Sometimes in a great nation’s history there are turning points when decisions are made that shape the future.
It happens when war is declared. Britain was transformed, and set on a different path, by two world wars.
A general election can occasionally have a seismic effect. Labour’s landslide victory in 1945 led to the creation of the NHS, the welfare state, and the nationalisation of much of British industry.
Margaret Thatcher’s electoral triumph in 1979 marked the moment when this country’s long economic decline, and the insidious defeatism of its ruling class, began to be reversed.
Thursday’s election promises to be just such a fateful event. Most polls have indicated not only a stupendous Labour victory but also the obliteration of the Conservative Party. If they are correct, there will be no meaningful opposition to Sir Keir Starmer’s rule.
It is dangerous in any democracy for one political party to be so dominant. I certainly wouldn’t relish the prospect of the Tories being handed so much power – unchallenged, unchecked and untrammelled – for a generation.
Labour is threatening to change Britain more fundamentally even than Tony Blair. Despite the party concealing its true purposes during this dishonest campaign, we can glimpse the outlines of a revolutionary programme intended to remould our country.
Higher taxes, at least half a step back into the EU, constitutional upheaval, the sanctification of net zero, votes for 16-year-olds so as to entrench Labour power, more uncontrolled immigration – the plan is there for all to see, notwithstanding the obfuscation.
There’s class war too, which I’d hoped we had seen the last of. It explains Labour’s proposal to apply VAT to private school fees since there’ll be little, if any, economic benefit. It underlies shadow foreign secretary David Lammy’s remark on Thursday that the Tories aren’t the ‘right class of people’ to be running Britain because of their ‘public school smallness’.
Sir Keir isn’t a bad man but he’s a committed socialist. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Who can doubt that, if Starmer surveys the landscape next Friday and sees no opposition – not just political but also in the increasingly woke law courts, where he was nurtured – the Labour leader will feel supreme?
Sir Keir Starmer, pictured at the TV debate on Wednesday, is a ‘committed socialist’
In such a dystopian Britain the media would be hobbled. I wouldn’t trust the BBC, which is determined to have its licence fee renewed on favourable terms, to speak truth to Labour power. I doubt the outspoken GB News – home to Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg – will survive, and I greatly fear that the freedom of newspapers will be curtailed.
Here’s the extraordinary thing. As a result of the quirks of our first-past-the post electoral system, a Labour supermajority of hundreds of seats could be achieved with the party winning a smaller share of the popular vote than the Tories did in 2019, when they had a majority of 80 seats.
First-past-the-post has given this country political stability for many decades but on this occasion, principally because of the emergence of Reform UK, it threatens to deliver a grotesquely disproportionate and undeserved victory to Labour.
According to one projection model by the Financial Times, the party is on course to win roughly 72 per cent of the seats with about 42 per cent of the vote. In 2019, the Tories won 56 per cent of the seats with 43.6 per cent of the vote.
It follows that voters who fear a Labour one-party state, and the radical transformation of Britain I have tried to describe, should use our electoral system shrewdly. It is what Liberal Democrat and Labour voters have been doing in their own cause for years.
In many seats, where Labour enjoys unassailable leads over the Tories, there is nothing that can be done. But, as this special supplement illustrates, there are dozens of seats where Labour and the Tories are neck-and-neck. The Conservatives would win these if a significant proportion of those intending to vote Reform UK were to switch to them.
For example, a poll by More in Common suggested that Labour will win a landslide majority of 162, with the number of Conservative seats slashed by more than half to 155. But it found there were 96 seats in which Labour and the Tories were within five points of each other. If the Tories won all of them, their total number of seats would jump to 203, reducing Sir Keir’s majority.
In some constituencies the Tories would expect to beat Labour but may not do so because of the Reform vote. Polls suggest that in Central Devon Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride is a whisker ahead of his Labour opponent. He could lose because of Reform.
About 90 per cent of prospective Reform voters are thought to be former Tories. Some of them detest their old party. But shouldn’t the prospect of Labour one-party rule be far more distasteful to them than backing the Conservatives?
There are also Tory-held seats where Reform threatens to hand victory to the Lib Dems or SNP. In Arundel and South Downs, Science minister Andrew Griffith has the Lib Dem candidate breathing down his neck. He will be safe if enough would-be Reform voters come over to him.
Reform has begun to wobble in the polls after ‘Putin-friendly comments’ from party leader Nigel Farage, pictured at a rally on Thursday
Of course, it’s not just prospective Reform voters who can save the Tories from annihilation, and ward off a Labour landslide. According to a poll in yesterday’s Mail, about one in ten voters are undecided. They too could choose to defend the Conservative Party against a wipeout.
But it is those thinking of voting Reform who offer the best hope to the Tories. They should fear unchecked Labour rule as much as any of us. As mainly Brexit voters, they should grasp that Labour intends to steer this country slowly and gently back into the maw of Brussels. If the party were to win a second term, the process would be complete.
In recent days, Reform has begun to wobble in the polls. It was damaged by Nigel Farage’s Putin-friendly comments. A number of Reform candidates and backers have been revealed as oddballs or extremists, the most recent being the volunteer who called the Prime Minister a ‘f****** P***’, after advocating shooting those arriving by small boats.
Reform UK is not a party in the normal sense of the word. It is a collection of individuals, some of them not at all wholesome, assembled without much care or thought, and hitched to a make-believe manifesto thrown together in a hurry.
More to the point, even if it gains more votes than the Lib Dems, Reform is unlikely, because of the oddities of the first-past-the-post system, to win more than a handful of constituencies. It can enfeeble the Tories by depriving them of enough seats to form a plausible opposition, but it won’t be able to be an opposition itself.
Should Labour romp home with a supermajority, there’ll be no opposition in this country. The centre-Right would take years to recover. However unpopular Sir Keir Starmer may be, however incompetent, however disrespectful of our history, Labour could rule for a generation.
Those who fear such an outcome should study this supplement carefully. By the judicious exercise of your vote, you might still be able to save your country.
