Voices: How the Brexit vote is still realigning British politics

One of the many remarkable features of a remarkable set of elections is that virtually nowhere in the various councils and mayoralties – nor in the razor-edge by-election in Runcorn – has there been a traditional straight fight between Labour and Conservatives.

Instead, it’s been, most commonly, Labour versus Reform, sometimes the Tories trying to compete with Nigel Farage’s insurgents, and some scraps in the south and west of England between the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens.

The once commonplace notion of a Con-Lab marginal feels distinctly antique today. Even fewer people are giving their allegiance to the two main parties than they did at the last general election, when between them they garnered a little over half the votes cast – a record low for the traditional duopoly.

Viewed from the perspective of the electoral convulsions of the last 10 years, it feels like we are witnessing another phase in a decade of realignment, triggered and then catalysed by Brexit and the 2016 EU Referendum. It has come to the point where the very future of the Conservative Party as the solid, dominant presence on the right of British politics has been cast into doubt; and where Farage, who did so much to dislocate politics over the last quarter-century, can be seriously regarded as the “real leader of the Opposition” and a potential prime minister.

How did that happen? As he often remarks, “something big is happening out there”.

As things stand, the question of the leadership of the Conservative Party, the oldest and most successful force in democratic politics in human history, feels almost like an irrelevance – because whether Kemi Badenoch survives or whoever might replace her are second-order questions in the context of these more fundamental societal changes.

The Tory party, in other words, seems doomed, whoever is in charge – even if there will always be some hope it can recover. Great swathes of the country the Tories could always rely upon – Lincolnshire, and Staffordshire, for heaven’s sake – have fallen to the Farageistes.

At the general election, the Tories lost ground to Labour and the Liberal Democrats – Cambridgeshire, Oxfordshire and Devon – and they’re not recovering any of it now. It's hard to see what leader or agenda could emerge that would allow them to do so; and a pact with Farage, which he feels no need to bother with, would simply be an act of surrender to the Reform insurgency.

There’s another indicator. Quietly, but ominously, the Tories were humiliated far more at the Runcorn by-election than Labour was. In “normal” times, with Labour in power, the Tories would have won that seat. Instead, they were ignored by disillusioned voters and ended up not far off losing their deposit.

In these local and council elections, we've witnessed another seizure in the slow death of Conservative England – and it’s not going to be the last.

Politically as well economically, the British are still working their way through Brexit, and the painful process of adjustment isn’t over. Just as it broke the British economy – and thus, ironically, incubated the conditions and grievances so successfully exploited by Reform UK under the slogan “Broken Britain” – so Brexit is now breaking the party system. Under particular stress is the status of the Conservatives, so long taken for granted, as the natural party of government.

The EU Referendum that was so foolishly conceded by David Cameron a decade ago, under pressure from – yes, indeed – Nigel Farage and his then vehicle Ukip, divided the Conservative Party, and it has never recovered.

It was never actually that popular in the 2010s, relying on the Lib Dems to form the coalition, barely winning a majority in 2015, and losing that in 2017.

The Tory decline goes back further than we think, but the Brexit vote of 2016 marks the genesis of the historic realignment currently well underway. It critically fractured the party’s traditional internal coalition of moderates and Thatcherites, pro-Europeans and Eurosceptics, social liberals and conservatives – and it’s their own fault.

Boris Johnson’s cynical and careerist decision to defect from his usual liberal pro-Europeanism to join the Leave campaign, which he never expected would win, made the crucial difference to the disastrous result. Under the successive leaderships of Theresa May, Johnson himself, Truss, Sunak and now Badenoch, the party has purged itself of its moderate, pro-EU elements, abandoned the centre ground and jettisoned its green agenda. It declared war on its own voters, and evolved into a hard-right party, but one never quite able to compete with the real, radical thing, led by Farage.

Johnson did score a formidable victory in the 2019 election, famously demolishing the Red Wall – but at this distance, it feels more like an aberration, a deceptively pleasant interlude along the long-term journey to oblivion.

A weary electorate wasn’t that enthusiastic about the Tories, but voted to end the endless agonising arguments, and “get Brexit done”. They were also unimpressed by Corbyn’s Labour alternative. At that point, Johnson promised that Brexit and “levelling up” would change people’s lives – but he failed to deliver, for good reasons (the cost of covid) and bad (incompetence and lies).

When the next general election came round last year, the Tories were appropriately punished. Now it’s Labour’s turn to be blamed for failing to deliver the “Change” it talked so much about. All that Labour minister Ellie Reeves could point to the government having done for the people of Runcorn was four new breakfast clubs. That, too, is why Farage is doing so well.

It may be that the British electoral system has slowed the post-Brexit realignment of the party system, but it plainly hasn’t prevented it. In the interwar era, it took more than a decade for Labour to replace the Liberals as the main “progressive” party fighting the Conservatives – and it was far from a linear, smooth, predictable transition. Indeed, the Labour Party itself split badly in the 1930s, before it recovered and formed its first majority government after the second war. By that point, the Liberals virtually went extinct.

No one should expect Reform UK to soon become a first or even second party in the House of Commons. It is possible that the Tories could eventually pull themselves together and see off Reform, just as Labour overcame the SDP-Liberal Alliance in the 1980s. That was a false dawn of an attempted realignment that also had its roots in the European question, with politicians working across party lines after the 1975 common market referendum.

This time round, it’s the tectonic plates on the right that are shifting, and it’s Reform that is gradually pushing the Tories further and further back. Nothing in politics is pre-determined or inevitable, but neither does any political party enjoy a divine right to exist, let alone govern.