Better to be feared than forgotten? | Conservative Home

More in Common has done something fun: devised a poll in which, yes, the Conservatives come third – but where that’s a good thing!

In an attempt to divine the nation’s ‘negative voting intention’, they asked voters which party they would choose to vote against if offered the opportunity to cast a negative ballot (in what would be an entertainly weird electoral system). The overall results, per MiC’s Ed Hodgson, are as follows:

• Labour | 23 per cent
• Reform UK | 22 per cent
• Conservative | 10 per cent
• Green | 4 per cent
• Liberal Democrat | 4 per cent

Could be worse, right? Less than twelve months after the nation handed us a crushing defeat – and Labour an historic majority – only one in ten voters would single us out as the worst possible option, whereas almost a quarter would choose Labour.

The breakdown by different party’s voters (see image above) is even more interesting – and not just because the fact that fully a quarter of our remaining voters would prioritise blocking Reform over any other party makes the (already substantially illusory) proposition of a pact between our two parties difficult. (It’s the most substantial second anti-preference of any group.)

No, there’s also the fact that not one other party’s group of voters consider the Tories their primary threat. In fact, only Labour and Reform UK voters (and only a small percentage of the latter) even consider us the second-worst option; both Liberal Democrat and Green voters would apparently, in aggregate, prioritise blocking Labour instead.

That’s good. Or is it? There is an optimistic case to be made about these numbers, certainly. But it might well be a dangerous illusion. Let’s go through it, and decide for yourself.

The optimistic case is, as one Tory put it to me, this suggests that the Conservatives have potentially a relatively high ceiling. Both Labour and Reform are riding higher than us in the polls, but each also has a substantial block of voters which deeply dislikes them, not just amongst the other’s supporters but amongst supporters of the minor parties too.

One potential interpretation of this is that the Conservative brand is not perhaps as irradiated as one might expect in the circumstances, and it might be possible – although not easy – to put together a fairly broad coalition of voters.

The negative case can be summed up quite simply: that the positive case sounds like political cope borrowed from the Lib Dems. Even in the course of the two short paragraphs above, I had to actively fight the urge to throw in references to the “moderate middle” and “the two main parties”. These are not good arguments to which a putative party of government should have to resort.

Nor is that just an aesthetic problem. Another interpretation of these results, and a much more dangerous one, is that the Tory Party is simply becoming irrelevant. There are the traditional two primary actors, each with their partisans and antipartisans, and then there are the Others.

On this reading, we are not hated because we are not doing anything, nor is there any imminent prospect of our doing anything. Voters would prioritise their negative ballots on blocking Labour or Reform because it is Labour or Reform that feel to voters like contenders for power.

I might revile the prospect of a Green government, but would I cast my precious antivote to stop them in More in Common’s neg-election? Not on current polling.

All that, however, is merely depressing rather than dangerous. The danger is that things like this tempt the party to try exactly the sort of split-the-difference strategy the logic of the optimistic case describes. This could be framed as “moving to the centre ground” and would probably be favoured by those who advocate doing such, because it involves offering no definite diagnosis of Britain’s problems and, as we have discussed previously, they don’t have one.

The problem here is not that a policy of not frightening the horses doesn’t work. It can, tactically, be very effective. Kemi Badenoch’s victory in the leadership contest, and before that Labour’s at the general election, are both testament to the fact that one can win without policies.

The problem is that winning by such means doesn’t arm one with a mandate. We have discussed at length the problems this poses for Badenoch’s attempts to develop a policy programme.

But at least the stakes in opposition are (relatively) low. Sir Keir Starmer offers a much more powerful example of what happens when such a strategy comes into contact with actually governing. If media reports about a complete u-turn on the welfare bill are accurate, he has within twelve months of taking office found himself unable to deliver his government’s programme or legislate on things the Chancellor announced in a fiscal statement. Even those of us who predicted this government would end up here did not think it would happen so quickly.

It might sound like a luxury, in present circumstances, to be choosy about hypothetical conditions under which the Conservatives return to office. But there is no point gaining office without a plan for what to do with office, and I have argued before that: “Today’s Overton Tightrope leads nowhere; the 50-year forward projections of health, social care, and pension spending point to a future where government does nothing else.”

This isn’t entirely the Party’s fault. British politics is stuck; the current consensus is rotting before our eyes, but there has as yet been no equivalent of the Winter of Discontent to break its spell on a critical mass of the voters. They’re all deeply unhappy, yes, but continue to cleave to a basket of policy preferences which make a breakout impossible.

But there had been no Winter of Discontent in 1975, either – and one cannot start trying to create political space for a course of treatment until one knows what it is. A party which is committed both to blocking new tax rises and maintaining the full Winter Fuel Payment has not, in terms of the public accounts at least, started looking yet.

Perhaps, to return to an optimistic interpretation of this poll, relatively low antipathy to the Conservatives means that the Party will have an easier time winning a hearing from voters. But if large sections of the electorate deeply dislike Labour and Reform, each of which is peddling different flavours of fantasy economics, it seems a stretch to think voters would welcome the real thing.