Just nine months after the last general election and probably more than 40 before the next, the battle cry of “unite the right” has been both surprisingly quick and slow off the mark. Quick because we are less than a year out from the last campaign, but slow because the one emphatic lesson of 4th July 2024 was that the right lost because of division. What is happening, why, and what does it mean?
Last week, the call for right-wing consolidation reached a new peak as Robert Jenrick, the Tory MP, second-placed leadership candidate and now shadow justice secretary was “caught” speaking to Tory students at UCL in March, saying: “I want the right to be united. And so, one way or another, I’m determined to do that and to bring this coalition together and make sure we unite as a nation as well.”
Today, every politician knows that everyone they’re speaking to has a smartphone and could be recording them. Even if Jenrick was just trying to appeal to the Tory base, it’s interesting he used this explosive subject to do that. But talk of uniting the right has been rumbling . Having once said it was “for the birds”, Kemi Badenoch has suggested there could be “various coalitions” within councils after 1st May. And Tory MP Esther McVey went further in leaked comments, proposing a pact whereby the parties agree not to stand against one another in certain seats, starting with the Runcorn and Helsby byelection on 1st May, which Reform is tipped to win in what will be a major reversal for Labour in one of its top 50 safest seats.
Since Jenrick’s comments were revealed by Sky News, Ben Houchen, the Tory mayor for Tees Valley, has said “coming together in some form” would be “best thing for the country” if the two parties keep splitting the right. Jenrick has tried to qualify his statement by claiming he was talking about voters, not parties, and has since said he wants to put Nigel Farage “back into retirement”. But it’s too late, this incendiary issue isn’t going away.
It won’t because analysis by Compass, the organisation I’m the director of, shows that in 202 seats at the last election the right lost because its vote was divided—that is, Conservatives and Reform polled more votes than the successful progressive candidate. Compass calls these seats “regressive tragedies”, the mirror of their more common progressive counterpart where the centre-left has in the past lost out from division in its vote. Now the tables have been turned. Of those 202 seats, 171 were won by Labour, 26 by the Liberal Democrats, two by the Greens, two by the SNP and one by Plaid Cymru.
Pure electoral arithmetic points heavily to some kind of collaboration as the right seeks to rebuild the winning coalition of 2019. This won’t be easy. Both the Tories and Reform will have to swallow some pride or gamble that they can produce a knockout blow to remain or become the primary right-wing alternative to Labour. Everything depends on the mood in the country as we approach the next election and critically whether, like last July, it will simply be a matter of how to get the incumbents out.
If it is, then things get much easier for the right. All they have to do is repeat the Keir Starmer-ED Davey “pact” of 2024 in which seats are divided up according to who is best placed to win. Where one party can’t win, they stand only the thinnest of paper candidates, directing all their energies to their target seats. This, combined with well-informed voters using myriad tactical voting sites, enacted a crushing pincer movement on the Conservatives. And to the great benefit of sheepish political leaders, it allows them to deny that anything is happening when it is. Labour even went so far as to punish candidates in non-target seats for excessive campaign work, and ordering its candidate out of Clacton, handing Nigel Farage a free run.
On the progressive side of politics the same dilemmas and tensions abound. Labour is shedding twice as many votes to the Liberal Democrats and Greens as it is to Reform. The party is vulnerable to losing dozens of seats at the next election to its left. Progressive parties face the same choice: divide, be conquered and lose everything, or cooperate but share power?
But this surface war of words reveals much deeper systemic turbulence in the British political system. First, it is a product of party fragmentation, which has been developing for decades but now appears to be reaching a tipping point, as Peter Kellner explained in Prospect recently. This fragmentation could get deeper on both the left and the right. Ben Habib, who was a co-deputy leader of Reform UK, has taken control of a new “pro-patriotic, pro-British” party, currently named the Integrity party, which is vying to outflank Reform on the right. Meanwhile, the embers of at least one new left Corbynite party are busily being stoked as another big gap in the political marketplace is eyed.
Of course, events could temporarily reconsolidate voters around the old duopoly, as Brexit did in 2017 and 2019. But that is likely to be fleeting as our democratic system fails the basic test of providing people with sufficient economic, social and environmental security.
Of course, all roads lead back to the systemic problem of our voting system, which was designed to enable the duopoly but has now entered a doom loop. Governing failure begets fragmentation which, under first-past-the-post, leads to more failure. The notion that we need a democratic reset, starting with proportional representation, is becoming an urgent reality.
In the meantime, the established parties will jostle and joust for a temporary and weak advantage, hoping, in the case of Labour and the Tories, that voters will once again hold their nose and vote for the least bad option. It is this instinct among the country’s voting population that may determine our political future. Is electing the lesser of two evils insufficiently evil, or will the mould be broken for good? On this everything hangs.
