To listen to some on the right of British politics, the current problems facing The Conservative and Unionist Party are relatively simple to solve: Nigel Farage and reform won 14% of the vote, and the support of over 4 million Brits, by saying what the Tories are too scared to say: Immigration is changing British society fundamentally and needs to be sorely restricted if not reversed.
Most of those voters – not all, but most – are ex conservatives who defected because the last Tory Government was an ineffective mess that delivered liberalism instead of conservatism. If, this analysis basically supposes, the party just lurches to the right and starts speaking fluent Farage-ese, the right can re-unite, and Sir Keir Starmer will be a one-term Prime Minister.
As with almost all simple analyses, there is evidently some truth – much truth even – to this basic assessment of the problem. The Tory party has, undoubtedly, lost millions of voters to its right over immigration. Yet the difficulty with that diagnosis is a simple one: If that’s the problem, why did the Tories themselves retain the support of many more voters than Reform got? The Tories – flabby, liberal, out-of-shape and exhausted – still won 23% of the votes and the support of over six million Britons.
Indeed, the party also lost votes on its left. Most of the polling analysis done since the election suggests that a portion of former conservative voters – smaller than the reform defectors but large enough to matter – defected en masse to the Liberal Democrats, who are to reform what Glasgow Rangers Football Club are to a young lad on the bogside of Derry dressed in a Palestinian Kefiyah.
It is because of this, you’d have to imagine, that the current four-way contest for the Tory leadership divides the four candidates into two broad camps. There are the candidates on the right – Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick – and the candidates in the centre or on the left, James Cleverly and Tom Tugandhat. The first two clearly wish to move in the direction of Farage and Reform, the latter two appear to prefer some formulation of sticking where the Tories are and hoping that political gravity does the rest, as Britain tires of a Labour Government.
The problem – speaking as somebody whose instincts very much drift towards the right wingers in the contest – is that the centrists have a point.
In the first instance, Nigel Farage is not simply going to go away: No conservative will ever “out-Farage” Reform and get to its right on immigration. In the second instance, trying to do so will immediately or gradually alienate many of the voters who stuck with you the last time, for whom Farage-ism on immigration and other topics was a bridge too far even when the alternative was Rishi Sunak.
It’s also not even clear that Faragism or Faragism lite is a path to a governing majority. Farage won the support he did in the last election by taking a very clear stance on immigration and culture war issues. It should not be forgotten that at the same election, over 50% of voters divided their support between Labour, the Lib Dems, and the Green Party – all of whom were tonally and on policy far to the left of the Tories on the question of immigration.
The Tories, then, are operating in an environment where immigration is hurting them more than any other party – not only in terms of policy, but in terms of the structure of the electorate. When an issue is the top concern for a minority, but that concern is not shared – at least at the ballot box – by a majority, that is a recipe for near permanent opposition.
This is a pattern you see right across Europe. Marine LePen has never managed to achieve a majority of the vote, but even when she comes first in terms of votes won, the other parties can achieve a majority of the vote to keep her out. The same thing, we are told, may now happen to the Austrian Freedom Party in that country, as it has happened to the Allianz fur Deutschland in Germany. It also appears to be a persistent reason why Donald Trump struggles to achieve a majority of the vote in the USA – say what you want about “neverTrumpers” and “RINOs”, but it is hard for a Republican to win when Dick Cheney of all people is voting for the Democrat.
It is also a problem for the right – on a smaller scale – here in Ireland. Yesterday, when I wrote about Independent Ireland’s new immigration policy, which is substantially to the right of anything offered by a Government Party or a mainstream opposition party – the biggest single complaint of readers was that it wasn’t right-wing enough. Aontu generally finds itself on the wrong end of the same criticism.
This is the problem with Farage-ism, in purely electoral terms: It is a clear votewinner, but also a clear voter repellent. And you cannot consistently win power – in the UK, France, Ireland, or anywhere else – when a clear majority of the electorate is actively hostile to you. The right, and not just the Conservative Party, needs to find a way to square that circle and ease the concerns of voters in the middle. Otherwise it could be a long generation in the wilderness.