England’s divided anti-Tory opposition will keep on losing unless it rallies to save Labour

This is Iain Martin”s latest newsletter for Reaction subscribers.

Two years is a long time in politics. On Sunday 23 May it is the second anniversary of Britain’s European elections 2019, when the Conservative party got a mere 8.8% of the vote. Led by a demoralised Theresa May, they limped home in fifth place. Falling 368,497 votes behind the eccentric Greens, Britain’s oldest party was humiliated.

The winner was a new party – the Brexit party (remember them) – on 30% and more than 5.2m of the votes cast. It was a historically significant electoral earthquake that finished May’s leadership and reminded the Tories they are supposed to have a ruthless streak.

Nigel Farage owed his insurgent victory, a “smashing of the Establishment” as he described it, to a mass defection by Tory voters protesting at the years of parliamentary shenanigans by those MPs trying to overturn or frustrate the result of the 2016 referendum. In a pointer to subsequent events, traditional Labour voters also rallied to Farage’s flag at those European elections. They wanted someone to get Brexit done, to coin a phrase.

Just two years later, it is almost as though the near annihilation of the Tories never happened. Today, they sit on 45% in the latest poll by YouGov, the Brexit party is defunct and Farage has faded away to irrelevance. To paraphrase the phrase of the radio DJ in Spinal Tap, the “rockumentary” film from the 1980s following an out of date rock band around America, Farage is currently residing in the “where are they now? file.”

I’ll tell you where Farage is now, or where he was earlier this week. The man who changed the course of British history by terrifying the Tories was on a tour of America. Sadly, or not, depending on your view, pranksters booked almost 3000 tickets for his free event in Pittsburgh this week to create the false impression that it would be packed. Reports suggested that the audience that turned up totalled 14 people. If true, that’s another echo of Spinal Tap and the scene when the band is booked by the record company booker Artie Fufkin for a record-signing promotion event in Indiana, and no-one turns up to meet the band at the store. Farage’s team said it was fake news, and they do seem to have rounded up several hundred people to listen to Nige fulminate about the left-wing media.

If the curtain has fallen on Farage’s career, for showman Boris Johnson years of power and patronage seem to stretch out into the distance. He’ll be there for eight years, nine years, ten years, longer than Thatcher, I keep hearing it said by Tories, few of them looking particularly excited by the prospect, even though under his leadership the Conservatives smashed Corbyn and constructed an extraordinary coalition of voters interests by uniting the Brexit vote under a Tory banner. In the style of Disraeli, the charismatic 19th century Tory leader, he connects with working class English voters. Now, they are sick of Labour and middle class entitlement. Those voters like Boris and they love that he annoys the people he annoys.

In the face of this altered reality, those who viscerally hate Johnson and his very existence are in shellshocked disarray. They have fallen back on the vain hope that allegations of corruption will persuade his voters that they backed a wrong ‘un. It is not impossible that these voters will suffer buyer’s remorse eventually but it seems unlikely to happen soon, again because they like him and disregard hysterical attacks on his character. They knew they weren’t getting a saint when they put him in power. And then there’s the vaccine.

Boris Johnson’s single greatest advantage in maintaining this hold is that the opposition forces are hopelessly disunited. They cannot even agree whether or not to take him seriously, as though his japester routine was ever a barrier to his victories in the London mayoralty and the 2019 general election.

But if the polls have the Tories now on 45% then by definition a majority are unimpressed and in the market for an alternative government at some point. How can enough of them be assembled behind one party, in sufficient numbers in the right places geographically, in the way that Tony Blair managed in the 1990s and early 2000s?

To engineer this, what on earth should depressed non-Tories in England do next?

I’ve heard all manner of suggestions in recent weeks, including just waiting for an economic crisis to blow up the government. Although that’s possible, even then there needs to be an alternative on hand with a potential Prime Minister in the running.

A cerebral former cabinet minister tells me that it will take a cooperation pact between Labour and the SNP ahead of attempting to secure a hung parliament, and then a vote to change the voting system to proportional representation, locking the Tories out. The flaw in that theory is that voters in England have previously shown at election time they resent the idea of a minority administration at Westminster being bossed by Scottish voters to cannibalise the voting system. The idea of an Ed Miliband-led coalition relying on SNP votes in the Commons was not a popular notion in the 2015 election.

Then there is the rise of the English Greens, likely to be boosted if Germany ends up with a Green Chancellor succeeding Angela Merkel, as seems likely at the German elections in September. This may suggest to many environmentally-minded younger voters in England that the future is Green and boost the party further.

The party is already eating the Lib Dems. Its Scottish sister-party has almost destroyed the Liberal tradition in Scotland, where the Lib Dems have deep roots. No longer. The Scottish Liberal Democrats are down to four seats in the Scottish Parliament and get no “short money” funding to employ staff. They are on the verge of extinction.

In England, might some form of three way multi-party effort – Labour, Lib Dem and rising Greens – make a formal anti-Tory pact possible? Again, this does not sound like a convincing offer to put in front of the country, with a Labour leader standing aside in certain seats like a coward, and being bossed about by assorted “knit your own yoghurt” types trying to close down the economy.

Weirdly, the option that is barely mentioned is surely the only option likely to produce a non-Tory administration any time in the next decade. That option is, obviously, saving the poor old Labour party and moving it into the centre as the antidote to endless Tory victory.

This might sound preposterous, considering the desperate position Labour is widely agreed to be in. The far left is much stronger than it was in the early 1980s, the last time that Labour moderates began their long march back to power. Sir Keir Starmer does not have the countenance of an election-winner and politics doesn’t seem to be his thing. That is fatal when anyone running the Labour successfully must be good at machine politics, because it is built as a machine.

The Labour party is not necessarily doomed, though. In Wales, it won the recent elections under Mark Drakeford. In Scotland, the party’s new leader Anas Sarwar is a potential star. Labour is struggling in the Red Wall but in southern England, where voters may come to feel ignored by the Tories, there are flickers on the heart monitor.

Moving from that to a full-scale Labour revival in England would require such combined effort of patriotic organisation and fresh thinking, accepting Brexit, that it sounds impossible. Is it though? The mega-money and energy that was poured into the doomed anti-Brexit cause, and has since dissipated in lockdown, could, if there is the will, be redirected into raising money and organising hundreds of thousands of non-Tories in England to take over Labour. Do the opponents of Boris have a better idea?

Ahead of 2019, the anti-Brexit crowd poured millions into the Lib Dems on the basis that it was supposedly becoming the “party of the 48%” who voted against leaving the EU. Hilariously, a YouGov poll conducted two years ago this month, immediately after those European elections I mentioned earlier, had the Lib Dems in front on 24%, ahead of the Brexit Party, Labour and the Tories. Six months later, after Jo Swinson has set fire, metaphorically speaking, to millions of pounds of anti-Brexit donor money, her party won eleven seats in total.

After that experience, knowing the voting system isn’t going to change, and English first past the post politics shapes who wins, wouldn’t it make more sense for anti-Tory money, activism and influence to reorientate around Labour and funding a grassroots drive?

I doubt it will happen. What I’ve suggested is too logical and rational when there are such tribal loyalties in play and Labour is seen as just another of those centre-left European parties with an existential problem. Such an effort to rebuild Labour would also need a charismatic leader, to fling out the far left from the party, and right now there is no-one obvious available, no anti-Johnson, no Thatcher of the centre-left, no Blair figure.

That being the case, it looks as though mainstream anti-Tory opinion in England is going to stick to the easier option of being divided and hoping something turns up. And losing.