Right-wing populists will be the single greatest threat to the UK’s Conservative Party during the next election, a report from a think tank credited with its prediction of the Conservative ‘Red Wall’ victory has claimed.
UK Conservative Party leaders need to be very wary of the emergence of a new right-wing populist party in Britain, with one think tank now seeing such a party as the single greatest threat to Tory hegemony.
This is in stark contrast to both Labour and the Liberal Democrats, neither of which are perceived in the findings as being such an immediate threat to the power of Boris Johnson’s government.
According to the report by think tank Onward, the threat posed by a so-called “NewKip” party — as opposed to any left-wing threat — is what British Conservative Party hardliners need to be most wary of.
The party identified as most closely resembling that threat is Reform UK. The inheritor of the Brexit Party, Reform has yet to make a considerable impact in British politics, but nevertheless follows in the mould of the Brexit Party and UKIP, both of which had an outsize impact on UK politics and won national elections.
“The possibility of the Conservatives being outflanked on the right has received less attention than the recent success of the Liberal Democrats,” the report notes. “But it is worth considering the potential impact of disaffected 2019 Conservative voters finding a new home in a party like Reform UK.”
Onward’s research goes on to suggest that Tories would lose 53 seats as the result of the emergence of such a party during the next election, though the populists themselves would gain little from this, as their main impact would be splitting the vote, not winning seats.
“…a right-wing resurgence is more problematic than a consolidated left,” the paper noted, claiming a pact between the LibDems and Labour would only result in a loss of 44 seats.
“The Brexit Party would not actually win any seats for themselves,” the paper continued. “The effect would just be to deny victory to the Conservatives.”
By contrast, the research released on Monday determines that Labour and the Liberal Democrats are less of a concern, though the Tories need to be careful in regards to maintaining their gains in the North of England, which the think tank sees as being the main battleground for the next election.
The split-vote phenomenon is not without foundation. While Nigel Farage’s anti-Europe parties have enjoyed considerable support across the United Kingdom, winning several national votes for the European Parliament outright, it has never been able to localise the support necessary to get seats in parliament.
The paper also warns of “demographic change” in the south of the country, however, noting that such a shift could make traditionally safe seats less conservative over time.
Johnson’s government has suffered a number of recent political defeats in the post-COVID era, most recently losing the supposedly ultra-safe North Shropshire seat to the left-leaning Liberal Democrats.
“We have already seen the Midlands overtake the South in terms of Conservative vote share,” the document notes. “In a sense, the core of the Conservative Party is shifting from Surrey to Staffordshire.”
However, the Labour party appear to have a much steeper hill to climb, with the paper outlining the party’s far-leftist progressivism as a point of serious weakness.
“For Labour, the main challenge is to find a strategy that allows them to both regain Blyth Valley and win Wycombe for the first time since 1945,” the research claimed. “Doubling down on left-liberalism isn’t going to work in enough constituencies, as much as some of the party’s base might appreciate it.
“Labour need to win over Conservative voters,” it concluded.