A recent poll shows the Labour candidate ahead in Selby and Ainsty, where in 2019 Adams won more than 60 percent of the vote. In Somerton and Frome, the candidate of the centrist Liberal Democrats appears to have a strong chance of prevailing. “My central expectation is that we lose all three,” a Conservative lawmaker told the BBC.
Obviously, that’s not guaranteed. When I spoke to Joshua Simons, the head of Labour Together, a think tank close to Labour leadership, he suggested that Conservatives were strategically exaggerating their pessimism to lower expectations. Still, there’s a broad sense that, with national elections due sometime in the next 18 months, the Conservative Party is imploding. “We Are on For a Massive Defeat,” blared a headline in The Financial Times, quoting a former Tory cabinet minister.
The U.K.’s conservative collapse looks particularly stark when set against the ascendant right in much of the rest of Europe. Italy has a prime minister from a party with fascist roots. The far-right Vox could be part of the next government in Spain. There are right-wing governments in Sweden and Finland. Conservatives just won a second term in Greece. The last French election was a contest between the center-right Emmanuel Macron and the far- right Marine Le Pen, and though Le Pen lost, she appears to be gaining support in the wake of the recent riots. Even in Germany, where shame about the Holocaust once seemed to inoculate its people against right-wing extremism, the reactionary Alternative for Germany just won its first mayoral election, and in a recent poll it was the second most popular party in the country.
Yet in Britain, the right appears to be approaching something like free fall, with a recent poll showing Labour with a 21-point lead nationally. It’s quite a turnaround, given that, until recently, the Tories were often called the most successful political party in the world. Less than four years ago, the party won its fourth consecutive national election by a staggering margin, leaving Labour, then led by the leftist Jeremy Corbyn, decimated. “It was catastrophic,” said Reed. “It was really in question as to whether the Labour Party could survive.” A 2021 New Republic article was subtitled, “How the Tories Became Unbeatable.”
It would be nice, as someone who wants to see social democracy thrive, to report that Labour has since discovered some brilliant strategy for beating the right. In truth, though, if conservative hegemony in Britain is starting to break down, the Tories deserve most of the credit, both for their dissipation and their mismanagement.