The year that has just come to an end was a tumultuous one for democratic politics internationally. For incumbents 2024 proved especially torrid. Even in the world’s most populous democracy, India, Prime Minister Modi returned to office diminished and unexpectedly needing to cobble together a coalition. The US economy was the stand-out success story globally, but relatively robust growth there could not mask popular concerns about living standards, so Donald Trump was swept back into office as the first former US President to be re-elected since 1892. In neighbouring Canada, Justrin Trudeau has signalled his as MP and party leader, citing “internal battles” with Liberal colleagues. Meanwhile let’s not even start trying to unpick the prolonged parliamentary turmoil that has beset both German and French politics.
Closer to home the results of the UK’s General Election last July were some of the strangest in British electoral history. After four successive defeats the Labour Party returned to office with a landslide majority of 174, its second largest on record. However, its share of the popular vote at 33.7% was Labour’s sixth lowest in the 22 General Elections since World War Two, suggesting that the UK’s party and electoral system is failing properly to represent voters on a range of economic and geopolitical issues.
Understandably in the aftermath of Keir Starmer’s electoral triumph political commentators initially drew comparisons with the stunning Labour victory achieved by Tony Blair in 1997. The immediate presumption was that with a similarly unassailable majority, Starmer would be well set for a comparably prolonged period in office. Although some persist in regarding Starmer as something of a policy void, he has long been relatively clear in his social democratic instincts supporting modest tax rises, steady changes to regulation, small steps towards closer continental relationships without unravelling Brexit and light-touch public sector reform without upsetting Whitehall and the Trades Unions. For all the talk of ‘Change’ in the run-up to the election, Starmer’s government so far has offered more by way of continuity to the Sunak administration.
Indeed, there are arguably greater parallels between the early days of Starmer’s government and the Wilson/Callaghan Labour administrations that took office in February 1974 promising a ‘social contract’ to restore industrial harmony. In order to bring a rapid end to long-running public sector disputes Starmer has simply paid off striking unions in the NHS, railways and local government with precedent-setting inflation busting deals; his Chancellor has exempted the public sector from unprecedented hikes in employers’ NI and imposed generous minimum wage increases without any recognition of its inflationary impact on low-pay differentials. The history of the second half of the 1970s suggests these early measures may come back to bite by the end of this decade, especially if he continues in a flagrantly partisan fashion to fund this by alienating the interests of the just-managing elderly, the farming community and private schools. Increasingly I wonder that the real change election may come in 2028-29 by which time dissatisfaction with the status quo may be so widespread that a political party offering disruption and a radical break from the past wins popular support.
But even after a turbulent first six months in office and plenty of evidence of buyer’s remorse from the electorate it would be unwise to write-off Keir Starmer and his party too soon. In stark contrast to his predecessors in the second half of the 1970s, Starmer has demonstrated that the Labour Party he leads will not tolerate dissent. For sure that ruthlessness is potentially double-edged. Even last July five previously safe Labour seats fell to left-wing independents and the weakness of the Tories makes it harder to persuade more radical leftist voters that supporting the Greens or breakaway parties will let the Conservatives in.
However, Keir Starmer also has that most precious of political gifts, time, firmly on his side. He has control of the political agenda for at least another four years, with a huge parliamentary majority. This gives him leeway to drive forward some lasting reform in stark contrast to the paralysis of the past decade, when the narrative was dominated by Brexit, Covid and the never-ending internal strife under successive Conservative Prime Ministers.
In the meantime, for the Conservative leadership a perilous year now lies ahead. Kemi Badenoch will be acutely aware of the fate that befell a succession of her predecessors despite the apparently conclusive endorsement by the Party membership in the country. Iain Duncan Smith still sits on the Conservative benches, whilst the media never seems to tire of faithfully reporting Liz Truss’s latest interventions. The scars of Margaret Thatcher’s 1990 removal from office arguably took two decades to heal, so it would also be premature to assume that the anger felt by tens of thousands of die-hard Tory supporters since the defenestration of Boris Johnson only three and a half years ago has been fully sated.
For the Tories it may be tempting to cast an envious eye across the Atlantic and seek to emulate Trump’s Republican crushing victory. Yet it is difficult to see so soon after a calamitous period in office in which Kemi Badenoch served as a minister – rather than the disruptive outsider she now seeks to style herself as – how she can say anything to the mass of Britons disillusioned by economic hardship and alarmed by uncontrolled immigration. She has many sensible things to say about reprogramming the state, but few elections are ever won by convincing proposals over political process. The other main thrust of her appeal has been an uncompromising stance on the ‘war on woke’ but the cultural divide in the UK is simply insufficiently potent to bring with it a plurality of voters; Trump’s genius meanwhile was never to speak down to working class voters.
Much attention has focused on the shallowness of Labour’s popular appeal and the remarkable impact of the first past the post electoral system. However, the Conservatives’ hold even on the 121 seats they managed to win is barely less tenuous. In only five constituencies do the Tories have a majority of 10,000 or more (and in 66 it is less than 4000) – contrast this to the relative stability of the Liberal Democrats, 25 of whose 72 MPs boast five figure majorities with a mere sixteen defending majorities below 4000. The Liberal Democrats’ superbly targeted campaign brought them their best national result in 101 years; where the party now has highly active and locally visible incumbent MPs, it will be difficult to dislodge, and low hanging future fruit lies in other parts of southern England at the Tories’ expense. Meanwhile the Tories will be torn between crafting an appeal to win back these Home Counties and West Country seats and voters whilst requiring a fundamentally different message to find favour in the ‘Red Wall’ constituencies first won in 2017 and 2019 which are likely to be in play if the Labour government becomes seriously unpopular.
This encapsulates the threat posed to the Tories by the rise of their rivals on the Right, Reform UK. The new populist disruptors of UK politics will be a key challenger for votes and seats in coastal Kent, Essex, Norfolk and Lincolnshire but also in the ever-volatile parts of northern England and Wales where it stands to benefit by electoral momentum at the expense of the Big Two parties. This process has already begun in earnest at local government byelections during the second half of last year.
We have become accustomed to writing off the chances of any new party usurping the century-long enduring appeal of the Conservative-Labour duopoly. Four decades ago, the SDP failed to break the mould partly because to do so it needed to destroy the Labour Party. Back then Labour never fell below 207 seats – even in its calamitous 1983 election it retained stronghold constituencies in much of urban England, the former manufacturing belt of northern England and in central Scotland and south Wales. As we have seen today’s Conservative Party has no such reliable bedrock of support to ward off the advance of Reform UK, although in the short term the Tories may both be too historically entrenched to die, yet too weak to recover as a viable party of government.
If polling is to be believed, the British public currently regards Brexit, or at the very least its implementation, as the UK’s single biggest strategic mistake of the present century. The chances of a rapid Conservative electoral recovery may also be hampered by their authorship of this tale of woe. Paradoxically irredeemable damage in the short term to the Conservative brand may even play into the hands of Reform UK, which despite being the offspring of the Brexit Party and UKIP, stands ready to mop up the support of right-of-centre voters seeking a credible and viable alternative, untainted by the failings that surrounded the UK’s departure from the EU.
Written on 6 January 2025 by The Rt Hon Mark Field, former Member of Parliament (MP) for Cities of London and Westminster and Consultant at Buchler Phillips, an independent boutique firm with an impeccable Mayfair London heritage, specialising in corporate recovery, turnaround, restructuring and insolvency.