It’s time to see if the polls are right.
Previously: the voting megathread
I don’t see how that makes them vulnerable though. I can’t see the reform voters going back to the conservatives so reform are going to continue to split the conservative vote forever.
In 1993 in Canada, there was a Reform party that along with the BQ, split the Tories so much that the latter won only 2 seats. Though not as badly, the splitting was repeated in 1997, and 2000. Then they (i.e. Reform, renamed Alliance, and the Progressive Conservatives) merged. After that to present they were in government for about 9 years, over half as a minority. Presently 118 Canadian MPs are Conservative.
So if Canada is a guide, Farage might be replaced, then the replacement replaced by one maybe born in the early 1980s and one who will be compared to a Vulcan. Reform will merge with the Conservatives, and he will become leader, and will run the Conservatives for over 10 years. During this time, he will lead minority government for about 4 years and then a majority another for about 5 years; but all of this won’t happen for at least 10 years.
Similarly to what happened with UKIP, the Tories will just take Reforms policies, bring in new further-right leadership and support will come back.
Especially after Labour (who just got elected on a fairly bland centrist manifesto) won’t manage to magically fix things in 2-3 years. Conservative media will blame Labour for all the issues (even though most are the fault of the Tories) and Conservative voters will rally around the banner of “Labour out!”.
Or Reform just eats the Tories, which seems a but less likely to me, but either way the split won’t last.
Yes. Thinking that reform will always be there is extremely naive, reform can disappear just as quickly as UKIP did after Brexit.
I think that’s right. Tories will move further to the right on immigration and force Labour to move with them. Populism isn’t going anywhere.
But one of the main reasons that the conservatives are so unpopular is because they’ve been chasing the right and leaving the centralist politics basically defended, which is why Labour wandered over there, and they have clearly done well out of that.
