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“I’m sad to be in opposition but there’s a part of me that’s excited,” Kemi Badenoch told the Conservative party conference last October.
“We are going to have fun.”
Fast forward to this morning and there was little sign of either the “excitement”, or “fun” the Conservative leader predicted last year.
Far from being unleashed from the political chains of office, Badenoch continues to be heavily tied to them.
Right across the country, in a set of local elections heavily dominated by former Conservative strongholds, the party continues to be severely punished by voters, as they switch in huge numbers to Reform and the Liberal Democrats instead.
The reasons for last year’s defeat have already been well dissected. Fourteen years of low growth, public sector austerity and administrative incompetence lay the ground for a historic collapse in support for a party which had previously been the most electorally successful in Britain’s history.
Yet while in the past recently ousted governing parties quickly regained support in opposition, the opposite now appears to be happening with the Conservatives. Even in the face of growing global economic uncertainty, and an unpopular new Labour government, these results show that Badenoch’s party continues to go backwards.
The reasons for this go well beyond the Conservatives’ recent record in office, to the much more fundamental question of who the party is now actually for.
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A Failed Realignment
Ever since Brexit, the question of who the Conservative party stands for has been one that Tory politicians have struggled with. For Boris Johnson the answer lay in uniting socially conservative non-metropolitan voters, in opposition to a coalition of Labour’s socially-liberal, university-educated, metropolitan base.
This strategy, which centred around a relatively small number of constituencies in the so-called “red wall” ultimately failed once the hollowness of Johnson’s promises to “level up” those parts of the country became clear. Yet while Johnson’s “realignment” ultimately proved illusory, it was at least a clear electoral strategy. The same cannot be said for what followed it.
In the wake of Liz Truss’ devastating kamikaze raid on the Conservative party’s economic reputation, Conservative party leaders quickly switched to an equally devastating raid on their own record on immigration. Beginning with Rishi Sunak’s ludicrous pledge to “stop the boats”, Conservative politicians succeeded in massively raising the salience of rising immigration numbers, while doing absolutely nothing of substance to actually deal with the issue. The result was that socially conservative voters started to switch in increasing numbers to Reform UK instead, with every attempt by the Conservatives to further mimic Nigel Farage’s talking points, merely convincing even more voters to switch to the real deal.
And as socially conservative Tory voters switched over to Farage, so too did the Conservatives’ more socially liberal base switch over to the Liberal Democrats. Turned off by the increasingly Trumpian pro-Brexit rhetoric of the party leadership, millions of affluent life-long Conservative voters in the South increasingly fled to Ed Davey’s party. The result was a two-sided bleeding of Conservative support that today’s results show is now only getting worse.
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Repeating Mistakes
This is not a process that the party’s current leader, Kemi Badenoch, appears likely to reverse. Indeed far from realising the error of her ways, the Conservative leader appears intent on merely deepening them. Like an inveterate gambler already several thousand pounds in the red, Badenoch continues to make exactly the same hopeless bets that got her party into this mess in the first place.
At every turn – from immigration, to climate, to the ECHR – Badenoch keeps betting that her strategy of telling voters that Nigel Farage has been right all along, but that they for some reason shouldn’t vote for him, will eventually come up trumps. That the opposite keeps on happening somehow merely further convinces her to keep on trying.
In business, the ‘sunk cost fallacy’ is the term for when a failing enterprise continues to pursue a doomed commercial strategy, simply because its owners have already invested so much of their resources into it. In these situations, businesses continue to pour good money after bad, long after it becomes clear that complete reversal is the only sensible remaining option.
This failure should now be an urgent warning to the Labour party not to repeat the same mistakes themselves. If Keir Starmer’s party continues to mimic Farage’s rhetoric and policies on issues like immigration and asylum, as they did in the weeks running up to these local elections, then they risk entering the same electoral death spiral entered by the Conservatives just a few years ago.
If Reform really are the new opposition to this Government, as Farage claimed this morning, then Starmer’s party should start to actually meaningfully oppose them. A Labour strategy of telling voters that Farage is essentially correct, but can’t be trusted to deliver, is no more likely to work for Starmer than it did for Badenoch and Sunak.
That this is the case can already be seen in these results. Far from winning back Reform-curious Labour voters, Starmer’s strategy appears to be merely convincing his own electoral base to look elsewhere instead. In the Runcorn by-election, attempts to squeeze Green and Liberal Democrat voters with fear of Reform failed to bear fruit, with many liberal and left wing voters quite content to reject Labour, even if it meant a radical right MP being elected instead.
Labour’s strategy of endorsing George Osborne-style cuts to benefits, while mimicking Farage-style rhetoric on immigration, has had the dual impact of turning off Labour’s natural supporters, while merely encouraging the Reform curious to opt for the real deal instead – something some of those Labour politicians who held on last night are already pointing out.
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In order to avoid falling foul of Farage, Starmer’s strategists only need to look as far as the party they just ousted from office. Over the course of 14 years the Conservative party failed their own electoral base, while boosting support for the ideas of their nearest political rivals. The result was a historic collapse in support, followed by the emergence of a new political force which now looks set to replace them.
It is not inevitable that the same will happen to the Labour party. A quick look around other English-speaking nations, like Canada and Australia, shows that centre left governments can still push back the Trumpist tide.
But in order to repeat their success, Keir Starmer’s party must first pick the correct electoral strategy. Simply picking the same approach that is still being tested beyond destruction by the Conservatives would be unlikely to end well.