There is an end-of-days feel about the current Tory administration in Britain. They’re not exactly drinking schnapps in the bunker of Number 10 but the pounding of enemy artillery is getting closer.
The party trails Keir Starmer’s opposition Labour Party by a seemingly unassailable 20 points and the popularity of prime minister Rishi Sunak, the fifth leader in seven years, is trending at an all-time low.
This is perhaps unsurprising given the chaos of the last two years, starting with the disastrous premiership of Boris Johnson; the brief Liz Truss-led meltdown; and Sunak’s fail-to-ignite leadership.
After winning a landslide victory with a majority of 80 seats and 43.6 per cent of the popular vote as recently as 2019, the party looks all over an electoral bust.
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Sunak has officially until January 28th, 2025 before he must face the music electorally but commentators believe he’ll opt for an autumn election next year. His high-profile reshuffle last week, which saw the surprise return of former leader David Cameron and the exit of anti-woke firebrand Suella Braverman, appears to be a last throw of the dice.
It tells us two things. First, the party has accepted it will lose the next election. The return of Cameron was about shoring up the so-called “blue wall”, the party’s southern England heartland, which has traditionally voted Conservative but was generally opposed to Brexit. It is the inverse of the “red wall”, Labour’s heartland in the north, which switched sides in the heat haze of Brexit.
Cameron’s resurrection is an exercise in damage limitation.
One modelling of how the current polls would play out in terms of seats suggests Labour would win 420 seats, equating to a landslide 190-seat majority, with the Tories slumping to just 149 seats, mirroring Tony Blair’s landslide win in 1997.
Avoiding a defeat of that magnitude, which might lock the Tories out of government for a decade, is now the main aim.
The second thing the reshuffle tells us is that the party is still riven by the same internal divisions that careered it and the country down the self-destructive Brexit path. At the centre of this noisy wrangle is immigration, the most divisive issue in British politics, perhaps in global politics.
There is, however, something more profound, more corrosive going on at the heart of Torydom than a fatigued and unpopular administration. The party that has dominated UK politics for the last 100 years appears to be eroding its own electoral base.
Politically it is taking positions on Brexit and climate change (Sunak has reversed out of several climate commitments while controversially restarting North Sea oil and gas exploration) that alienate younger voters.
At the same it is presiding over economic policies that make the promise of home ownership, even for young professionals who might have traditionally voted Tory, a lost cause.
As Robert Shrimsley, chief UK political commentator of the Financial Times, said in a recent opinion piece, the electoral danger for the Conservatives is that their appeal becomes limited to older voters.
“The bitter truth for Tories is that they have lost the economic hook that pulled in those younger voters while doubling down on political positions that alienate a significant portion of them. One of the two may be manageable. Together they are indeed a bet against the future,” Shrimsley wrote.
Polling by UK think tank Onward earlier this year found that 62 per cent of 25- to 40-year-olds in Britain believe the Tories should lose the next election. The only age category in which the party polled ahead of Labour was in the over-65 category.
“With home ownership a dwindling dream, stalling wage growth and soaring childcare costs, it is no wonder that millennials are becoming less conservative as they age. To paraphrase Tony Blair, millennials’ instincts are to get on in life and they think the Conservatives’ instincts are to stop them,” James Blagden, head of politics and polling at Onward, said.
And then there is the thorny issue of immigration. Back in 2010, Cameron pledged to cut net migration to below 100,000 people a year. He failed spectacularly.
Brexit was meant to resolve the issue once and for all, ending the free movement of people from the EU and handing back control of UK borders to London. Yet migration has rocketed to record levels since the UK’s exit. In 2022, two years after the UK’s official EU departure, net migration to Britain reached an all-time high of 606,000.
As home secretary, Braverman made “stopping the boats” – a reference to the flow of migrants crossing the English Channel – a priority. Her inflammatory rhetoric – “the invasion on our southern coast”; “the hurricane of mass migration” – was no doubt designed to cultivate the nativist wing of the party and the electorate.
Her reactionary populism, however, tends to alienate university graduates and those from migrant backgrounds who form an increasing share of the UK population. More recently, the party’s most divisive MP seemed to have been on a mission to get herself sacked in order perhaps to launch her own leadership bid.
The Tories traditionally pitched themselves as the party of economic competence. Since the rise of the Tory right under Johnson, however, the party has become fractured along cultural lines and has pursued reckless economic policies, estranging itself from its core base and from younger voters.
