Robert Shrimsley and Miranda Green ask whether Reform might be behind a Conservative extinction level event
The FT's UK political commentator Robert Shrimsley and deputy comment editor Miranda Green ask whether Reform will be behind a Conservative extinction level eventWhat's that? OK it's Sketchy Politics, and it's the, potentially, extinction election.
This is what happened to the left. You can't let the vote be divided. You've got to get close to them. You've basically got to become the full Farage. There's people of his party who would like Nigel Farage back in the party. And there's a couple of Conservative candidates, I think, even putting pictures of Farage rather than Sunak on their leaflets, which is amazing. Suella Braverman talking very positively about him.
...would vote Conservative, when, in fact, a lot of them are just angry, disaffected protest voters. Obviously... Or are we, as some on the right, like Nigel Farage, would like to claim, in one of those moments where the whole of the right is realigning and becoming a different force and that you can build a majority that way because everything we know so far suggests Nigel Farage is a deeply unpopular character. He has a core of support, but he can't get beyond it and that he puts a ceiling on how far that group of people can go in the electorate.
There's only one seat, actually. There's sort of an electoral curiosity - Sheffield Hallam, which is -That's slightly different, I think. So Sheffield Hallam was Nick Clegg's seat. And so there's a sort of weird grudge match between Labour and the Lib Dems in that one seat in Yorkshire.
Although, I have to say, I think people who say that have got no idea what house prices are like in Surrey, either. And the polls are showing them at levels you and I can probably never remember them being at. They're in the 20s. That's extraordinary. And so they're just getting clobbered. But there's no rules that say it has to. There's nothing that says it has to happen that way. There's nothing that says, if they're on 20 odd per cent three weeks out from polling day, that they are definitely going to claw it back.
And you can see how that argument can get traction. And, also, they'll say, look, if he's got more than 400 MPs, for the sake of argument, the real power are going to be all these left-wing MPs not in government demanding more things from him. They're going to be the opposition. It's going to be in his own party. You actually need some opposition there to stop him. And I can see that's a decent argument.
It's on the Essex coast. It's very Brexity, incredibly high proportion of leavers and of people in older age groups. So they'll be tough on immigration. They'll be tough on climate change policies. They'll find it very easy to take a harder line. And the challenge for them is not going so far into that hard line that they alienate people they need to win back.But there could be some other things they do that might give fodder to the opposition, do you think? The Green agenda.
Now, something that they have pledged to do is to relax the planning laws to get a lot of housebuilding going on. Now, it seems to me that is one way they can, as you've argued a lot in your columns, show that they're actually delivering almost immediately. But it seems to me that does also open up a dynamic here because rump Tory party MPs, certainly Lib Dem MPs, even Greens, could go very Nimby on them on the opposition benches. But with this sort of majority...
And one of the fundamental points is the UK has become less attractive for foreign investment. If people start seeing infrastructure being built, things being built, the country appearing to be moving again, then we could be in a different game.
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