What happens next? Conservatives after the inevitable defeat.

Disraeli was right in 1872 about improving people’s lives and James Carville was also right in 1992 when he told us ‘it’s the economy, stupid’. The problems Britons face are overwhelmingly economic.

The nearest the UK got to having a more proportional system of elections was via a referendum following a typically half-baked deal on constitutional changes between David Cameron and Nick Clegg. So, unless something very strange comes over the authors of the forthcoming Labour election manifesto, there is precisely zero chance of there being a change to Britain’s electoral system any time ahead of hell freezing over and the little devils playing ice hockey. This simple truth matters a lot more than people realise when it comes to questions about what will happen next in UK politics and government.

People active in politics and with strong views to right, left or centre often talk about the electorate as a set of blocks that can be turned into a policy platform in the manner of a toddler piling his wooden bricks up on the living-room carpet. You will hear the likes of Patrick O’Flynn or Matt Goodwin telling us that there is a winning coalition of the economically left and socially right that is just waiting to be built from those nice coloured blocks. And others will point to the rainbow politics first pioneered in London back in the early 1980s by Ken Livingstone where promises - often contradictory ones - are made to each of the blocks (or their usually self-appointed leaders) which will lead to the votes piling up. The problem is that our political and electoral system doesn’t work like this and to hope that it will is wishful thinking.

So what is going to happen? I have several thoughts based on my appreciation of how politics works in the UK. 

1. The Conservative Party will not cease to exist. I know that fans of Peter Hitchens want this to happen but our system does not easily make for a change of this nature. The last successful national party to emerge was formed in 1900 and didn’t get a share of power for 25 years after that date. Moreover, the Labour Party benefited enormously from the huge extension of the franchise in 1918. The various right-of-centre clusters - which strangely seem to start with the prefix Re- - are, in large part, vehicles for personality-driven politics, opportunistic and inconsistent. Reform hasn’t even managed to get a councillor elected and shows no sign of breakthrough in parliamentary by-elections, which indicates that the popularity of ‘lean left on the economy and right on society’ is not quite as appealing a message as Goodwin and others like him believe.

2. Assuming that the forthcoming election results in a thrashing for the Conservatives then we will get a new leader from amongst the rump. I’m not going to speculate on who that leader might be - it does rather depend on which of the various contenders manages to keep his or her seat - but it probably matters less than do the narrowed political options for the Party after a thoroughly deserved trouncing. It is a truism in politics and especially binary political systems like that of the UK, that you win elections by tacking to the centre. But it is also true that the location of the centre changes over time. A Starmer government will try to push the centrist, establishment position, especially on social policy and the role of government, further to the left. Meanwhile the reality on issues like immigration, defence, crime and some social policy (e.g. trans rights) will pull the centre further to the right.

3. The most likely response of a new Conservative Party leader (and it matters very little who) will be to adopt the sort of ‘National Conservative’ policy platform and accept that the few remaining classical liberals in the Party will either depart forever or become a tiny group of grumblers sticking around more out of habit than conviction. As a result (and despite the huge failure of policy on immigration since Brexit - at least in NatCon terms) the Conservatives will adopt the shrill anti-immigrant stance we’ve seen from insurgent parties across Europe. But because the Party will be opposing an essentially pro-immigration Labour Party, this will be the easiest door at which to push.

4. An overtly anti-immigration Conservative Party will mean that the ‘baby parties’ will lose relevance. It has been true that every decade there is a resurgence of populist, often racist, politics driven by immigration and a gut-feeling among many that problems of crime, jobs and economic struggle can be laid at the door of immigrants. We saw this with Enoch Powell and the dockers walk-out supporting his views on immigration. It arose again at the end of the 1970s, especially in South- and East London, with the politics of the National Front. And then again with the BNP, then with UKIP. Today is no different and the problem - right wing racist parties are a problem - diminishes with declines in immigration or else by the mainstream opposition absorbing immigration concerns in their policy platform. Britain does not have a system of elections such as the Netherlands where an avowedly anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant party becomes the biggest party but with less than 25% of the vote (it is almost certain that Holland will now get a left-leaning coalition between Labour-Green, the new centrist party and the liberal party that has led governments for the last decade or so).

5. Being tough on immigration and crime is not enough to win an election (if it were then far right parties would long ago have replaced the Conservatives). Winning an election requires a credible economic strategy that seems not only moderate but also delivers economic growth. For European populists who get into government (Poland, Hungary, Italy) the economic strategy is not theirs to set because the European Union still provides a broadly ‘neoliberal’ approach to trade and monetary policy. This is why these parties - Geert Wilders in The Netherlands is overtly supportive of that country leaving the EU - are always ‘eurosceptic’. The EU does not allow for the sort of damaging protectionist trade and industrial policy (especially the latter) that ‘National Conservative’ and ‘post-liberal’ politics demands. The UK, because of Brexit, can pursue such a policy so a post-defeat Tory Party will adopt a protectionist economic policy and will try to out-bid Labour on running an interventionist industrial policy.

6. If the Conservatives go into a 2029 General Election on this basis (and assuming that Stamer’s incredible run of luck continues when it comes to, as Harold Macmillan put it, ‘events, dear boy, events’) then they will lose. If the Party makes progress then the leader may survive this loss but the ‘hard’ right agenda will need to be softened. The oft-sold idea that you can present a non-credible, protectionist economic agenda as ‘leaning left on the economy’ will have been defeated and the Conservative Party will remind itself of its purpose and turn to a more open and international economic approach.

7. Lastly, and importantly, the Conservative Party will need to see that the radicalisation of young people through social media and universities does not preclude the making of political strategies that work for those young people. It is widely argued that Canadian PM, Justin Trudeau won re-election for his left-of-centre Liberals off the back of mobilising younger voters. Today opinion polls, for perhaps the first time ever, are showing the Canadian Conservatives ahead of Liberals among 18-24 year-old voters. And the reason is clear, the Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, has focused unrelentingly on a critical issue for young people - housing. Not by promising left-of-centre prescriptions like rent controls or social housing but by seeking to open up the nation’s planning system so more houses are built. In the UK, if the Conservative Party does not begin to talk about issues like housing then it is unlikely to recover any support among younger people. And after the 2024 General Election, the opportunity to make a pro-housing position effective will arise because Labour’s housing strategy is going to fail.

All of these thoughts are just that, thoughts. I have not conducted any opinion polls or sat in any of the salons frequented by the great and good. But equally I’m not making this case on the basis of flavour-of-the-month pundits, often with books or podcasts to flog, that get thrust in front of me on social and mainstream media. Having been actively involved in politics since the 1970s, I hope my analysis might contain a little wisdom gleaned from that time. What I do know is that Disraeli was right in 1872 when he told us to bother about improving people’s lives and James Carville, echoing that advice in 1992, was also right when he told us ‘it’s the economy, stupid’. Right now the problems facing Britons are overwhelmingly economic - the mortgage rate, the cost of the food shop, the taxes they pay, the wages they earn. We know because we have 200 years of good evidence that liberal economics is the best way to respond to people’s concerns about their personal financial circumstances. To try and sell the public something else is foolish and stupid.