Realignment

In the light of the Gorton and Denton by-election, I'm republishing this post from last November,

Among the many contributions to British politics of Jo Grimond, leader of the Liberal Party from 1956 to 1967, and again, briefly, in 1976, was his belief in a realignment of the left. Grimond wanted to reorganise the anti-Conservative forces in British politics around his socially progressive, pro-European and anti-corporatist version of Liberalism, which he thought would be a far more effective long-term vehicle for defeating the forces of the political right than Labour’s static, soul-sapping monolithic, class obsessed state socialism.

The essence of Grimond’s case is correct even today. Polling shows that whereas Labour would lose an election which only it or Reform UK could win, the Liberal Democrats could beat Reform. That finding is borne out in local government elections, in which the Liberal Democrats are far more successful at holding off Reform than the other parties. And polling often shows that when voters are asked to estimate their chances of considering voting for different parties at the next election, the Liberal Democrats beat Labour overall (for example in November 2025, a 35% chance on average for the Liberal Democrats, 30% for Labour). Without tactical voting in favour of Labour holding down the Liberal vote (the ‘wasted vote’ argument is nothing but an appeal for tactical votes), that realignment would have already happened. But realignment is very difficult to bring about. Labour has been capable of just enough change to fend off the Liberal Democrats, for example Tony Blair’s abandonment of clause 4 in 1995 or Labour’s strategically ambiguous half call for a second EU referendum in 2019, without changing enough to see off the Tories.

That is why what we are now seeing on the right of politics is so remarkable. We are seeing a full-scale realignment. The Conservative Party is being devoured by Reform UK. According to YouGov, the Conservatives have lost around 30% of their 2024 voters to Reform, which comes on top of having lost nearly a fifth of their 2019 vote to Reform in 2024. A string of local councillors and an MP have defected from the Conservatives to Reform. Businesses have started to attend Reform’s annual conference. And at the local elections of 2025 the Conservatives lost around 500 seats to Reform, about half the seats they were defending.

The Conservatives’ reaction to Reform’s success is in a way similar to Labour’s response to the threat from the Liberal Democrats: they have started to imitate and in some cases to outflank Reform, calling for withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, menacing with deportation even immigrants who already enjoy indefinite leave to remain (which they half-heartedly withdrew after an outcry from more old-fashioned Conservatives), threatening to dismiss judges and calling for a ban on wearing a burqa. But unlike Labour’s manoeuvrings against the Liberal Democrats, the Conservatives are getting nowhere. Their poll ratings are not improving even as their desperation rises.

Reform UK is named after another party of the right that succeeded in bringing about a realignment, the Canadian Reform Party, a libertarian party that competed with and then absorbed the Canadian Progressive Conservative Party. Other successful realignments include both sides of the sectarian divide in Northern Ireland, where Sinn Fein displaced the SDLP and the Democratic Unionists displaced the official Ulster Unionists, and both sides of the left-right divide in France where La France Insoumise has overtaken the Socialists on the left and the Front National, now the Rassemblement National, now vastly outnumbers Les Républicains on the right.

What all these successful realignments have in common is that a more extreme party superseded a moderate one. The lesson, regrettably, is that realignments can be powered more successfully by anger, intransigence and the language of betrayal than by appeals to reason. Reform’s basic proposition is that the Conservatives have betrayed Brexit by allowing a massive increase in immigration, which, Reform claims, is harming the interests of indigenous British people, and by failing to introduce radical deregulation, in particular by failing to eliminate climate change related environmental regulation. Reform is playing on the xenophobia and racism of two thirds or more of the supporters of the parties of the right and, to a lesser extent, on the limited but almost exclusively right-wing audience that exists for climate change denial.

The Conservative response lacks all credibility. Voters know that the Conservatives had a decade in office, after they rid themselves of the Liberal Democrats in 2015, when they were free to implement the policies they now advocate. Even worse is the Conservatives’ attack line against Reform, that Reform is too inexperienced to be given control of Britain’s economic policy. They are asking voters to forget their own breathtaking incompetence in economic policy, culminating in Liz Truss’s catastrophic budget. Chasing after the far right and reminding voters of their own economic incompetence is a recipe for losing another chunk of their remaining non-xenophobic voters, who still exist, to the Liberal Democrats. The Conservatives look doomed.

But Labour also looks if not actually doomed then at least teetering on the edge of doom. A realignment of the left is happening, but it is not Grimond’s realignment. It is a realignment of the further left, using a formula, reminiscent of the one that has worked for Farage on the right, that Labour has betrayed its supporters. Both the Greens, who seem to have been successfully infiltrated by people who only care about climate change because it gives them a stick with which to beat capitalism, and the nascent Jeremy Corbyn-Zarah Sultana party are siphoning off Labour support by reviving such left-wing nostalgic favourites as extensive nationalisation (I more than half expect soon to hear the Greens pronounce that old Militant slogan “Nationalise the top 200 monopolies”), withdrawal from NATO, and vehement hostility to Israel. This is precisely the strategy that destroyed the French Socialist Party, the governing party of France less than ten years ago and now much smaller than La France Insoumise, a party whose very name exudes intransigence.

Unlike the French Socialists, Labour is in government and so in a position to take action to win these voters back, and many longer established Greens will soon find their new friends difficult to deal with, especially on the issue of the European Union, to which the anticapitalist left is notoriously hostile, but every time Labour pursues xenophobic votes on the right, it will lose more votes either to the left or to the Liberal Democrats.

Some Reform supporters, particularly those who voted for Labour in the past, lean left in economic policy, and so Labour could attempt to attract back both leftists and Reform voters who previously voted Labour by ditching the whole economic policy legacy of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and returning to old Labour’s approach – nationalisation, central planning, tax and spend. But that route has many risks, Nationalisation usually means pouring vast subsidies into failing businesses, diverting resources from public services and making the government vulnerable to pressure from strikes for higher pay. Central planning, hints of which are already visible in Labour’s health and local government policies, is simply beyond the intellectual and organisational capacity of British central government and often leads to gross and costly errors. And tax and spend is unpopular unless voters can see improvements in public services in their daily lives, something which, if the government is spending taxpayers’ money not on services but on nationalisations and the pay of those who work in an expanded public sector, they are not going to see. And in any case, a left-wing appeal to Reform voters might not work. Voters who are moving to Reform are doing so mainly because of “immigration”. Many seem to care far more about being cruel to foreigners than about anything else.

If both realignments continue, and Labour continues to refuse to change the electoral system, voters who are neither xenophobes nor supporters of far left economic and foreign policies will be looking at a deeply depressing choice. In political systems without first-past-the-post, the result of situations of this type is that moderate and Liberal forces start to rise, creating a three-bloc configuation. In France, the two-round electoral system helped to generate a new alliance of social liberals and christian democrats, the movement that brought Emmanual Macron to office. In Northern Ireland, the dash to the extremes helped to re-launch the Alliance Party, a combination of Liberals and moderates. But first-past-the-post is designed to promote a two-party system, and even if those two parties are the devil and the deep blue sea (or the far right and the far left) the logic of the system is that every voter is under pressure to vote negatively, against the worse of two options. That is what happened in 2019, which offered perhaps the worst choice in history between the leaders of the two largest parties, and which resulted in bringing to power the worst two prime ministers of my lifetime.

But a point can arrive when the two choices are both so repellent that the logic of first-past-the-post loses its grip on the voters’ throats. That is what happened in 1981-82, when the choice between Margaret Thatcher’s brutal policy of driving up unemployment and Michael Foot’s advocacy of state socialism in one country caused a political rupture: the formation of the SDP and its alliance with the Liberal Party. The situation now is admittedly different. For one thing Labour is in power, and it is far more difficult to split a party in power, with all its patronage and privileged access to the media, than one languishing in opposition. But other conditions are more favourable than in the early 80s. The Liberal Party had only 11 MPs after the 1979 election. The Liberal Democrats now have 72 seats, most of them very secure. And politicians now can benefit from the main lesson of 1981-82 (which admittedly had to be relearned in 2019) that starting new breakaway parties makes no tactical or strategic sense and that the goal needs to be not to wallow in the narcissism of small differences but to create a bigger, broader, more inclusive Liberal Democrat party.

The Conservative and Labour Parties are both in decline. For at least one of them, that decline looks terminal. In the past they both attracted pragmatic politicians who could be described in some sense as liberal, or even Liberal. Those politicians need a new home and the Liberal Democrats, for the sake of the country, should be offering them one. It would not be Grimond’s realignment, and those of us who have worked our entire political lives to bring about Grimond’s realignment will need to exercise some restraint. But in a way it would be an even more remarkable development. It would be the re-creation of the old Liberal Party in its early 20^th century form, before political missteps in the 1920s and 30s stripped it of many talented people, both progressives who drifted to the Labour Party and those fearful of state socialism who drifted in the direction of the Conservatives. It would be a kind of homecoming. It would also be the last best hope for a politics that rejects both cruelty and fantasy.