"Is the British Conservative Party Going the Way of the Liberal Party?" Revisiting the Question After the Election

The July 2024 General Election in Britain (covered here) saw, in a historic degree, abysmal voter turnout, and an abysmal showing by the two major parties, with the Conservative Party's vote collapsing outright. The Conservatives' 24 percent share of the vote this time around compares unfavorably with the 31 percent that was their prior low in 1997, the 31-32 percent that was their lot in the three elections in which they ran against Blair-led Labour (1997, 2001, 2005), the 35 percent+ (and often much higher) that they managed in every prior election of the post-World War I era outside the Blair period, and the 42-44 percent they got in the elections of 2017-2019, when they got nearly double the share of the vote they received last week, and that from a rather larger share of the electorate. (Some 29 percent of the eligible voters may be said to have voted for the Conservatives in 2019, as against just the 14 percent who voted for them in 2024, only one in seven of the country's eligible voters casting their ballot in favor of a fifth straight Conservative ministry.)

This was in part because of the extremity of disgust with the Conservative Party after these last fourteen years, which went so far as to enable a challenger from the right, Reform UK, to draw off much of its vote--14 percent of the votes cast, which is rather more than any third party has had since 2010, and more than any third party other than the Liberal Democrats has had since Labor supplanted the Liberals as the country's "number two" party a century ago. Of course, that still leaves the Conservatives a long way ahead of this particular rival, but were the trend to continue--were there to be a transfer of a 6 percent share of the vote from one party to the other in the next election--then it would be the Conservatives in the number three position, in the kind of restructuring of the British party system the country last saw in 1924.

How likely is that? I suspect not very. Due to Britain's system for translating votes into seats, Reform will end up with a mere four seats in parliament--against the Liberal Democrats' seventy-one, and the nine the Scottish National Party won with a mere 2 percent of the vote, the four seats Sinn Fein won with one-twentieth of the share of the vote Reform got (0.7 percent), all as with their lower votes the Green Party (7 percent) and Plaid Cymru (0.7 percent) each get four seats. It will make for a very small parliamentary presence for Reform (less than 1 percent of the seats), and the influence that goes with it (even if Nigel Farage is now in the House, and a media whose default tone is "shrieking rightwing hysteria" is bound to give his party and him disproportionate coverage). Moreover, one can see the way the vote for Reform is spread about the country as placing significant obstacles in the way of its expanding its parliamentary position.

Meanwhile the Conservatives would seem down, but not out. In opposition they will, with the help of a media which is naturally forgetful--above all, of the failures of the right--encourage the public to forget the chaos they presided over during 2010-2024. Keir Starmer's Labour will make it the easier, given how brutal the press is likely to be even with one who may prove the most right-wing leader Labour has had in the whole of its history, all as Starmer commands little enthusiasm among his own base (ultimately, voted in by just one-fifth of the country's eligible voters, many of whom would seem to have "held their noses" as they did so). At the same time the Conservatives will respond to Reform's gains by inclining further rightward, stealing some of Reform's thunder, with some new faces helping the process given the discredit fallen on old-timers like David Cameron, Boris Johnson, and the always multiply unlikely Rishi Sunak.

The result is that 2024 could in the long run prove to be the high water mark of Reform UK--just as the Liberal Democrats, amid surging dislike of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown's New Labour earlier in the century, saw its share of the vote surge to 22 percent in 2005 and 23 percent in 2010 (far more than Reform just got) before collapsing in subsequent elections (scoring just 7-8 percent of the vote in the next two elections). However, it seems unlikely to be the last heard from that end of the political spectrum, going as it is from victory to victory in these years amid centrists proving more loyal to an increasingly despised neoliberalism than to the mission of "consensus" sustenance they talk about so self-importantly, and effective opposition, or even alternatives for the discontented, proving scant. Indeed, with another General Election all but guaranteed by mid-2029 barring world war-caliber catastrophe (alas, a less unlikely-looking thing these days than a few years ago), it may not even be the last surprise Britain's third parties will produce before the decade of the 2020s is out.