General British politics discussion thread

Their client press will just carry on being the Tory propaganda machine.

In any case, I'm not of the mind that the Conservatives will be out of power for that long. Starmer's Labour is only getting in because the Tory's have imploded. They're not gaining power for anything that they've actually done themselves or on the basis of their declared beliefs or policies. So if the Conservatives can get their act together in a relatively short space of time and try to move back to the middle ground, they can slip back in when and if Starmer's Labour get found out.

There's many Tory voters merely lending their vote to Starmer's Labour, but all the Tory's have to do is…ahem…"reform" a bit to lure those voters back.

Well, the current headbangers are going to be sidelined. The Conservatives know that their deep leaning into neo-liberal/hard right politicking isn't going to float with the electorate. So they'll need to soften up and manoeuvre more towards the centre. They won't completely abandon a neo-liberal route, of course, but they just have to emulate Starmer's version of it and draw back the more middle ground Conservative voter who has temporarily given their preference to Labour.

The Cons are going to be absolutely gutted in July, bar a miracle, and they'll need to have a bit of sense if they want to be in with a shot in the next election cycle. Assuming that Starmer's Labour don't completely implode themselves mind you. But there are, probably, many people in the Conservative Party that have understood that the Tufton Street think tank direction is a loser for them and trying to appeal to the useful idiot brigade of racists and bigots isn't enough to win elections.

If they want to gain power again, they'll have to change.

I think you are just wrong, this is a death of the Liberals moment in history. The Tories as we know it are a spent force, but at least two parties will emerge from the ashes. There is every evidence that when this happens one of these will be more to the right and these will be the stronger of the two. Look to Australia and Canada to see how it works.

There is a false premise going on that the British are a fundamentally decent bunch - but there is a sizable minority who are just nasty hard right types and these are the ones who have dragged the Tories into a hard right stance that has torn them apart internally. Allow the division of hard and soft right to happen and the hard right element will become a formidable force.

This isn't a death of the Liberal's moment.

That happened at a time of major changes to voting enfranchisement and before that the loss of a major Liberal stronghold in Ireland.

This will be more like post Celtic Tiger Fianna Fail but with an easier route back because they don't have an almost identical party as opposition.

It's not a given that, when the Tories again present as a credible alternative government, they will be as far or further to the right than they are at present.

I expect the Tories to lose this election very badly.

On balance, I do not expect them to get fewer votes than Reform (though that is not impossible).

Regardless, they will certainly get many more seats than Reform. I also expect them to get more seats than the Scots Nats and the Lib Dems. They will be the official opposition.

But they'll be in no condition to actually offer any serious or constructive opposition. They're a faction-riven rabble at the moment; after the election they'll be a much-reduced, shell-shocked, faction-riven rabble. They'll need to rebuild their own party discipline and their own institutional capacity before they can think of offering anything that looks like credible opposition to the Labour government.

That will be a challenge because they will be greatly depleted in resources — both talent and cash — and hugely demoralised. But the first-past-the-post duopoly system will hold them in its tender embrace and ensure that they continue to hold the "official opposition" position for as long as it take them to be capable of actually performing in it.

I agree with other posters that their initial attempts to rebuild will probably take the form of a lurch further to the right. Their knee-jerk reaction will be to keep doing what they have been doing — lurching rightwards — only harder. They'll be too shell-shocked and demoralised to enage in much in the way of creative, open thinking about how they got into this pickle, or to face up to mistake for which they are responsible. Plus, they'll see Reform as their primary threat, and they will want to take Reform support from it. Plus plus, they have already purged from the party many of vpices that think — or, at any rate, that say — that the lurch to the right was a mistake.

But lurching further to the right won't work for them, for the same reason that lurching to the right hasn't worked for them so far. In general, centrist parties that move rightwards in response to a perceived threat from the right do not benefit by doing so. The Tories are suffering electorally not despite moving to the right, but because of moving to the right. They've abandoned the historic Tory ground of defending established institutions and upholding order and hierarchy in favour of nihiliism, destructiveness, the rejection of competence and expertise, the fostering of culture wars and conspiracy theories. Johnson lied to the Queen. Gove openly preferred ideological purity to competence and expertise. Truss rails against the institutions of which the Tories were one proud — British courts, the British civil service — as a grand conspiracy of elites against her premiership.

None of this has left Britain feeling more prosperous or its people feeling happier, and the Tories know it. The signature policy acheivement of the new, hard-right Tories, Brexit, is something they dare not discuss, because it's electoral poison. There's no reason to think that, if they continue in opposition with the hard-right positions and values that they have practised in government, and electorate that is manifestly unhappy with those positions and values will suddenly come to love them. Obviously there is a market for those positions and values; the current success of Reform shows that. But it's not a majority; Even aggregated together the Reform and Tory votes are less than the Labour vote alone, never mind Labour aggregated with other centre and left-of-centre parties like the Lib Dems and the Greens. And if the Tories tried to aggregate them, either by occuping Reform's ground or by merging with Reform, they would inevitably lose some of their existing votes to the left — either to Labour or the Lib Dems. This would make matters worse, not better.

There is no route back to power for the Tories that doesn't involve appealing to the centre ground. So there, sooner or later, is where they will go. Rebuilding the party as a credible opposition and as a credible government in waiting involves satisfing the moderate centre that they have abandoned nihilism, and that they stand for competence and realism. They're not go to do that by trying to out-Farage the Reform party.

A very realistic chance that they will only return in the region of between 50 to 75 MP's.

Sweet Jesus, imagine! That's not any kind of opposition.

I agree with others who've already posted that labour won't touch EU membership if they take the majority.

Rejoin, or realign will have to come from another stand alone group, possibly libdem with tory defectors.

This would guarantee labour a second term if rejoin and reform tear shreds off each other on a matter that most would rather forget.

I would however imagine that slowly and incrementally the UK will realign over time.

I reckon it will be like quietly rejoining Erasmus+ that won't affect the oldest most strident voters. Canada, Oz and NZ are also in Erasmus+ so reentry could be very much sold as a non EU thing, the most wicked of marketers could even respin it is a brexit win.

The Turing alternative will still exist, purely for pride but in effect it won't matter they're back in the Erasmus fold.

If and when the total wipeout of the Tories happens, Farage's entrance into the arena will be seen as a major factor - every hard right type now has an alternative to vote for. This is indeed the scenario that could result in the Conservatives being decimated in the election.

Those people would have mostly stayed at home if Reform was not around. That's how it looks in every election post Johnson.

Will surely lose the Tories some seats due to split votes but the Tories were sunk long before Farage came back. The needle hasn't actually changed much really.

The problem for the Tories is that moving to the center is not what its core demographic want, its core demographic been elderly millionaires/billionaires. This is where the majority of its financing comes from and they have adopted the fashionable right wing view of democracy as an inconvenience rather than an asset.

What do you do when your paymaster doesn't want what you know is good for the party ?

My guess is that they will abandon the Tories and increasingly pump money into efforts to subvert democracy such as the Reform party and flooding the the social space with copious amounts of lies.

But how do we know that Tory OAPs in the shires won't vote for Reform? It's far from a given that they will stick en masse with the Conservatives.

Here is Labour candidate in NE Scotland attempting to explain what GB Energy is all about to the local radio station. The amount of nonsense from Labour about this is off the charts

But lurching further to the right won't work for them, for the same reason that lurching to the right hasn't worked for them so far. In general, centrist parties that move rightwards in response to a perceived threat from the right do not benefit by doing so. The Tories are suffering electorally not despite moving to the right, but because of moving to the right. They've abandoned the historic Tory ground of defending established institutions and upholding order and hierarchy in favour of nihiliism, destructiveness, the rejection of competence and expertise, the fostering of culture wars and conspiracy theories. Johnson lied to the Queen. Gove openly preferred ideological purity to competence and expertise. Truss rails against the institutions of which the Tories were one proud — British courts, the British civil service — as a grand conspiracy of elites against her premiership.

Indeed. If one were more cynical, or conspiracy minded, one might wonder what caused the conservative party to do so many things that were divisive of/destructive to the country they purport to love and presumably wish to "conserve".

Aside from Clacton can't think of any seats that stand out as especially favourable for Reform. Maybe get a lot of 2nd places in Red Wall seats but there's no prizes for those.