 2024 general election, The Tory Calamity, was that the centre-right in the UK found itself in an historically unprecedented situation. Far from being a political force united behind a single party, it was now split between two parties that, in a first-past-the-post system, would cost it dear. Recalling the infamous Swan by-election of 1918 in Australia (see The Tory Calamity Part 1), where a similar split enabled the Australian Labor Party to win a safe centre-right seat, the stage was set for the UK’s two parties of the right to lock the right out of power indefinitely in a war of mutually assured electoral destruction that would only benefit the left, and particularly Labour.
Local elections 2025
At first glance it would be reasonable to suppose that today’s local elections are set to further confirm this development. Out of 1,641 council seats in 23 local authorities going to the polls across England this year, the Tories are defending 954 of them, with Labour defending 286, and the Liberal Democrats defending 207. Once again, the presence of Reform UK will make an already vulnerable party more vulnerable still.
Yet, there is also a big difference between now and July 2024 which, if reflected in today’s results, will not only invalidate the “Calamity at Swan” thesis, but portend something far worse for the Conservatives. Whilst Reform secured an impressive 14% of the national vote at the general election, this was nevertheless significantly behind victorious Labour’s 34% and the Tories’ 24%. However, opinion polling since suggests that we have moved decisively from a two-party to a three-party system. As we approach the Summer both Labour and Reform are on between 20-28% of the vote, whilst the Conservatives are slightly behind on 19-27%.
What makes Reform’s rise particularly noteworthy is not only its scale, but its speed. Indeed, whilst the rise of this insurgent party on the right bears some resemblances to that of Labour as it gradually replaced the Liberals on the UK left during the first decades of the twentieth century (see The Tory Calamity, Part 2), what took decades to eventuate one hundred years ago may end up taking less than five years a century later. The difference this time around, then, is that Reform has risen so dramatically and swiftly in the polls that it may be winning these notionally Conservative seats itself, rather than acting as a calamitous spoiler and delivering them to Labour or the Lib Dems.
In contrast to the local elections, the parliamentary by-election at Runcorn and Helsby, as well as some of he mayoral races, will be the first barometer of Reform’s threat to Labour. If Reform win what ought to be one of the government’s safest seats, as it stands to win many notionally safe Tory seats in the English shires, it will lend further credence to the idea that party politics in the UK has become a genuinely three- rather than two-cornered affair. We may be about to witness the beginning of no less than a party-political realignment of historically unprecedented proportions.
Impact on the prospects of a Tory/Reform electoral pact
Most significantly, if it is confirmed today this new three-party reality will have profound implications both for the Reform-Tory relationship and for government formation at the national level. As I argued in Part 3 of The Tory Calamity, the likelihood of a Tory-Reform pact to avoid mutually assured electoral destruction depends on the political balance of power between the two. Without having to be equal partners, a pact is desirable if it is to the of benefit of both. And in the case of the Conservatives and Reform it would have been of benefit. Whilst not popular enough to win more than five seats on its own under first-past-the-post in 2024, Reform was popular enough to cost the Tories dear. It could therefore have demanded future Tory cooperation, particularly in Labour target seats, in return for standing down in seats the Tories had in their sights.
Yet, matters are very different less than 12 months later. If the current polling is correct, tomorrow may well confirm that what held at last year’s general election no longer does. Moving from 10-15% to 20-28% in less than a year, and with both the Tories’ and Labour’s polling commensurately down, Reform UK will be able to win far more Westminster seats on its own, particularly when the vote share required to win is lowered because three (and in some seats, four or five) parties rather than two have a chance of victory.
Of course, the real test will be at the next general election. Nevertheless, and rather than continuing to be an option until sometime after midway of the current parliament, this year’s results may mean that the window for a Tory-Reform pact will have already started to close. Its feasibility always depended on things staying the same. But things have not stayed the same. If the balance is tipped decisively in Reform’s favour come tomorrow morning, such that it no longer requires Conservative votes to win scores, and possibly hundreds, of seats in Parliament, it will no longer require a pact. Indeed, it could be the first sign that the next general election threatens not just another sound battering for “the natural party of government”, but an extinction-level event.
The Dawn of Perpetual Coalition Government?
Whether any such three-party reality sustains itself remains to be seen, and one interesting question in this connection is whether the mathematical realities of first-past-the-post voting will eventually reassert themselves and force the country back into the two-party politics to which it is accustomed. Yet, whilst certainly possible (anything is possible in UK politics these days), that may become steadily less likely come Friday morning. Gaining representation brings power, and with that an interest in maintaining it. The longer a state of near parity between Labour, the Conservatives, and Reform persists the more likely it is that it will become the new status quo.
But that also brings with it another very lively and, at least for the UK, novel possibility. With the three major parties now polling fairly closely to one another, it may well be the case that none of them will be able to form a government on its own after the next general election. The result? The UK will enter a new era of coalition governments, and despite all the ominous signs for them above, ideological proximity would suggest that that will most likely mean a coalition between Reform and… what remains of the Conservatives.
Time will of course tell whether any of this is true. But we will have a good idea of the direction of travel, of whether a Tory/Reform pact is still viable, or whether the UKs political geography has been so fundamentally upended that all political cards, for all three parties, are off the table, come Friday morning.