Four Term Tories

Mary Southcott on how to beat them

The Tory Winning Machine: Why the Conservative Party keeps winning elections and what we can do to stop them by Adam Herriott

After four terms of Conservative government, Adam Herriott asks the question at a time when Labour is careful not to be treating the 2024 general election as if it is in the bag. Perhaps his easy to read 18 answers to his question are worth looking at. They are neither mutually exclusive or jointly exhaustive.   Some of them, the Conservatives seem to have forgotten. 

You may agree or disagree but they provide stimulus for debate.  They suggest that even if Labour wins the General Election, we should not talk casually about our second term, or the Brown Commission recommendations about a Senate for Nations and Regions or Electoral Reform.  If it is an assumption we should not make when Labour is 20 points ahead in the poll, this applies doubly for a second term. 

What is clear as Peter Kenyon and I argued in the New Democracy Chartist Supplement is Labour should not leave democratic reform off its agenda. We would like democracy to be flagged up in the first King’s Speech this year. 

Labour Conference made decisions on proportional representation in 2021 and 2022 and then in 2023. These words were adopted in the National Policy Forum policy platform: “the flaws in the current voting system are contributing to the alienation and distrust we see in politics”. Perhaps we need to add: “we can learn from Scotland and Wales”, a phrase which was part of Unison’s resolution which passed their 2022 Conference.  

We will see in action the determination of the Conservatives to save their first past the post system when we elect mayors and police and crime commissioners in May 2024.  We know that Labour is talking about votes for 16 and 17 year olds.  There is some consensus on what of the Conservative legislation could be rescinded. The Voter ID requirement lost the vote of as many as 14,000 people in the 2023 local elections.  Reversing these changes could form the basis of a Democratic Reform Bill.

The next election may settle whether to deal with the disillusion and distrust in politics we need to change the government or whether that government needs to change the way politics is done.  This book is written to be accessible. Even if you know everything about politics you will know people who do not. It covers the basics.  Its message is that if nothing changes the Conservatives will return even if wiped out this year. And we know because of the manoeuvring of leading opponents of their current leader that a future right-wing government could be worse than anything we have seen so far. 

We have learned from byelections that the first past the post system can be gamed. There are determined attempts to make sure the tactical voting goes against the Conservatives. The current system is a two-edged sword.  Labour has choices. It can live in the past or get Labour’s future back. Adam Herriott’s analysis may help.