A Tory-Reform pact is a fantasy – but not for the reasons Kemi thinks

Britain’s Right is fractured and it is not just about personalities. Only one side looks set to triumph

Daily Telegraph 

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British politics is presently in a new era, certainly as far as the opinion polls are concerned. These show a steady rise in support for Reform UK and a slight but sustained decline for the Conservatives, plus a fall for Labour. The result is something we have not seen since the 1920s, a three-party split, with Reform, Conservatives and Labour all having roughly the same vote share, in the low 20 per cent range. (The remainder is divided between three or four options such as Liberal Democrats and Greens).

The response to this seems obvious if you see yourself as being on the Right: the two Right parties (Conservative and Reform) should at least form an electoral pact and agree not to compete with each other. That would give them together just under half of the total votes and, given the way the two parties’ support is geographically distributed, a crushing advantage under our electoral system. This course, its proponents argue, would realign politics decisively in favour of the now united Right.

This however is a fantasy. First off, there are massive practical difficulties. The big one is that under our electoral system pacts of this kind result in one party consuming the other. There are many examples of this. Neither Reform nor the Conservatives want to be the party that gets swallowed up and so any collaboration would be fraught.

The deeper problem is this. Given the previous point, a collaboration, or even an actual merger, only makes sense if the two parties are broadly on the same page on everything that matters – in which case why have two parties?

It also has to be true that all of the voters who support each of the two currently separate parties agree with each other. Arguments for a pact assume that there is a singular “Right” in UK politics, with voters and activists broadly agreed on the major issues and that the current division of these voters between two parties is a contingent phenomenon, the product of personalities and events rather than deeper divisions.

This is not the case. At any time politics is dominated by one particular issue. What that issue is depends on what voters think matters most.

From the 1920s until recently it was economics, the choice between capitalism and socialism or free market individualism versus big government collectivism. This is no longer true.

The issue is now the choice between nationalism and cosmopolitan globalism. Right used to mean primarily “free market” but now means “nationalist and anti-globalist”.

Immigration is the touchstone issue rather than taxes, regulation, or nationalisation. Supporters of big or active government are now as likely to be found on the nationalist Right as the cosmopolitan Left.

In the United States today, Maga Republicans want government to be more efficient and to not pursue a woke cultural agenda, but the rising stars also want an active industrial policy, protectionism and expansive government in other areas. This kind of combination of an active state and a nationalist public philosophy is advocated by some people in both Reform and the Conservative Party and found expression in both the 2017 and 2019 manifestos.

Those advocating an electoral pact typically assume that “Right” means Thatcherism or, more accurately, Powellism. This combines nationalism and a focus on national self-government (and hence things like opposition to immigration) with support for free markets, low taxes and smaller government.

That is the position of a majority of continuing Tory voters, and also the leadership of Reform. However, it is not the view of the majority of voters attracted to Reform and in particular the kinds of voters in northern and Midlands working-class areas who swung Conservative in 2017 and 2019, and voted Leave in 2016.

These voters want less immigration and more public spending, favour public ownership of utilities, and are hostile to big business. On the other side, there are voters who like free markets and lower taxes but are relaxed about immigration and dislike nationalism. Some of these defected to the Liberal Democrats but many are still, just about, supporting the Conservatives but would abandon them if they combined with Reform.

This also means that talk of a “progressive alliance” of Labour, Liberal Democrats and Greens is a waste of time. The Left side of British politics is also ruptured. Many voters (most Greens, many Labour ones and some Liberals), favour extensive state intervention combined with internationalism and greenery.

The current Labour leadership, many of their voters, and most Liberal Democrats, favour a more moderate globalism combined with free markets and a clear focus on promoting economic growth and dynamism through things like reform of regulations, governance and taxation. These two combinations of views are also impossible to yoke together. In addition, there is the intense tribal hostility between Labour and Liberals, something many Tories do not realise.

Surveys indicate that the Thatcherite combination of free markets and nationalism only has the support of at most 20 per cent of voters. The combination of nationalism and expansive government has the support of around 25 per cent of voters at present, although this is rising.

There are presently four broad quadrants of voters, radical Left, nationalist, free-market nationalist, and free market or pro-growth and cosmopolitan.

The problem is that the parties do not align neatly with these four groups and will not as long as we have our current electoral system. The challenge is that if Right is now identified both by nationalism and free markets then it is impossible to get all of the nationalist voters and all of the free market ones into the same tent at the same time. Some of the nationalist voters will reject the free markets, some of the free-market ones will be put off by nationalism.

This means that for the foreseeable future cooperation between two parties with different core constituencies is for the birds. In an interview in this paper Kemi Badenoch made precisely that point. Eventually, if the electoral system does not change, we will end up with just one major Right party but this will almost certainly be defined by nationalism and will lean Left on economics. The nationalist free marketeers will have to take it.