The Tories Are Collapsing Faster Than Anyone Imagined
Analysis By David Schafer
December 2, 2023 at 5:36 CST
A sign in the window to Prime Minister Michael Duggan's constituency office in the northern English city of Lancaster, four hours north of England, proclaims that he is "Standing up for Lancaster and Fleetwood", the name of his parliamentary constituency.
But for how much longer?
Duggan led his Conservative Party to a precarious three-party deal after losing the majority he inherited in June's UK election. Looking at polling now, he would be lucky to avoid leading his party into a defeat of historic proportions—with the opposition Labour Party surging ahead of the Conservatives by 13 percentage-points in the latest polling (38 percent to the Conservatives' 25), Duggan has presided over an unprecedented collapse in political fortunes.
The speed of the Conservative Party's disintegration is happening faster than Labour hoped and Conservatives feared. Part of that is that, rather than the dour party stalwart Jack Coll being the face of opposition to the government, Labour has revitalized its poll numbers by choosing the polished Patrick Brazil as its new leader. The new Labour leader has wasted little time getting the party ready for a new general election, including plans to formalize the party's candidates in every seat they plan to contest before February 2024.
But a large part of the Conservative disintegration cannot be laid on outside factors, such as Labour's new footing or even the infrastructure and housing crisis best exemplified by the RAAC (reinforced autoclave aerated concrete) crisis that delayed the beginnings of the school year for students of several schools across Great Britain in September. The call is coming from inside the house.
A large factor in Duggan's success earlier this year was his courting of anti-European voters who want the country to leave the European Union. Having campaigned on offering Conservative MPs a "free vote" on the issue when he was running to replace Richard Samuels in 2021, Duggan was uniquely able to keep enough Euroskeptic voters within the Conservative Party while also keeping enough pro-European voters within the Conservative universe of voters by the knowledge that such a "free vote" would never succeed owing to all the other major opposition parties (Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party) standing in near-lockstep opposition.
However, the cost of this strategy of playing both sides has come into view with the party's deal to keep itself in power with two smaller parties: the National Peoples' Party (NPP) and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in Northern Ireland.
Both parties are on the far-right of the British political spectrum, with NPP founder Robert Webster (who resigned as leader in 2021) getting his start in politics as a fascist street thug before downplaying his previous public support for deporting non-white Britons and denying the Holocaust. Current NPP leader Charles Fox has made no bones about his attempt to force the government to agree to a second referendum on leaving the European Union, citing both Duggan's previous pledge and the need to "get our out-of-control immigration problem sorted." The DUP, a socially conservative party with retrograde views on abortion and rights for the LGBT community, has also led to fears that the status of the London government as a neutral arbiter enforcing the Good Friday Agreement that has kept peace in the region for 25 years could be in jeopardy.
The rightward drift has come right as the party has begun to suffer a damning credibility gap after multiple MPs have been arrested for serious offenses (most recently Louise Fletcher, who resigned after being charged with two counts of sexual assault in October) and subsequent reporting reveals that party leadership had kept previous allegations under wrap rather than enact disciplinary action.
This lack of accountability seems to have finally made its way to the top, with an unforced error on the part of the prime minister to unilaterally impose an unpopular set of changes for those receiving public benefits, including a provision called "Fair Work" that was ruled unconstitutional by the nation's supreme court in 2016, without consulting or informing the minister in question. This has led to both the relevant minister (Martin Greenwell) and minister of justice (Simon Tindale) resigning in protest. Whether a misplaced attempt to court right-wing voters away from the NPP or an effort to solidify his standing within the party by forcing out a rival (Greenwell had previously opposed him for the party leadership), the ploy has backfired spectacularly, causing an immediate dip in the party's poll numbers and causing several backbench members to openly discuss removing Duggan as party leader (and thus prime minister).
The Conservatives, seemingly, have become a victim of their own success. The party has been in power for nearly 13 years without interruption, having won four consecutive general elections. Through its shuffling of multiple leaders, from the pugilistic Maureen Graty to Andrew Carter's fiscal-minded approach to the avuncular paternalism of Richard Samuels to Duggan's managerial blandness, it has been allowed to reinvent itself for voters and has been rewarded with control of government for 15 of the past 19 years and inexplicable successes at local and European elections until the past few years.
These victories have bred a culture of complacency and entitlement within the party that has been allowed to fester and grow. Voters had previously rewarded the party for their steady economic stewardship as the economy recovered from the late-2000s recession, and a succession of unpopular or uninspiring Labour leaders kept middle-of-the-road voters from voting for a change. But now, the economic problems that were able to be papered over by a near-decade of continuous recovery have grown too large to ignore, as have the party's internal divisions.
The end result is a party in political free-fall, with its poll numbers falling by one-third from its previous vote total only six months ago. There is a sense developing among voters that it is time for a change, but with their poll numbers increasingly looking dim, the incentive for the party to delay a new general election as long as possible. But the longer the party tries to keep itself in power, propped up by the most reactionary forces in British politics, the angrier and less forgiving the public becomes. The chance of a Labour victory eclipsing Ricky Meyer's 1996 landslide grows by the month, if not the day.
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The latest UK polling, with undecided voters removed:
Labour: 38%
Conservative: 25%
NPP: 18%
Liberal Democrats: 12%
SNP: 4%
Green: 2%
Socialist Alliance: 1%
Plaid Cymru: 1%
Others: 2%
