This is the general election scenario that scares me most The Conservative party are going to lose the next general election; at least, unless something truly miraculous happens. I also think the odds of a hung parliament are tiny as well. Labour are going to get a majority, it’s all but nailed on. Again, unless something totally unforeseen happens, Labour wins the next election.
The key feature of Faragism is not taking responsibility. Sniping from the sidelines saying “if only I was in charge things would be great”.
When he has opportunity he resigns and pops up somewhere else. At the moment UKIP was at its height he resigned. At the moment the Brexit Party was at maximum inflection he stood down candidates.
Farage is all about the grift. Making money. Dragging politics to the right by threat.
He will sit on the sidelines, loved by Tory members, threatening the Conservatives by being more right wing.
While Nick has filled in a lot of assumed detail on this case that are possibly a little over egging it, he's basically on the money. I have said repeatedly said that hoping the Tories go down to a Canadian Progressive Conservatives type defeat of the likes of 2 seats after being in power, as they did in the early 90's ( or even 90 seats), would be a case of "careful what you wish for".
Yougov have done deep analysis of the views of the British voter and their methods, along with IPSOS, are the most accurate of the bunch. If you divide views into Left, Centre Left, Centre, Centre Right and Right, the biggest group is in the centre. However, while it pains me to say it, there is no big, successful centre party, at least not that can come through with major representation based on FPTP voting, so with exceptions, the centre normally decides the result whether it goes to the Tory right or to the Labour left.
The next largest grouping is Centre Right + Right, which is larger than Centre Left + Left. So for Labour to win, they have to take most of the Centre, so cannot do this with a Corbyn/Michael Foot leadership and appear to be disadvantaged with even a mid left Ed Milliband. Of course there are other factors, mainly in what the other side are doing. The obvious example was Mrs May's robotic inability to campaign in 2017. Also the Tory's 2017 uncosted manifesto with highly unpopular policies on paying for social care or on tax cuts on big inheritances, which left a unique open goal for Labour. But the useless Corbyn still couldn't score. However, Corbyn's better result that year gave the Left a crumb of an argument on the supposed popularity of Left wing policies, when it was nothing of the sort.
FPTP voting advantages the broad right wing most of the time, wherever it is used. That is because right wing views are more evenly spread around geographical constituencies such as the large number of rural and suburban areas in useful concentrations sufficient to win most seats. The left and progressive votes are piled up much higher in Urban areas, where they achieve useless higher average vote majorities. The wasted votes on centre and left are further generated by being split between so many parties: Labour, LibDem, Green and again with Nationalists in the devolved nations, all with distinct political traditions.
The centre and left have so many disadvantages in the present unfair British political system and the large number of Right wing voters are not going away. Even as Tory incompetence, corruption and economic failure causes right wing voters to stay at home in millions this time, or to vote for ReformUK, or fringe parties, that represents a broad right wing movement in flux. It will regroup itself and make a more serious stab at power . Farage is their best chance to make a serious electoral stab in 2029 if they keep on moving to the populist right.
The sensible alternative would be for the Tories to go moderate One Nation. But those MPs were either expelled or made to sign fascistic like loyalty agreements to De Pfeffel and Brexit. These were elected MPs who are supposed to represent their constituents and their consciences, not rubber stamps for Johnson and the Leave campaign. They narrowly lost the Referendum, are cowed and have little Tory membership support for any leadership candidates. They are not coming back for the forseeable, so it's a populist right wing future for the Tories.
Starmer and Davey have to be bold and confect a reason to join the Single Market and fast or the Industrial Strategy and green conversion both parties offer, will fail to bring back much growth. They will also need to borrow and reverse austerity to get money flowing through our failing councils, health authorities and closing high streets and pubs, as government spending makes up 40% of the economy and any £1 spent generates £3.50 as it goes around and around. If they don't do so, a populist nasty party, likely led by Farage will be banging on the door to be let back in practically the blink of an eye. Only once in the modern era has the combined forces of the right exceeded the votes of the left + centre, which was 2015 at 51%, when UKIP were on their record 12%, but the LibDems were down on 8%, while the Tories were on the up and Labour were down.
The other piece of the puzzle is proper PR voting ( not AV), by which a strained future Labour Party will be able to govern into the 2030's with LibDems and Greens and build a future for this country with professionalism, continuity and consensus, keeping at bay the populist menace until it hopefully subsides.
I'll start by taking another pot-shot at your support for FPTP. In the scenario you outline, it's a significant contributory factor to Labour getting a 'so large we're ungovernable' majority, to the Tories being annihilated despite holding on to a significant chunk of the vote and to parties offering an alternative (or wanting to do so but being put off by the requirement to appeal to a small minority of swing voters in a small number of constituencies) doing poorly at a time we'd need fresh faces and ideas in Westminster.
Although it requires a lot of 'what ifs' I think your scenario is plausible, but I'd be more concerned by a greater and more immediate risk to the country. If we end up with an almost one-party state (and not just the stable and predictable 'elective dictatorship' that FPTP is supposedly meant to offer), and one without sufficient ideas or cohesion to improve things, this country's 'death spiral' could accelerate. The economy could get progressively harder and harder to fix and people could become more and more attracted to extremes. With no credible 'alternative government' waiting in the wings, why would investors and those residents with the means to flee not to so? In such a scenario we could see a PM Farage, but I'd be more concerned about being in the situation that enabled a populist autocrat to gain such support and power. (And noting that this person, whether it's Farage or someone else, wouldn't necessarily need very much support to seize power under our current electoral system.)
I still think the election will be in May. The polls aren't likely to change much by Autumn and delaying to the last minute pushes them into a corner and rarely works well
Farage is not a politician, he's a campaigner. He wouldn’t last very long as leader of the Tory party. It would split in two with him in charge. And of course he would first have to find a constituency association that would have him.
As for Labour, they have plenty of ideas, but Starmer is being ultra cautious. Also, spending will be tight because of Tory financial mismanagement and corruption. We could see them elected for a second term with more reforms in 2029.
Another possibility is found with a clue in the name ReformUK. This party and Brexits/UKIP before it were set up by right wing Tory grandees to hammer the Tory Party to the right. They, including many aristo's funded it with huge sums of old money. They were copying a playbook that worked in Canada and is outlined in the book "Reform on the Right"
The Reform Party of Canada were set up in the western plains to challenge their Progressive Conservative Party ( PC), which they saw as too centrist liberal in a country with a Liberal Party regularly in government, also with FPTP voting. The parallels are astonishing. They had regional separatist nationalists in Quebec ( PQ), a Labour Party (NDP) & Greens. Their Tories were posh, while Reform were populist, noisy and aggressive. Reform started taking substantial votes and some seats from the PC, scaring them as Farage scared Cameron and other Tory leaders.
Eventually ,The Reform Party of Canada merged with The Progressive Conservative Party ( PC) to form the Conservative Party of Canada. They got back into power for two terms as an extremely nasty outfit. One of their actions was to ban any academic science papers they didn't like, so banned hundreds as part of a culture war. The present Liberal PM, Trudeau, was working as a teacher at the time, with no interest in getting into politics as his Dad had done, but was so horrified by them that he took a Liberal party that had fallen into third place behind the NDP, back into power, now in a second term. One hopes he remembers his own former preference for PR voting and brings that in before it's too late.
Farage does not need a formal merger probably as he has had UKIP/Brexits entryism into the Tory Party and can close down Reform UK ( his company) and implore supporters to go over, who would probably follow him anyway. Farage's narrow band of support will not help him but in a FPTP system with little choice and a future Labour Party down from limited recovery, Farage could win based on as little as 1/3 of the vote.
Hmmm, how large a proportion of centrist voters would hold a negative opinion of Farage? Would we not end in a position, where the lib dems might end up as the official opposition?
It's a nice idea but the numbers would be a stretch even for optimists. Unless the Tories virtually vanish, the LibDems are not able to target enough seats, as they don't have the funds. If the LibDems made opposition leaders, it would be ironic as their economic policy paper just came out and you could hardly get a fag paper between it and Labour's. It would produce continuity and consensus to support recovery though
The Torys are dependent on funds and donors to run their party machine. Those donors want influence in return. If the Tories end up under 100 seats, that funding will look elsewhere. They may well end up below the breaking point, which is 20%?
Holger, that's a good point. The LibDems got a lot more donations and people and representative bodies attending their conferences when in coalition.
It would be great to see the Tories down but not to the point they practically vanish, as what would replace them would be hard right, more populist and nasty. There's a lot of right wing voters who want something along those lines.
On the shares of the vote Nick projects (Lab 45%, Con, Lib Dem & Reform 15% each - I've added 6% for the Greens based on current polling), Electoral Calculus projects the following seat totals; Lab 534, Lib Dem 62, SNP 16, Con 15, Reform 1, Greens 1. That's without making any allowance for tactical voting or what may happen in Scotland. So, under Nick's scenario, the Lib Dems would be the Official Opposition and the Tories would be the fourth largest party in the House of Commons.
Part of what makes it plausible is the spineless nature of Tory so-called moderates. We saw it again last week. I expected the Tory Party to descend into civil war after the election. It's looking more and more likely that it will be a walkover for the right.
This feels highly plausible; certainly that a Tory wipe out is being under-priced, as they get squeezed between ReformUK and supercharged tactical voting.
At least 35% +of the populace will always vote Centre Right/Far Right and a self 'fiscally constrained' Starmer/Reeves Govt will face huge head-wins getting re-elected. The progressive majority in this country really needs to get PR taken seriously A Faragist or /populist govt enabled by FPTP and unconstrained by the niceties of checks and balances could well be a legacy of the next election.
The reason bookmakers promote accumulators is that the odds of a whole series on unknown future events panning out in one particular way are vanishingly small. A bookmaker might offer 500-1 on all of these predictions coming to pass, and still not be offering decent value.
If Labour wins, they will be overwhelmed in 3 months by the huge and insoluble problems facing Britain. In fact, the situation is now so bad that there is nothing any political party can do to avert societal collapse.
The ruling elite of Britain have made irreversible, terrible decisions in the post WW2 period. The best decision made, by Harold Macmillan, was to join the EEC. The effects of BREXIT would be bad enough without all the other problems.
People sense this, approximately 500,000 emigrated in 2022. They were the useful ones, who could apply and be accepted into Australia, NZ, Canada or the USA. Probably another 500,000 will have left in 2023. Replaced with what?
Interesting piece but I doubt this will happen, Labour will be lucky to get a majority of about 30 seats, this is ideal and something they can grow on in the following election as Thatcher did in 83. The Tories will be in a Civil War still in 28/9.
Sunak may wait til January 25 for the election, on his CV it will say PM 2022-2025.
I more or less agree,. I can't see Sunak going much early, although they don't want another Christmas/Winter campaign, so late October.? Activists are not put off and the voters won't punish the Tories extra for annoying them over Christmas.
I think all this is worryingly plausible but I hold on to the idea that Starmer is no fool and aware that the country could one day be in this kind of situation. So he must have a plan to do something structurally to shore up. I don't know what, but something.
Hopefully Starmer will junk his "Make Brexit work" and his acceptance of Tory tax and spend or dithering over PR and will be radical, doing everything that is needed to be done.
The key feature of Faragism is not taking responsibility. Sniping from the sidelines saying “if only I was in charge things would be great”.
When he has opportunity he resigns and pops up somewhere else. At the moment UKIP was at its height he resigned. At the moment the Brexit Party was at maximum inflection he stood down candidates.
Farage is all about the grift. Making money. Dragging politics to the right by threat.
He will sit on the sidelines, loved by Tory members, threatening the Conservatives by being more right wing.
While Nick has filled in a lot of assumed detail on this case that are possibly a little over egging it, he's basically on the money. I have said repeatedly said that hoping the Tories go down to a Canadian Progressive Conservatives type defeat of the likes of 2 seats after being in power, as they did in the early 90's ( or even 90 seats), would be a case of "careful what you wish for".
Yougov have done deep analysis of the views of the British voter and their methods, along with IPSOS, are the most accurate of the bunch. If you divide views into Left, Centre Left, Centre, Centre Right and Right, the biggest group is in the centre. However, while it pains me to say it, there is no big, successful centre party, at least not that can come through with major representation based on FPTP voting, so with exceptions, the centre normally decides the result whether it goes to the Tory right or to the Labour left.
The next largest grouping is Centre Right + Right, which is larger than Centre Left + Left. So for Labour to win, they have to take most of the Centre, so cannot do this with a Corbyn/Michael Foot leadership and appear to be disadvantaged with even a mid left Ed Milliband. Of course there are other factors, mainly in what the other side are doing. The obvious example was Mrs May's robotic inability to campaign in 2017. Also the Tory's 2017 uncosted manifesto with highly unpopular policies on paying for social care or on tax cuts on big inheritances, which left a unique open goal for Labour. But the useless Corbyn still couldn't score. However, Corbyn's better result that year gave the Left a crumb of an argument on the supposed popularity of Left wing policies, when it was nothing of the sort.
FPTP voting advantages the broad right wing most of the time, wherever it is used. That is because right wing views are more evenly spread around geographical constituencies such as the large number of rural and suburban areas in useful concentrations sufficient to win most seats. The left and progressive votes are piled up much higher in Urban areas, where they achieve useless higher average vote majorities. The wasted votes on centre and left are further generated by being split between so many parties: Labour, LibDem, Green and again with Nationalists in the devolved nations, all with distinct political traditions.
The centre and left have so many disadvantages in the present unfair British political system and the large number of Right wing voters are not going away. Even as Tory incompetence, corruption and economic failure causes right wing voters to stay at home in millions this time, or to vote for ReformUK, or fringe parties, that represents a broad right wing movement in flux. It will regroup itself and make a more serious stab at power . Farage is their best chance to make a serious electoral stab in 2029 if they keep on moving to the populist right.
The sensible alternative would be for the Tories to go moderate One Nation. But those MPs were either expelled or made to sign fascistic like loyalty agreements to De Pfeffel and Brexit. These were elected MPs who are supposed to represent their constituents and their consciences, not rubber stamps for Johnson and the Leave campaign. They narrowly lost the Referendum, are cowed and have little Tory membership support for any leadership candidates. They are not coming back for the forseeable, so it's a populist right wing future for the Tories.
Starmer and Davey have to be bold and confect a reason to join the Single Market and fast or the Industrial Strategy and green conversion both parties offer, will fail to bring back much growth. They will also need to borrow and reverse austerity to get money flowing through our failing councils, health authorities and closing high streets and pubs, as government spending makes up 40% of the economy and any £1 spent generates £3.50 as it goes around and around. If they don't do so, a populist nasty party, likely led by Farage will be banging on the door to be let back in practically the blink of an eye. Only once in the modern era has the combined forces of the right exceeded the votes of the left + centre, which was 2015 at 51%, when UKIP were on their record 12%, but the LibDems were down on 8%, while the Tories were on the up and Labour were down.
The other piece of the puzzle is proper PR voting ( not AV), by which a strained future Labour Party will be able to govern into the 2030's with LibDems and Greens and build a future for this country with professionalism, continuity and consensus, keeping at bay the populist menace until it hopefully subsides.
Another very interesting piece Nick.
I'll start by taking another pot-shot at your support for FPTP. In the scenario you outline, it's a significant contributory factor to Labour getting a 'so large we're ungovernable' majority, to the Tories being annihilated despite holding on to a significant chunk of the vote and to parties offering an alternative (or wanting to do so but being put off by the requirement to appeal to a small minority of swing voters in a small number of constituencies) doing poorly at a time we'd need fresh faces and ideas in Westminster.
Although it requires a lot of 'what ifs' I think your scenario is plausible, but I'd be more concerned by a greater and more immediate risk to the country. If we end up with an almost one-party state (and not just the stable and predictable 'elective dictatorship' that FPTP is supposedly meant to offer), and one without sufficient ideas or cohesion to improve things, this country's 'death spiral' could accelerate. The economy could get progressively harder and harder to fix and people could become more and more attracted to extremes. With no credible 'alternative government' waiting in the wings, why would investors and those residents with the means to flee not to so? In such a scenario we could see a PM Farage, but I'd be more concerned about being in the situation that enabled a populist autocrat to gain such support and power. (And noting that this person, whether it's Farage or someone else, wouldn't necessarily need very much support to seize power under our current electoral system.)
I still think the election will be in May. The polls aren't likely to change much by Autumn and delaying to the last minute pushes them into a corner and rarely works well
Farage is not a politician, he's a campaigner. He wouldn’t last very long as leader of the Tory party. It would split in two with him in charge. And of course he would first have to find a constituency association that would have him.
As for Labour, they have plenty of ideas, but Starmer is being ultra cautious. Also, spending will be tight because of Tory financial mismanagement and corruption. We could see them elected for a second term with more reforms in 2029.
Another possibility is found with a clue in the name ReformUK. This party and Brexits/UKIP before it were set up by right wing Tory grandees to hammer the Tory Party to the right. They, including many aristo's funded it with huge sums of old money. They were copying a playbook that worked in Canada and is outlined in the book "Reform on the Right"
The Reform Party of Canada were set up in the western plains to challenge their Progressive Conservative Party ( PC), which they saw as too centrist liberal in a country with a Liberal Party regularly in government, also with FPTP voting. The parallels are astonishing. They had regional separatist nationalists in Quebec ( PQ), a Labour Party (NDP) & Greens. Their Tories were posh, while Reform were populist, noisy and aggressive. Reform started taking substantial votes and some seats from the PC, scaring them as Farage scared Cameron and other Tory leaders.
Eventually ,The Reform Party of Canada merged with The Progressive Conservative Party ( PC) to form the Conservative Party of Canada. They got back into power for two terms as an extremely nasty outfit. One of their actions was to ban any academic science papers they didn't like, so banned hundreds as part of a culture war. The present Liberal PM, Trudeau, was working as a teacher at the time, with no interest in getting into politics as his Dad had done, but was so horrified by them that he took a Liberal party that had fallen into third place behind the NDP, back into power, now in a second term. One hopes he remembers his own former preference for PR voting and brings that in before it's too late.
Farage does not need a formal merger probably as he has had UKIP/Brexits entryism into the Tory Party and can close down Reform UK ( his company) and implore supporters to go over, who would probably follow him anyway. Farage's narrow band of support will not help him but in a FPTP system with little choice and a future Labour Party down from limited recovery, Farage could win based on as little as 1/3 of the vote.
Hmmm, how large a proportion of centrist voters would hold a negative opinion of Farage? Would we not end in a position, where the lib dems might end up as the official opposition?
It's a nice idea but the numbers would be a stretch even for optimists. Unless the Tories virtually vanish, the LibDems are not able to target enough seats, as they don't have the funds. If the LibDems made opposition leaders, it would be ironic as their economic policy paper just came out and you could hardly get a fag paper between it and Labour's. It would produce continuity and consensus to support recovery though
The Torys are dependent on funds and donors to run their party machine. Those donors want influence in return. If the Tories end up under 100 seats, that funding will look elsewhere. They may well end up below the breaking point, which is 20%?
Holger, that's a good point. The LibDems got a lot more donations and people and representative bodies attending their conferences when in coalition.
It would be great to see the Tories down but not to the point they practically vanish, as what would replace them would be hard right, more populist and nasty. There's a lot of right wing voters who want something along those lines.
On the shares of the vote Nick projects (Lab 45%, Con, Lib Dem & Reform 15% each - I've added 6% for the Greens based on current polling), Electoral Calculus projects the following seat totals; Lab 534, Lib Dem 62, SNP 16, Con 15, Reform 1, Greens 1. That's without making any allowance for tactical voting or what may happen in Scotland. So, under Nick's scenario, the Lib Dems would be the Official Opposition and the Tories would be the fourth largest party in the House of Commons.
Part of what makes it plausible is the spineless nature of Tory so-called moderates. We saw it again last week. I expected the Tory Party to descend into civil war after the election. It's looking more and more likely that it will be a walkover for the right.
One problem is that those with a spine were kicked out by Johnson, so the remaining moderatesare, by definition, the more spineless ones.
The odds on this prophecy are shortening...
This feels highly plausible; certainly that a Tory wipe out is being under-priced, as they get squeezed between ReformUK and supercharged tactical voting.
At least 35% +of the populace will always vote Centre Right/Far Right and a self 'fiscally constrained' Starmer/Reeves Govt will face huge head-wins getting re-elected. The progressive majority in this country really needs to get PR taken seriously A Faragist or /populist govt enabled by FPTP and unconstrained by the niceties of checks and balances could well be a legacy of the next election.
The reason bookmakers promote accumulators is that the odds of a whole series on unknown future events panning out in one particular way are vanishingly small. A bookmaker might offer 500-1 on all of these predictions coming to pass, and still not be offering decent value.
If Labour wins, they will be overwhelmed in 3 months by the huge and insoluble problems facing Britain. In fact, the situation is now so bad that there is nothing any political party can do to avert societal collapse.
The ruling elite of Britain have made irreversible, terrible decisions in the post WW2 period. The best decision made, by Harold Macmillan, was to join the EEC. The effects of BREXIT would be bad enough without all the other problems.
People sense this, approximately 500,000 emigrated in 2022. They were the useful ones, who could apply and be accepted into Australia, NZ, Canada or the USA. Probably another 500,000 will have left in 2023. Replaced with what?
Interesting piece but I doubt this will happen, Labour will be lucky to get a majority of about 30 seats, this is ideal and something they can grow on in the following election as Thatcher did in 83. The Tories will be in a Civil War still in 28/9.
Sunak may wait til January 25 for the election, on his CV it will say PM 2022-2025.
I more or less agree,. I can't see Sunak going much early, although they don't want another Christmas/Winter campaign, so late October.? Activists are not put off and the voters won't punish the Tories extra for annoying them over Christmas.
I think all this is worryingly plausible but I hold on to the idea that Starmer is no fool and aware that the country could one day be in this kind of situation. So he must have a plan to do something structurally to shore up. I don't know what, but something.
Hopefully Starmer will junk his "Make Brexit work" and his acceptance of Tory tax and spend or dithering over PR and will be radical, doing everything that is needed to be done.