The Tory Calamity Part 2
A clear and present political danger
I want to start the second instalment of ‘The Tory Calamity’ not with an introduction, but with a graph:
Take a good look at it, for it may prove to be the most significant graph of the current UK electoral cycle, and potentially beyond. Despite having some vital information deliberately redacted, our mystery graph clearly shows a dramatic, and possibly unprecedented, improvement in the number of seats won at UK general elections since 2010. Who won these seats, or is it perhaps how they were won, and why that may be important, will be revealed later. But for now, let us recall where we are in our enquiry.
We saw in Part 1 that there are important parallels between the state of the right in the UK after this year’s general election, and that of Australia in the wake of the notorious “Calamity at Swan” of November 1918. Most notably, in both cases the right was marked by party political fracturing that cost it dear, and which was only remedied in Australia by the introduction of preferential voting and the creation of the Coalition between the two major right-wing parties that endures to this day.
Before discussing a possible remedy for the situation in the UK, however, we must first ask if it even requires one. There are, of course, several reasons to doubt that the right in the UK has suddenly become like that of Australia. Firstly, one may doubt that the admittedly unprecedented performance of Reform UK at this year’s general election heralds a new multi-party politics that poses a systemic risk to the electoral success of the Tories. Such a situation, after all, has long existed in Scotland and Wales, where nationalist and other sympathies mean that politics has always been about more than the Tories and Labour, as well as in Northern Ireland where it is not about them at all. Moreover, the example of the Liberal Democrats shows that, as in Scotland and Wales, even in England politics has never been a straightforward duopoly, and indeed was only ever one until the emergence of Labour as the primary alternative to the Conservatives at the beginning of the last century. Thus, precisely because FPTP does not inexorably lead to a two-party system, contrary to what Duverger’s law would have us believe, the success of Reform UK, and for that matter of the Greens, actually represents nothing new, but rather more of the same. (This is a little unfair on Duverger. His law illustrates a tendency in FPTP systems, not a cast-iron principle.) Finally, that success may not in any case be of any long-term consequence. Even when independents are added to the tally, with just 14 of the 543 English seats in parliament, the two “major minor” parties and independents together occupy but 2.5% of them.
What happens to your politics when you can’t see what’s staring you in the face?
Yet, for those who think that the dominant position of the Tories on the political right post-election ‘24 remains unaffected, it is worth considering what happens when, contrary to what happened in Australia, little or nothing is done about the threat of party-political fragmentation. Take, for example, the emergence of Labour as a credible party of government on the left in the UK at the beginning of the last century. The election of its first 2 MPs at the “Khaki Election” of 1900 was, of course, insignificant compared to the Liberals’ 183, let alone the victorious Conservative and Liberal Unionist’s massive 402.
But it was the response of the Liberals to that development that revealed not only an important difference to what happened under similar circumstances in Australia, but how what does happen is often dependent upon contingencies such as the personalities at the centre of events. In Australia the right managed to protect itself from electoral calamity in the wake of the Swan by-election in large part because of Billy Hughes’s extraordinary political daring. But that was not the case for the Liberals in the UK in the wake of the election of 1900. At times themselves divided over hot-button issues of the day, the result of their failure to act upon the threat was that their rival on the left steadily improved its performance until, at the 1923 election, it leap-frogged the Liberals to become the principal alternative to the Tories, a position that the party of Gladstone, Lloyd George, and their Whig predecessors had occupied since the late 17th century, and which it has never recovered.
Now it could be argued that this is a little unfair on the Liberals. Whilst Billy Hughes managed to find a solution to the right’s predicament in Australia, it would all have come to nought without the control of the legislative agenda that he enjoyed as PM. Yet, this is no point of contrast, much less an excuse for failure. Just like Hughes in Australia, Campbell-Bannerman, Asquith, and Lloyd George all had the levers of Prime Ministerial power at their disposal at various times between Keir Hardy and Richard Bell’s arrival at Westminster in 1900 and the fateful election of 1923. But unlike their Australian contemporary, none of them found a solution to the problem that their nascent rival presented, and certainly never changed the voting system in response to it.
Tory victory in 2029, or so many Calamities at Swan?
The trouble with political realignments is that they often go unnoticed until they are well under way, and by then impossible to stop. All realignments, we may say, have to start somewhere, and just as the Swan by-election threatened to lock the right out of government in Australia indefinitely, and not dealing with Labour has succeeded in doing just that to the Liberals/Liberal Democrats in the UK for 95 of the last 100 years, the same may well be about to happen to the Tories, no matter how improbable that may seem today. Indeed, the whole point is that it is improbable today.
But it is not as if the warning signs are not there.
The degree of success of minor parties at this year’s election is unprecedented, given the huge obstacles they face in first-past-the-post systems.1 Since 1997 the most minor party MPs elected to English seats at Westminster at a general election has been the three that were victorious in 2005. So, for those who dismiss the importance of what happened this past July, perhaps we should bear in mind the result delivered by the electors of Swan in 1918 (and by those of Derby and Merthyr Tydfil in 1900). The lesson they give is that, regardless of what voters’ political convictions are - in the case of Swan it was undoubtedly intense ideological mistrust of a former Labor PM that was decisive - so long as those convictions are strong enough not even the in-built advantages of FPTP can guarantee legacy party strength indefinitely.
Of course, conditions today in the UK are very different to those one hundred years ago. But regardless of the reasons for the fragmentation of the UK right - the passage of time may end up showing that it had as much to do with dissatisfaction with a Tory government that had overstayed its welcome as it did with ideological or policy differences - it is now plainly the case that it has fragmented. And the role of political conviction in sustaining that divide should not be underestimated. Today the divide on the UK right lies along the fault-lines not just of fiscal policy and the role of the state more generally, particularly in the wake of COVID-19, but also of border control, identity politics, and “left-behindness”. And think here not just of how feelings about immigration and of climate change have driven ideologically committed support for Reform and the Greens respectively despite FPTP, but of how the ongoing October 7 War between Israel and Iran and its proxies motivated many Muslim voters in Labour-leaning constituencies to elect 5 independent MPs, including former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, to Parliament.
To be sure, this year’s election may end up representing a far less significant development than the one the Liberals failed to deal with, and Billy Hughes did, a century ago. But the important political point is to be found in the not knowing whether it will. And, most importantly, not knowing if what is happening now will lead to political calamity later means that a sensible strategy to deal with it needs to be put in place. So, what we can ask, today, is whether the Conservatives are about to fall victim to an unstoppable shift in party politics, given that the opportunity to leverage the advantages of office that Billy Hughes could is now unavailable to them.
Show me the numbers
We shall have to leave it to future political historians to decide whether just this ended up coming to pass. But, for now, we may ask whether, beyond the bare fact of Reform UK’s unprecedented performance, it is possible to spot any additional warning signs. Focusing for now on England’s 543 seats, perhaps the most general, and fairly obvious, sign is that if they show anything, this year’s results show that