My friend “Art Sifton,” the social media gadfly found at @ArtSifton, is one of the sharpest political observers I’ve ever met, and not just of Alberta politics. The night I was writing the previous post on this blog about the July 4 election in the United Kingdom, Art emailed me this, with permission to crib from it. It’s too good to quote uncredited, though, and while its reasoning is similar to parts of my post, at 680 words it is a model of the lost art (as it were) of newspaper column writing. Art, a former newspaperman in the days when that term still had some currency, asked to share the byline with John Alan Ashton, co-author with former Alberta NDP leader Ray Martin of “Made in Alberta: The Ray Martin Story,” with whom he collaborated.
By Art Sifton and John Alan Ashton
Coming out of their worst electoral defeat in a generation, members of the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom are likely doing some soul searching.
Some will suggest that the Tories earned their drubbing through economic mismanagement, others will point to a cavalcade of petty scandals and a culture of entitlement. But others will point to the rise of the Reform party and suggest that the answer is simple: the left won because the right was divided … and they will propose that the solution is to “unite the right.”
It’s a simplistic and inaccurate analysis that will appeal to many in the Tory ranks because the one thing that’s less fun than losing an election is admitting that you deserved to lose.
Looking at the popular vote numbers from the July 4 general election, it’s easy to make the superficial case that a conservative vote split is all that’s to blame for Tory woes. Although some in the Labour party are celebrating like it’s 1997, this election is nothing like Tony Blair’s breakthrough win. The Labour Party under Sir Keir Starmer this year earned only 33.7 per cent of the vote – the lowest popular vote tally for any governing party in British history and almost six points less than they earned under Jeremy Corbyn in 2017. They won few majorities in individual constituencies, but rather took a lot of pluralities. On paper, if you add the Reform votes to the Conservative votes, this election looks a lot different.
But this analysis misses out on some key factors at play. Labour’s popular vote share was depressed by a variety of factors including the public assumption that their win was inevitable.
Looking at individual constituencies, one sees a remarkably consistent pattern: in the safest Labour constituencies, the party underperformed because voters felt safe in lodging protest votes. Between the last election and this one, Labour lost support in urban downtown seats to Greens and left-wing independents. In places like Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leicester, and north London you’ll see Labour going from 70 per cent to 50 per cent (with some exceptions). They even lose a few seats to the Greens (4) and Independents (5). The Labour majority doesn’t come from Scotland and Wales, but the blowout does. Labour gained 45 seats in those two countries and gained tons of votes in Scotland. They break even on votes and win new seats on vote splits in England’s suburbs and country seats in the Midlands and North.
In short: the Labour majority is more stable than some pundits are suggesting, and it does not just come down to the Conservative party being sundered in twain.
Despite the facts, within the next year or two, British conservatives are almost inevitably going to start to hear the old refrain of “unite the right.” The people peddling it at first will be members of the Reform party – in part because they have the most to gain.
This is a script that’s been played out in Westminster-style democracies time and time again. Incompetent and destructive Tory dynasties will fracture into an establishment party and a radical right party. When that fracture happens, a moderate centre-left alternative will win government which then motivates the establishment party to accept a merger with the radical right. Then despite the fact that all moderate and establishment voices are sidelined or expelled from the merged party, the public accepts it as the “new Conservative party.”
We’ve seen this happen in Canada in the wake of the 1993 general election in which the old Progressive Conservative Party of Canada fractured. We saw this happen in Alberta in the wake of the 2015 general election in which the old Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta fractured.
Whatever name they’re under: UKIP, Reform, or the British National Party. That faction is preparing to gut the existing Conservative party and wear it like a suit. They will metaphorically re-enact Buffalo Bill’s role from The Silence of the Lambs.
So the message we have to drive home to all moderate and establishment Tories: you can’t tame the alt-right; the alt-right will tame you.
It is true that some of those used to enjoying power in the UK will be desperate to grasp at any quick fix to get them back into power. So Unite the Right has some appeal.
Of course it also takes the right person to pull it off. Here in Alberta a motley coalition was quickly constructed between those wanting the perks of power again and those wanting power to achieve social objectives. Kenney as a long term and arguably successful Federal Conservative with credibility and close connections with social Conservatives was a most suitable choice to lead it.
So far United the Right has has mixed results in Canada. Manning never became PM, but his understudy Harper who was able to come off as less populist did. But then he lost in 2015. Here in Alberta it is going better for the UCP, but they had to turf Kenney who it seems was not populist enough.
It is hard to predict the future, but if the UK’s is anything like Canada’s experience, I predict two things. First the right there will eventually unite, but only get back into power after voters tire of Labour. If Labour can deliver the competence voters expect, that could be a while. Second, yes the Conservative party and future leader will be less moderate, but the leader to win again for them will not be Farage.
Perhaps Alberta is a recent exception, but generally the more obvious kooks do not generally win.
Speaking of the alt-right (or as Lisa ,imho correctly calls them:the alt-wrong); the one thing I found interesting in all this was firstly Rishi Sunak appointing former PM David Cameron as foreign secretary, given that he was/is (?) Honorary Advisory Board member of the IDU, and now with the Conservative loss, he has now resigned.
More questions, alot more speculation. Now if I was going to put the cat amongst the pigeons, he’d be turning up to help Nigel…..seems like a very British (Columbian) move: or CAliance ,Reform, UCP, UKIP– whatever they seem to call themselves.
No wonder people don’t vote, you’re not sure who you’re voting for, if they are going to still be the same party a year later, if they haven’t crossed the floor in the meantime.
Apathy is a cornerstone of authoritarian success.
This kind of reminds me of what Take Back Alberta, with Davey Boy Parker in Alberta are trying to do.
In France, voters spoke out against electing the far right, and sent a message, which is a good thing.
In Alberta, voters never learn to accept that Reformers aren’t true Conservatives, like Peter Lougheed was.
Anyone who has known Peter Lougheed, or his MLAs will tell you that.
Ralph Klein was a Liberal turned into a Reformer.
Danielle Smith and the UCP are Reformers.
Pierre Poilievre is also a Reformer.
They will say anything to get elected, because they are good at lying. Their destructive policies will harm many people.
Where’s the intelligence in that?
If you combine the reform and tory votes it would be dishonest not to combine the labour and liberal democrat votes.
Not so sure about that. After all, the LibDems supported the Cameron government as part of a coalition. One could argue that, since 2010, Labour under Starmer has moved to the right, the Lib Dems a bit to the left, and the Tories quite a lot to the right, so in that case you certainly have point.
Left, right, alt right, reform, liberal, conservative. These old labels have become meaningless. Isn’t it odd the “far right” parties in Europe have been most opposed to the U.S./NATO war in Ukraine, calling for diplomacy to end the conflict. Nigel Farage got into hot water when he suggested the war in Ukraine was provoked by NATO (gasp!).
Once upon a time being anti-war was the exclusive position of left wing politics. Not anymore. The “center-left” parties of Europe are following the NATO orders and are pulling out all the stops to preserve the Kiev regime the U.S. installed in 2014 in a violent coup. All under the guise of preserving the “rules-based international order” (our rules, our orders). Now the new UK defence minister has called for an increase in the defense spending target for NATO member countries from 2 to 2.5 percent of GDP. More evidence there’s hardly any difference between Labour and the Conservatives.
Ronmac: You’ve touched on one of my major gripes with “progressive” politicians in Canada and elsewhere in the West. They’re all warmongers too. In fact, they seem to adopt warmongering with particular enthusiasm when they have the opportunity, as if to prove they can be just as tough as their conservative opponents. Just as there is no party that is not in favour of neoliberalism, in Canada that means there is no party that is not in favour of war and more war. If I have a point of disagreement with you on this comment, it’s the implicit assumption that the Poilievre Conservatives on this issue would be better than the warmongering Liberals. It would seem from what he has to say that the opposite is true. DJC
I consider PP to be “centre right” Not much difference between him and JT. Two peas in a pod.
The only antiwar voice I’ve heard in Canada is Maxine Bernier. Imagine. A couple of months ago he was lamenting how the war in Ukraine could have been avoided. “Instead, the murderous neocons in Washington and their lapdogs in other Western capitals (including Trudeau and Poilievre in Ottawa) got their bloody proxy war…”
PeePee is centre right?? Hahahaha
You’re talking about a slimeball who’s just to the left of Goebbels or Himmler.
I’ll give you one thing Ron, you’re always dependable for a laugh.
To the left of Goebbels or Himmler? Any evidence for that? Or are you just going by feelings?
Come on FoF, as ronmac said these labels are meaningless. Justin Trudeau is happily escalating the war in Ukraine so more people will die and Justin Trudeau supports Israel in it’s mass killing of mostly women and children in Gaza. You think that’s funny?
The site isn’t letting me respond to Mickey for some reason, so here goes….
Of course it’s not funny. But to compare Trudeau, with all his many flaws, to PeePee is asinine. Trudeau might be a tool and I’m not a fan of his at all but he’s not out to remake Canada into a Reformer/far right wonderland, unlike the Leader of His Majesty’s (dis)Loyal Opposition. I happen to love this country and don’t think it needs to be molded into whatever nightmarish vision that Manning/Harper/Poilievre want to impose on the entire nation. If Mickey and Ron can’t see that, along with the clear threat a PeePee-led CPC government would pose, then sorry but you can’t be helped.
There is one war which does not seem to appeal to “progressives”, and that is the Class War. The first and only public demonstration I have attended was the 15 February, 2003 protest against what remains the greatest crime against peace committed in this century. Some enterprising individual had decorated the Sherman tank in front of the Mewata Armoury with the slogan, “No War But Class War”. It clearly didn’t appeal to the “progs” of the day, as the Chretien government presided over the deployment of Canadian army, navy and air force personnel to the grossly illegal and immoral assault on Iraq, as they streamlined the Nyquil Kid’s neoliberal program launched in the eighties. de gustibus non disputandum est
Nigel got into hot water because it is a specious argument.
Yeah, exactly right. It’s only taken 30 years, a whole bloody generation, to be able to lay it out like this in a mainstream news source.
Problem is, this is the previous generations doing, their explanation. The newest generation is unlikely to buy into those old farts view.
And the wheel turns ….
Mr Sifton’s analysis would be on more solid ground if Starmer’s were not an even more neo-con version of the Labour Party than the odious Tony Blair’s. People weren’t just voting against Tory incompetence and corruption, they were voting against the Tories’ policies, and yet there was only a hair’s breadth of difference between Starmer’s platform and Sunak’s. If Starmer is unable to make major improvements in the quality of life of British working people, he and his majority may well turn out to be a flash in the pan. British politics have entered that mysterious country described on the maps as uncharted territory and what they will look like at the end of five years is anyone’s guess. After all, in the often-quoted phrase of another Labour prime minister, even a week is a long time in politics.
More than anything, the huge Labour win in the UK is attributable to the potential distortions of the First Past The Post electoral process. That’s the real story.
The turnout in Britain was about one in two. Disgraceful. Abysmal turnout doesn’t augur well for the US election in November.
No point in coddling the electorate. Getting out to vote and making a decision about your choices is hardly a hard task.
I was pleased with the Labor win. But it is a shallow victory.
I look forward to a future meeting of old Nige and the semi-royalty (Lord and the Lady this, Sir so-and-so, and other poo-bahs) that make up the traditional Conservative movement. Will he be overwhelmed by the number of forks at dinner?
“….it’s reasoning…”
Even Homer nodded.
Lars: Good Lord! It’s been fixed. DJC
Long ago my spellcheck gave me “Albetar”—which I retained. It also gave me “Flagel Garbage”—perhaps a little obscure until the recent TKO in the UK for which Preston Manning is said to have ghost-written. “Nanker Phelge” didn’t offer a glimmer.
But it never, ever gives me any notions about the left moving right or the right moving centre or the pole-positions of every pundit’s clown-car being anything other than it’s always been: none have leap-frogged any in schematic and—at least in “liberal democracies”—the centre lane is still where the electorate is most comfortable.
The partisan right’s been in trouble since 1870, it’s only strategy since then being to affect an “End of History”. The oldest political philosophy was the lowest hanging, overripe fruit on the vine and, repurposed off-label as its globalizing neoliberal usurpers have done has strongly inferred results—like, been-there-done-that.
Paradigms were buggy-whipped forward until tasers and electronic money-movement were invented. So-equipped, the well-heeled often delude themselves hubristically and become susceptible to predictably random catastrophes cruelly meted upon comfortably deserving innocents in the parochial strictures of the globalized neoliberal world. And not a Spellcheck neologism in the lot. Wrong bait? Maybe I should switch.
I flog my crazy flipping fingers to radar-love speed, tripped and tied in knots, one car to pass, here I go, praying the gods of spellcheck neologism will bless me with some unnatural pith.
Neoncons, the nearly-right, fasciest socialist’s dumocracy—and on and on until alls I get is this lousy “Untie the Right” T-shirt. And boney fingers, boney fingers.
If we make it through November will punditry still be saying: if a progressive party wins power then it isn’t progressive anymore? Is it really the stuff of partisanship that when the left wins it claims it’s losing, and when the right’s losing it claims it’s winning? Let’s ask Captain Chauvin.
Wait!—some colour! Nah!—alls I got was “right-sluicing” and “neo-dippers”. Oh, well, maybe tomorrow. Now it’s siesta time.
Starmer is a member of the “peerage” as well!!
Neoliberalism still rules most of the western nations, and most unfortunately, there is no compelling alternative with a force of ideas and moral suasion at any point that is convincing to the electorate. So we continue to flounder on the waves of leaders who come up with catchy phrases and very little in the way of substantive policies that generations after us “boomers” feel meet their needs for the present and future. Not much wonder younger generations do not bother to vote with choices like tweedle-dumb and tweedle-dee!
The instances of policy to lessen the present and future impacts of climate disaster meander between denial by a majority of conservative voters and their favoured politicians, and liberal voters who had/have to ponder the contributions of their favoured governing types to a great increase in emissions from the taxpayer built $7 cum $34 Billion pipeline.
Mr Starmer is not a peer. He was knighted for his service as Director of Public Prosecutions, but a knighthood is not a peerage. He is not eligible to sit in the House of Lords, as all peers are. A knighthood in modern Britain is a form of honour roll that can be thought of as roughly equivalent in importance to the highest level of our Order of Canada, known as a Companion.
https://www.royal.uk/knighthoods-and-damehoods
It’s essential to remember that B-liar set the Labour Party back decades. He set them so far back that Britons were actually willing to endure the CONs, rather than put up with that spawn of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown. When a twat like David Cameron actually looks better than anyone in Labour, the problem for Labour was serious. And Britons were even willing to tolerate the crazy that was Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak, until enough was enough. Kick them all out and make they never show themselves again.
While the Alt-right appear to have been routed, pay attention to the aftermath of the election. UK Reform is already under investigation for so-called ‘paper candidates’, as well as one or two elected candidates who, it’s believed, are fraudsters. Following the French election, Le Front is under scrutiny for some very shady financial actions that indicate clear potential criminal activity. Was the Kremlin involved? We can only hope.
And now that Hungary’s Viktor Orban is now under the suspicion of being a Kremlin agent (He was a member of the Young Pioneers during his youth in Warsaw Pact Hungary.) it looks like the gig may soon be up for many of Putin’s useful idiots the world over. But when dealing with the alt-right one needs to be ever vigilant.
My sister who spent countless hours volunteering for provincial and federal conservatives has been saying for years: “ We have got to get rid of Party Politics and run elections like municipal one where the people vote for the right people and not these stupid parties”. I think she is right. How many times have seen people elect someone they think would do a good only to have him / her forced to toe the line and do what the party leader tells them. The former conservative MLAs that I knew watched Klein buy them off with a severance package system where he could control them and make them agree with his stupid ideas.