Waiting for Farage. Why, despite the Tory’s problems, Reform UK is not breaking through.

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In 1988, Brian Mulroney became the first Canadian prime minister since the 19th century to win a second consecutive majority. Four years earlier, the Progressive Conservatives had come to power in an extraordinary landslide, winning no less than 211 seats out of a 284-seat legislature.

Five years later, the PCs won only two seats. It’s not a typo. Two seats. Kim Campbell, who succeeded Mulroney as prime minister, lost his.

Under First Past the Post, a lot of things have to go wrong for a great party to be so utterly obliterated. The eclipse of our own Liberal Party probably necessitated the long-running and bitter split between supporters of Asquith and Lloyd George, for example.

But a crucial ingredient is the presence of a viable alternative for his constituents. For the Liberals, it was Labour. For the Conservatives, it was Preston Manning and the Reform Party. Having won no seats in 1988 and only winning one in the meantime, they won 52 MPs in 1993 – although they won only 2,559,245 votes against 2,186,422 for the PCs . The electoral system gives and the electoral system takes away.

Right now, most of the debate about the Conservatives’ possible performance in the next election seems to revolve around whether it will be a year of 1992, when the Conservatives successfully defied the expectations for a narrow victory (albeit on what remains the highest ever popular vote), or the 1997-style rout suggested by current polls.

Even in the face of some truly satanic polls, there is currently little discussion of the possibility of a Canada ’93 Extinction Event. That this is the case probably owes much to the widely held perception that Reform UK is not ready for the kind of breakthrough its Canadian counterparts have achieved.

Why should this be? We know from recent experience that the Conservatives are not immune to challenge from the right.

The UK Independence Party may have only ever elected two MPs to Parliament, but it cast enough of a shadow over David Cameron’s government that it eventually conceded the Brexit referendum; in 2019, Nigel Farage’s decision not to field Brexit Party candidates may, according to political scientist Pippa Norris, have doubled Boris Johnson’s eventual majority.

Yet despite the government’s woes, Reform UK is not casting that kind of shadow this time around; Jeremy Hunt wasn’t looking over his Richard Tice shoulder when he eased immigration restrictions in the last budget.

Why could this be? There are a few reasons.

The first is the absence of Farage. Barely out of the bubble, he stepped back from his role as a frontline leader, settling instead to host his nightly show on GB News.

Although he was never elected to Parliament, Farage is a highly competent political operator and enjoys enormous public notoriety. Neither of these things is true for Richard Tice, a businessman with little practical experience of elected politics (his august predecessor had, at least, been a longtime MEP Tice only sat in Brussels from 2019).

While Farage always recognized the importance of sticking with the carrot and was careful to always keep his door open to disgruntled conservatives, Tice preferred to declare that the Conservative Party must be “smashed and destroyed.”

Such language is hardly likely to please wavering conservatives, either in Parliament or in the electorate.

That Andrew Bridgen, the first defector from this parliament, opted for the absurd Reclaim Party of Laurence Fox does not indicate much; indeed, Tice himself said in January that he would not host the MP for North West Leicestershire, citing his views on vaccines.

But it is significant that there is no broader chatter about defections, private meetings, communication channels, etc. Even though he only ever pocketed two MPs, Farage always kept the pot of speculation simmering; right now it’s almost stone cold.

Another problem is the lack of a ground machine (not an uncommon problem on the disused right).

UKIP struggled to turn its national profile into an effective activist base, but functioned long enough that in 2015 it made progress. Having secured second place out of 120 seats in 2015, it seems likely that had the referendum not taken place, they would have been on course to achieve Liberal Democrat-like status at some point.

Reform UK has the same problem – and has failed to inherit the groundwork done by its predecessor party. The last local elections are proof of this: despite circumstances that should be conducive to a challenge from the right, the party won only six councillors. Compare that with the Greens, who won 200 seats and took control of a new council.

Finally, there is politics. It is simply not clear that Reform UK is looking at the real gap that is opening up in British politics. It’s in what should be widely known as Jeremy Driver’s quadrant, summed up by him as “I love our NHS; hang the pedos”.

As Danny Finkelstein noted recently, there is room for a party that leans on the right on culture but on the left on the economy. This fits with my argument that cutting immigration in the long term would mean confronting a number of pro-business Conservative Party shenanigans.

Yet Tice, and indeed many of the disgruntled right-wingers trying to fill that void, are not cast in that mould. They are, as William Atkinson noted at the inaugural conference of the conservative Democratic Organization, mostly nostalgic Thatcherites. British reformers talk loudly about immigration, of course, but beyond that their program is mainly right-wing liberal economic policy and obviously self-serving, liberal-democratic flavored constitutional reform.

Combine all that, and it’s perhaps no surprise that even though the party garners between 5 and 8 percent nationally, it’s hardly expected to be on the cusp of a major breakthrough.

That doesn’t mean they aren’t a threat. Sir John Curtice told the FT that ‘Tory voters voting Leave are among the most volatile of the Tory base, with many not having long standing support for the party.’ They may primarily be “the recipients of protest votes from frustrated Conservative-leaning voters,” according to YouGov’s Anthony Wells, but under First Past the Post it could still make a difference in a number of seats.

And then there’s the one thing that could still cause that 1993 style clash: the return of Farage. In November he ruled out a pact with the Tories, and last month hinted he would return, suggesting he would have “a much more revolutionary agenda than just Brexit”.

With that kind of star power and its much better idea of ​​where to meet voters, British reformers could still do here what their Canadian counterparts did.

It is worth both sides remembering the end of this story: the right did not return to power in Ottawa, after thirteen years in the desert, until the two factions united again in the Conservative Party. from Canada.

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