The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Reform is obliterating the Tories. It’s too late to avoid electoral catastrophe
Yes, Labour won the battle of the by-elections, but it is the war between the second and third place parties that is going to define the future of British politics.
In years gone by, there would have been no need for Reform UK. Richard Tice’s party preaches the kind of conservatism that was mainstream thinking under Margaret Thatcher: small statism, with low taxes and effective border control.
But all that changed when the Conservatives started co-opting increasing numbers of social democrats into its ranks in a bid to combat the rise of New Labour. The trend was cemented under “heir-toBlair” David Cameron and his equally centrist sidekick George Osborne, who both seemed to regard people with Right-wing views, to quote the now Foreign Secretary, as “fruit cakes”, “loons” and “closet racists”.
They appeared to believe that the Conservatives could only win power as a “One Nation” party of Remainers, at least until Boris Johnson achieved the biggest general election win since 1987 on the back of a Ukipesque promise to “get Brexit done”, annihilating the Europhile Liberal Democrats in the process. So much for centrism. If the country wanted that, Sir Ed Davey would’ve been in power by now.
Granted, net zero loving, proimmigration Johnson was a bit of a Lefty at heart, but the 2019 Tory manifesto promised no income tax or National Insurance rises and a points-based immigration system.
The Conservatives have always boasted a “broad church” of views, but Rishi Sunak is now languishing in the polls because his MPs no longer seem to belong to the same congregation. They are not just singing from different hymn sheets but struggling to locate the song book altogether under a leader who preaches Thatcherism but practises the complete opposite: high tax and spend, low growth and porous borders.
What’s interesting about the election in Kingswood is that combined, the Conservatives (8,675) and Reform (2,578) produced a higher vote than Labour (11,176). In Wellingborough, the combined Tory (7,408) and Reform (3,919) vote wasn’t quite enough to keep Labour out of the seat on 13,844 but might have been with a bigger turn out. So if you look at the ideological battle for No 10 – conservatism isn’t 20 points behind. In fact, it seems the country is neck and neck between Left and Right.
Yet of these two brands of conservatism, one is collapsing and the other has gone from nothing to 10 and 13 per cent in real elections, not just the polls.
When you consider that Reform did this without Nigel Farage or nearly the same name recognition that Ukip had, then it tells you a lot about where the Right is repositioning itself. What was once regarded as a fringe political movement is increasingly being seen as a credible alternative not just to the Tories but Labour.
As Professor Sir John Curtice pointed out, the Conservatives’ double by-election defeats were not driven by a love for Sir Keir Starmer. It has instead been fuelled not only by a collapse in support for the Conservatives, with many voters refusing to turn out, but also defections on both sides to Reform.
Farage, now a “man of the people” thanks to his GB News and
outings, is not wrong when he says “Labour are for the middle classes, as are the Lib Dems. The Tories were lent a working class vote in 2019 but many of those are coming to Reform as they feel betrayed on immigration.”
Realistically, the party didn’t do well enough to challenge the two major parties, but third place in both by-elections, which saw the Lib Dems pushed so far out they lost their deposits, bless them, suggests Reform may soon become the kingmaker. While that may not win Tice and co any seats at the next general election, it could give them sway over Tory policy making when the party finds itself in opposition.
Yesterday Danny Kruger and Miriam Cates, the Tory MPs who co-chair the New Conservatives group, were among the first out of the traps calling for the Tories to cut income tax and consider leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, taking the fight to Reform and Labour.
The pair said in a joint statement: “The results in yesterday’s by-elections are unequivocal: Labour are winning because many of the people who backed us in 2019 are staying at home or voting Reform. Voters are not flocking to Labour. They want a genuine alternative to the consensus politics of the last two decades – high taxes, low security, managed decline.”
Elsewhere, we had Starmer suggesting he can bring the “change the country needs” and Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves pledging “change built on the rock of fiscal responsibility and iron discipline”. In language pulled straight out of the Conservative playbook, she suggested growing the economy is Labour’s “number one mission”, before calling for “security” for family budgets.
Yet the sight of blue Labour and red Tories rushing to steal the other’s mantle is surely only going to make the electorate believe that there is very little difference between them, again benefitting Reform which is the only party that can credibly offer change, not least as it was founded a few years ago.
Sunak can say: “A vote for Reform is a vote for Labour” as much as he likes, but the truth is that many small-c conservatives are so angry with the
Richard Tice preaches the kind of conservatism favoured by Margaret Thatcher
Government right now that they actively want to punish them.
They didn’t vote Reform in leafy Kingswood (Conservative since 2010) because they agreed with Chris Skidmore’s narrow-minded criticism of his own party’s dash for oil and gas. As Ed Miliband might say: Hell no! They did it because Skidmore is a posterboy for the Tories not being nearly conservative enough.
They did it because they wake up to news such as the “Lawsonian” Chancellor apparently rowing back on his pledge to cut income tax in the Spring Budget on March 6. They did it in reaction to seeing tables like the one produced this week by Oxford’s Migration Observatory, showing only 1.3 per cent of people who arrived in Britain “irregularly” by small boats from 2018 to 2023 were removed. They did it in response to Britain’s epidemic of worklessness, among other crises.
Ultimately, the Tories are in this rut because conservative Britons feel conned and betrayed by a party that claimed to be small state, pro-growth and pro-border control.
For months I’ve said that time is running out for Sunak to turn the ship, but it now seems too late. If, as reports suggest, next month’s Budget isn’t radical in cutting income tax and appealing to an electorate fast running out of patience, what other opportunity will there be?
With his virtue-signalling bingo card well and truly filled, Khan is no doubt congratulating himself on a job well done. But there is one overlooked immigrant group that surely deserves its own line, given their vast contribution to London’s culture and infrastructure: the Irish.
Perhaps because they’re white, they don’t count for much in the woke mind. Rather than an Irish line, there are only a few words about Irish textile workers on the Transport for London explanation of the Weaver line.
But consider their contribution from digging canals and building railways, to running pubs and lodgings, to the impact of Irish culture on music, poetry, literature and the arts in
Britain today. They weren’t welcomed and were instead subjected to intense discrimination – but their historical suffering appears to have been sidelined.
Even Khan acknowledged their contribution in 2016, saying: “I know just how much we owe the Irish community for the role they’ve played in making London great.” How hollow those words sound now.