- Reaction score
- 8,061
- Points
- 1,160
All that said....
In 2019, 14 million people voted Conservative. On Thursday, 6.8 million did. Over half our vote melted away. Even in the previous disaster of 1997, that didn’t happen: we still had 9.5 million voters out of the 14 million of 1992. That difference between now and 1997 is what happens when you have a competing party on the Right and when many of your own supporters are so demotivated that they don’t turn out.
Any analysis of what next for the Conservative Party, or indeed the Right more broadly, that doesn’t deal with this reality isn’t worth listening to. And there is, I’m afraid, already too much such analysis around. Yes, Labour’s final vote tally was unimpressive. Yes, the party has problems to its Left with the Gaza independents and the Greens. But Labour has 400-plus seats and all the instruments of government. There is plenty it wants to do and will do. The idea that the party’s majority is built on sand is just a coping mechanism, the purest wishful thinking.
Of course I don’t think that Labour’s ideas are good or will fix the country’s problems. Living under socialism is always bad. But when so many voters live off public funds and have got used to looking to the government to solve every problem, it doesn’t follow that it leads to electoral problems for Labour in the short run.
There’s no shortcut for the Tories. A divided Right will never win an election again
Pretending that Labour’s majority is built on sand is a pure coping mechanism. Rebuilding will be a difficult job
www.telegraph.co.uk