Never before has the main opposition party taken six seats from the Government during a term, and never before has the party in power lost ten, but the United Kingdom is experiencing a time of records: the highest taxes in seventy years, the deepest abrupt change in the quality of life, six million people of working age who live on subsidies, seven and a half million on waiting lists for public health operations, more than 750,000 immigrants a year…
Labor has won – as expected – the vacant seats of Wellingborough and Kingswood from the Conservatives, despite these being two traditionally Tory constituencies and where they enjoyed very substantial majorities. Of course, with a very low participation rate (around 35%) and growing support (13%) for Reform, the far-right eurosceptic party whose spiritual leader is Nigel Farage.
Different considerations come into play in by-elections than in national ones, but it is still a very clear warning from the electorate to the Conservative Party. If the Kingswood result were repeated when the country as a whole goes to the polls, its presence in the House of Commons would be reduced from the 349 seats it currently has to just 60. And if they were similar to those in Wellingboroug, the massacre It would be so apocalyptic that it would only have four deputies left, an extinction similar to that experienced by the Canadian right in 1993 and which is the subject of study in political science manuals.
The results, and the growing awareness that a clear general election defeat (whether in the autumn or spring) is inevitable, immediately sparked calls to “unite the right” (the Tories and Reform), with the intention to reconstruct, even half, the coalition that brought Boris Johnson to power in 2019 with an absolute majority. Although then the illusion of Brexit amalgamated the Eurosceptic bloc and now it is a reality, and it is also seen as a failure that has increased immigration and reduced trade and quality of life.
This union of the right would be forged around a program of drastic reduction of immigration – abandoning the European Convention on Human Rights and the Convention on Refugees –, a decrease in taxes (even though the country is in recession and there is no money), n and a radical cut in subsidies, the welfare state and funds dedicated to environmental policies such as decarbonization by 2050. But the centrist conservative bloc has warned that it would constitute a recipe for disaster and, instead of adding, the Tories would remain at the level of support that Reform currently has.
The victory in Kingswood, however, has had a bittersweet aftertaste for Labor, because it was by a lower margin than in the last by-election due to criticism of anti-Semitism in recent days.
