Thursday 27 June 2024

Polling data still points to obliteration for the Tories

With just a few days before the election, if the latest MRP poll by Electoral Calculus is anywhere near correct I suspect the Tory party will descend into open warfare on 5 July. The poll puts the Tories in third place behind the LibDems with just 60 MPs. It would be an earth-shattering result for the ‘natural party of government’ and since Sunak will be expected to resign as leader, and half the cabinet could be swept away, there will be hard questions asked about who or what is to blame as the survivors struggle to keep the party from imploding.  Since there's a considerable gap between the centrists and the hard right, expect clear dividing lines to appear very quickly.

Here's the poll data:

Reform is forecast to get 18 seats which would be quite something in itself. With Farage in the Commons many people expect pressure for him to become Tory leader, to unite the right.

David Gauke in The New Statesman writes, "One might feel a sense of vindication that the right’s capture of the Conservative Party has ended in disaster. Brexit, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss have wrecked the party’s reputation for competence and honesty. But that is not likely to be the lesson the Tories learn. The blame will be placed on Rishi Sunak, high taxes and immigration, and a hapless campaign."

Gauke knows the party machine and the members, and on this point, I think he's right. The party is going to conclude it isn't sufficiently Conservative. There will be no soul-searching in the ranks or in the Brexit-supporting press.

However, he also believes the prospect of Farage ever leading the party has diminished after his comments about the West provoking Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Some senior Tories are starting to see what a liability he would be as party leader.

And Gauke concludes that, "Maybe – just maybe – this past week was the moment when Farage’s attempt to become the undisputed leader of the right in the UK faltered."

The BBC has a nice article on its website about Brexit eight years on with several leave voters admitting they would vote differently now they've actually seen the consequences. One man, an army veteran, who voted for Brexit in 2016, is now wavering and I thought his reasoning held a big clue about the whole sorry saga.

Steve Smith lives in Gosport, Hants where 63% of people voted to leave the EU, one of the areas in the South with the highest numbers in favour of quitting the EU. He said:

"I think it was primarily immigration and I just thought it was a good thing to do. I studied the European Union as part of a course I did and it's very complicated, so I thought we were better off out of it." 

And now?

"I don't think it's brought as many benefits as perhaps we'd thought and I think the jury's out; I’m not sure. It depends on who gets in next to power as to what happens, I guess."

Note the "it's very complicated" so we are better off ignoring it.  Isn't that the real issue? The EU is simply beyond comprehension for a lot of people, and to many once things start to become complex their immediate reaction is to switch off, and believe it all to be a conspiracy designed to hoodwink them. They have no curiosity or wish to be better informed. Self-education is for them something to fear, to shrink away from.

Among a sizeable section of the British population, there is a terrible yearning for simple hammers and nails solutions to everything in a world of quantum mechanics, gene manipulation and AI. The sum of human knowledge is increasing exponentially and turning the clock back a century or two is not an option.

Part of the problem is a tendency to mistrust those in power, both here and elsewhere in the world. A tendency that has got worse in the last few decades as politicians routinely tell lies, make commitments they have no intention of meeting and generally show themselves to be self-serving, corrupt and in many cases, malevolent.

I think if we can push the Tories into third place and give them twenty years in the wilderness to reflect on where they are going wrong, that would be a good start.

If Kier Starmer can restore truth and honesty to their rightful place at the front and centre of everything in British politics (and he's just the sort of man to do it) that would be a good second step. He won't restore those things or get the economic growth he needs if he's not open and truthful about Brexit and at the moment, the jury is out on that one.

Posted by at