Tory slump continues: civic nationalists still struggling for relevance
Posted by admin978 on October 20, 2023 · Leave a Comment
Yesterday’s parliamentary by-elections showed Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government heading for a 1997-style landslide defeat. Despite this Tory collapse, civic nationalist parties are nowhere near the level of support that they enjoyed in the pre-Brexit era.
Each of the by-elections was in a very White constituency, so Labour’s victories owed nothing to ethnic minority support. Mid Bedfordshire is a very affluent collection of villages and small towns, and has never previously elected a Labour MP. Tamworth is more mixed socially (though not racially), with far more working-class voters, and was strongly pro-Brexit. Under its earlier name SE Staffordshire, but with similar boundaries, it fell to Labour at a by-election in 1996 and in the Blair landslide a year later, but at other times has been solidly Tory.
Apart from the Tories, the biggest losers were the United Kingdom Independence Party. UKIP polled 18.5% in Tamworth at the pre-Brexit general election in 2015, but yesterday UKIP candidate Robert Bilcliff managed only 1.7%.
The Heritage Party – a UKIP splinter group that in recent years has specialised in peddling conspiracy theories and anti-vaccination campaigns – had an even more embarrassing result in Mid Bedfordshire, where Heritage candidate Alberto Thomas polled only 0.2%. Just slightly ahead of Mr Thomas with 0.3% was Antonio Vitiello for the English Democrats (a party that has just reached an electoral pact with UKIP).
After these results there are bound to be serious questions as to whether UKIP, the Heritage Party or the English Democrats have any future in electoral politics. The EDs do at least have a rationale for continued existence, as they have the distinctive policy of campaigning for an English Parliament.
The much better-funded Reform UK again proved itself to be (by far) the strongest of the civic nationalist parties, and in Tamworth their candidate Ian Cooper managed to save his deposit, the first Reform UK candidate to achieve this since party leader Richard Tice almost two years ago in Old Bexley & Sidcup.
Mr Cooper polled 5.4% and finished in third place, at last breaking his party’s miserable run of twelve lost deposits.
But it’s important to recognise the following factors:
- Tamworth was a very strongly pro-Brexit constituency;
- The circumstances of this by-election, caused by the resignation of a Tory MP who was found to have made repeated homosexual assaults while drunk, were obviously ideal for a right-of-centre, ‘protest vote’ party.
- The Conservative vote collapsed, but lifelong Tories chose to stay at home and were not inspired by Reform UK’s lukewarm civic nationalism.
- A significant number of voters would have been confused by the Reform UK candidate having the same surname as the Tory candidate – previous research has shown that this type of confusion is always a factor (though only a minor one) when there are two candidates on the ballot paper with the same surname.
It’s not unduly cynical to point out that in each of yesterday’s by-elections, Reform UK just happened to select candidates who had the same name as one of the rival candidates from a major party. In Mid Bedfordshire, Reform UK’s Dave Holland lost his deposit but managed 3.6%, no doubt helped slightly by the non-coincidence that the Liberal Democrat candidate was named Emma Holland-Lindsay.
It’s a shame that Reform UK is so bereft of serious policies and serious ideological inspiration that it resorts to these shabby tricks, but even with the benefit of such ploys it’s becoming obvious that Richard Tice’s party is on the road to nowhere. Reform UK is at most a minor irritant costing the Tories a few hundred votes and will perhaps hand a few extra seats to Labour as Keir Starmer heads for Downing Street next year, but the party has nothing more to offer.
One much smaller party will be reasonably satisfied with their result. Britain First took a big gamble in choosing to stand in Tamworth where their candidate – deputy party leader Ashlea Simon – has no local connections. However, Ms Simon and party leader Paul Golding perceived that Tamworth is strongly pro-Brexit and felt that especially the White working-class section of its electorate might prove receptive to Britain First’s message.
After carrying out a serious and energetic campaign in Tamworth, Ms Simon polled 2.3% and finished in fourth place (ahead of the Greens and Liberal Democrats).
H&D is not especially sympathetic to Britain First’s brand of civic nationalism, with its intense focus on hostility to Islam and its insistence on multi-racialism. But we can see that while this is far from an outstanding result, it is much better than the three previous large scale BF campaigns, at the Rochester & Strood and Wakefield by-elections, and the 2016 London mayoral election.
In short, this was not a great result for Ms Simon, but certainly not a disaster – bearing in mind that the party has far less resources than Reform UK and does not enjoy the regular hype on GB News that is still given to Tice’s party.
With the BNP moribund, the NF barely functioning as an electoral party, neither PA nor the Homeland Party yet being registered, and the British Democrats yet to take off as a significant force at the ballot box, Mr Golding and Ms Simon will be regarded by some H&D readers as the next best thing to having a real racial nationalist party.
However, for some of us the lesson of this week’s by-elections is that all forms of civic nationalism are failing – not only failing to offer principled opposition to the zeitgeist, but also failing in their own terms at even the shabbiest and most ‘pragmatic’ level of politics.
The 4.6% polled at yesterday’s Mid Bedfordshire by-election by a local parish councillor standing as an independent parliamentary candidate – and the low turnouts in both constituencies (especially Tamworth) – show the extent of public disillusionment with the mainstream parties. Some form of nationalist party ought to be capable of getting its act together and mobilising this disillusionment, even with only a fraction of the funds that have been wasted on UKIP, Reform UK and various pro-Brexit splinter parties.
