Will there be another UK Tory Prime Minister in the future after the next GE?

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

The Liberal collapse took place amidst a massive expansion of the electorate and a world war. The Budget of 1909's land value tax (which the Lords managed to remove) and increasingly Georgist tendencies left them alienated from old money.

The Conservatives face structural problems, but I don't feel comfortable saying they are analogous. The Lib Dems, at least in rhetoric, still back LVT (and their anthem is explicitly Georgist, for whatever that's worth). Landowners are not going to accept them as an alternative party of property.

Yet they are the party of Nimbysm.

[Coldstream]

The opposition can say anything they want about the Tory Party, but there's no doubt that Boris Johnson was just too critical when it came to marshaling the spineless Leaders of the important European Nato States.  All the Ukraine cheerleaders owe him a debt, because he put his political neck on the line.  Thank Goodness for those White nationalist Brexit Voters, huh?

This is the opposite of what happened, he was facing domestic unrest as the details of Partygate emerged and he threw himself fullthroatedly behind Ukraine to attempt to channel Churchill and distract people.

Any potential Prime Minister (save Corbyn) would have done what Johnson did at the very least.

In answer to the question, yes, but unless there’s another economic collapse I suspect they’ll have to moderate a great deal because demographics are against them. If they end being led by an ERG style culture warrior they will be buried.

[Pouring Rain and Blairing Music]

We also have a very famous example - the most famous example in all World History in fact; the legitimate Ur-example - of a party of power rapidly falling to Also Ran status in part due to generational factors.



Again, it doesn't mean this is an at all likely scenario (it isn't!) but that less obviously plausible things have happened (c.f. the Labour split in 1981) have happened over the decades at points of crisis.

Any good reads about the fall of the Liberals vis-a-vis the rose of Labour? Or would Wikipedia suffice? (Any specific articles there?) I hadn’t realized the generational aspect of it before.

[Oryxslayer]

The public's impression of hung parliaments is negative because they either didn't have a feasible governing coalition, or because the minority party in the coalition was perceived to have purposefully and deliberately lied to its voters. If the government fell today and we got a Lib-Lab coalition, neither of those things would be true. It's the nature of the hung parliament, not the hung parliament itself that matters.

It does bare mentioning that Labour are playing towards the idea that any future minority government or coalition will not include the SNP for a reason. The SNP are not their friends in convincing people about the benefits of PR,  no are they their friends in implementing such reforms given the current system heavily favors the SNP.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

The world is also a very different place than it was then though. The UK may not be as polarized as the US, but it's still pretty damn polarized, especially post-Brexit.

If things were especially polarized then the Truss premiership would not have ended with the hilarious sight of the Labour Party leading by over 30pts in most published opinion polls. Actually British politics is a lot less polarized than it used to be, which is one of root causes of the present instability. A majority of the electorate now has no sense of party affiliation whatsoever and those that do are less reflexively loyal than they used to be. The increasing polarized political climate in the United States is actually very unusual: the opposite has been (and is) happening in most other democracies.

And perhaps crazier things have happened, but the Tories have won every single election against a Labour led by someone not named Tony Blair for the past several decades.

When you consider how few leaders the Labour Party has had since 1935 and how few General Elections there have been since then, that isn't as telling a fact as some people seem to think it is.

It would be quite dramatic if they fell now, even more dramatic than the collapse of the Liberals. And again, I'm skeptical that kind of thing is as likely to happen nowadays.

No one things that it is likely. But then, no one in 1914 thought the collapse of the Liberal Party was likely either. This is just harmless idle speculation.

Couple things:

1. Polls are not the same as elections. I am very skeptical, to put it mildly, that an actual election would have Tories obliterated by as much as the polls suggest now. Maybe I'm wrong and I'm too influenced by American political thinking here. But I just don't see even a 1997 style landslide as likely today. Again, Brexit divided your country quite a bit. I think once an actual election campaign got underway and we had photos of leaders eating sandwiches, fearmongering about socialism and immigration, etc. things would change in the polls and certainly by election day. I just highly doubt many of those old school Tory voters or the former Labour voters Boris won over due to Brexit would run in droves to Labour. They may just be saying they would now as a way of taking out their frustrations/dissatisfaction with the government when responding to polls. A lot can and will change in two years though.

2. Here's another way of looking at Labour: In the past 100 years, since the party overtook the Liberals as the primary opposition to the Conservatives, they have been in power for less than 30 years. Harold Wilson and Tony Blair are the ONLY Labour leaders to win more than once. It would be a very radical change if all of a sudden Labour started winning consistently.

? Ramsay McDonald won government in 1924 and 1929 (granted, neither particularly grand given the minority status of the former and the collapse of the latter) and Clement Attlee won in 1945 and 1950. I've said this before on the site, but the fallacious way people use the very small sample sizes of elections to draw grand conclusions makes very little sense in practice.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

The opposition can say anything they want about the Tory Party, but there's no doubt that Boris Johnson was just too critical when it came to marshaling the spineless Leaders of the important European Nato States.  All the Ukraine cheerleaders owe him a debt, because he put his political neck on the line.  Thank Goodness for those White nationalist Brexit Voters, huh?

This is the opposite of what happened, he was facing domestic unrest as the details of Partygate emerged and he threw himself fullthroatedly behind Ukraine to attempt to channel Churchill and distract people.

Any potential Prime Minister (save Corbyn) would have done what Johnson did at the very least.

Yes, that has "Thatcher saved the Falklands while Foot and Tory elite harumphed" vibes (the narrative presented by the Iron Lady.

[CumbrianLefty]

People using this line should have to say what they think would have happened had John Smith not died suddenly in 1994. If the reply is "Labour would then have lost the following election" that shows that they are unthinking Blair cultists rather than serious people.

[Boobs]

I've said this before on the site, but the fallacious way people use the very small sample sizes of elections to draw grand conclusions makes very little sense in practice.

Before Ramsay MacDonald, no Labour leader had ever been elected Prime Minister. Clearly the correct prediction in 1920 was that there would never, ever be a Labour government!

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

I doubt the Lib dems could ever fully replace the conservatives, the party membership is just too weird and empowered to fully embrace the compromises required to become a major national party.

[Хahar 🤔]

The single biggest point in the Tories favor against outright death, and arguably the reason why they can't be killed, is the party infrastructure. The Conservative Party is not just Westminster, but legions of councilors, local leaders, and backroom organizers. This is part of the reason why they didn't die during the Reform/Lib-Dem surge. It is also why the Lib-Dems refused to die after the coalition turned sour. This contrasts with the US and Canadian systems where the local parties, even if they have the same name, are entirely separate organizations from the national party. If the national party was to die, these locals would align with whatever new party that fills the vacuum, and maybe change their names.

Yes, it's easy to set up a new party, but very hard to build that infrastructure - as the SDP showed.

I suspect the most likely route to the Conservative Party no longer being a major party involves a shift to proportional representation without a constituency link or with particularly large constituencies. That minimises the importance of local infrastructure and makes it more likely that their support base could be taken at both ends by a radical-right party and the Lib Dems (or a similar party), who could then end up negotiating between themselves with the Conservatives as a third wheel. That's not a particularly likely outcome, but it's probably the least unlikely.

Yeah I agree with this.

It obviously isn't happening in the near future, but longer term, do you think there's any chance that Britain switches to PR?

Labour conference has come out in favour of PR. It's unlikely to be a priority for a majority Labour government (and if it is then it would probably maintain a strong constituency link and be less than fully proportional) but it's pretty likely to happen next time there's a hung parliament.

Introduction of proportional representation would be a huge change. The British constitution assumes the existence of a single party forming government alone with a majority of seats in the House of Commons, and the one period of time when this was not generally the case (1915 to 1945) was characterized by great political instability. The only example I can think of where a two-party political system was intentionally transformed through electoral reform to a multi-party system is New Zealand, and that was the result of profound issues of public trust in government that have as of yet no equivalent in Britain. The Labour Party and the Conservative Party have a shared interest in maintaining their privileged electoral positions, although (as we can forget here sometimes) electoral politics aren't the only consideration, as the actions of the Labour Party conference show.

Still, it's impossible for me to imagine a party winning a majority in anything like the near future on a manifesto including a commitment to proportional representation. In the event of a hung parliament I think a unilateral change to the electoral system would be politically infeasible and the nearest thing the Liberal Democrats could get would be a referendum like they got in 2010. The proportional representation side in that referendum would be opposed by the whole Conservative Party and much of the Labour Party. Maybe it could win anyway as the electorate changes, but we saw what happened the last time the people were consulted on the matter of electoral reform.

[vileplume]

People using this line should have to say what they think would have happened had John Smith not died suddenly in 1994. If the reply is "Labour would then have lost the following election" that shows that they are unthinking Blair cultists rather than serious people.

Whilst Labour would have undoubtedly won easily in '97 with anyone non-fringe as leader, I don't think the Labour Landslide would have been as large without Blair. He, at least in '97, did seem to have a unique appeal to a certain chunk of the almost-always-Tory part of the electorate.

[CumbrianLefty]

And yes I agree with all the above, but its not "nobody else could have won that election for Labour".

[EastAnglianLefty]

The single biggest point in the Tories favor against outright death, and arguably the reason why they can't be killed, is the party infrastructure. The Conservative Party is not just Westminster, but legions of councilors, local leaders, and backroom organizers. This is part of the reason why they didn't die during the Reform/Lib-Dem surge. It is also why the Lib-Dems refused to die after the coalition turned sour. This contrasts with the US and Canadian systems where the local parties, even if they have the same name, are entirely separate organizations from the national party. If the national party was to die, these locals would align with whatever new party that fills the vacuum, and maybe change their names.

Yes, it's easy to set up a new party, but very hard to build that infrastructure - as the SDP showed.

I suspect the most likely route to the Conservative Party no longer being a major party involves a shift to proportional representation without a constituency link or with particularly large constituencies. That minimises the importance of local infrastructure and makes it more likely that their support base could be taken at both ends by a radical-right party and the Lib Dems (or a similar party), who could then end up negotiating between themselves with the Conservatives as a third wheel. That's not a particularly likely outcome, but it's probably the least unlikely.

Yeah I agree with this.

It obviously isn't happening in the near future, but longer term, do you think there's any chance that Britain switches to PR?

Labour conference has come out in favour of PR. It's unlikely to be a priority for a majority Labour government (and if it is then it would probably maintain a strong constituency link and be less than fully proportional) but it's pretty likely to happen next time there's a hung parliament.

Introduction of proportional representation would be a huge change. The British constitution assumes the existence of a single party forming government alone with a majority of seats in the House of Commons, and the one period of time when this was not generally the case (1915 to 1945) was characterized by great political instability. The only example I can think of where a two-party political system was intentionally transformed through electoral reform to a multi-party system is New Zealand, and that was the result of profound issues of public trust in government that have as of yet no equivalent in Britain. The Labour Party and the Conservative Party have a shared interest in maintaining their privileged electoral positions, although (as we can forget here sometimes) electoral politics aren't the only consideration, as the actions of the Labour Party conference show.

Still, it's impossible for me to imagine a party winning a majority in anything like the near future on a manifesto including a commitment to proportional representation. In the event of a hung parliament I think a unilateral change to the electoral system would be politically infeasible and the nearest thing the Liberal Democrats could get would be a referendum like they got in 2010. The proportional representation side in that referendum would be opposed by the whole Conservative Party and much of the Labour Party. Maybe it could win anyway as the electorate changes, but we saw what happened the last time the people were consulted on the matter of electoral reform.

Firstly, nobody cares about manifesto commitments to proportional representation. It will change literally zero votes because anybody for whom that is a deciding issue already votes Lib Dem and there are about 100 of them nationwide.

Secondly, assuming there will be a referendum because there was beforehand is not a safe assumption. A junior coalition partner will have a strong incentive to get its key demands, and for the Lib Dems PR is one of them. The Conservatives have just changed electoral law (abolishing second preferences for PCC and mayoral contests) and that's an arguable precedent. The likelihood of parties being punished for abolishing PR is minimal because it's neither unpopular nor something people care about.

Thirdly, I'd note that in New Zealand they had electoral reform and after about 5 years of instability it ended up with a two-party system even stronger than before. It's not unlikely that the same thing would result in the UK.

[Coldstream]

People using this line should have to say what they think would have happened had John Smith not died suddenly in 1994. If the reply is "Labour would then have lost the following election" that shows that they are unthinking Blair cultists rather than serious people.

I have literally never heard anyone say John Smith wouldn’t have won the 1997 election. You must hang out with some strange people if you hear this on a regular basis.

[CumbrianLefty]

There's a type of Blairite diehard who I've quite often seen make that very claim on social media. And at least a handful of similarly minded opinion formers (Oliver Kamm being one)