Zero Seats: Tories Deserve to be Totally Wiped Out, Say Half of Voters, Including Their Own Supporters

GRIMSBY, ENGLAND - JUNE 12: Britain's Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader, R
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Oliver JJ Lane

The lies on border control and taxation from the UK Conservative party seem to be coming home to roost, with a poll finding a plurality of voters believe the party deserves total electoral oblivion.

The Conservative Party, governing the United Kingdom for the past 14 years, won back-to-back elections with promises of strident border control at voting time, but ultimately forgotten once returned to power.

Such astonishing betrayals, now impossible to hide and increasingly a matter of common conversation in Britain, are reflected in a Public First survey reported by The Daily Telegraph which found that 46 per cent agree the Tories “deserve to lose every seat they have”, an event that would be without parallel in 400 years of British political history.

Worse news still for the Conservatives, who may have wished to believe this was merely bullish talk by Labour supporters and other assorted political opponents, Public First purports to have discovered that the near-half of British voters includes 24 per cent of people who voted for the Conservatives at the last national election in 2019.

Just 35 per cent disagreed with the notion that the Conservatives “deserve to lose every seat”, and 19 per cent said they had no view or didn’t know. Apparently really trying to ascertain how serious the public is about this absolutist position, the pollster also asked whether respondents believed the Tories should actually come out of the election with no seats, rather than just deserve it if it happened to occur, and 36 per cent agreed.

Lose all seats is the plurality position in every age group except the over 65s. The Conservatives can take some comfort, though, given the polling discovered three per cent of hardcore devotees, who believed the party would emerge from next month’s general election with a “large majority”.

The Conservative Party has gotten itself into an apparently unsolvable quandary regarding its position with the voting British public. While it is not unusual for long-lived governments to suffer from public apathy and a general feeling of a need for change for change’s sake, the degree to which the public now appears aware they have been treated with contempt seems to be a first-ever in British electoral history.

It is a particularly impressive feat given just five years ago, in 2019, the party won a historic majority under Boris Johnson. But two Prime Ministers and three lockdowns later and the shine has evidently worn off. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage declaring the vote to be “the immigration election” — pinpointing with accuracy the great Conservative weakness — is grinding the party towards zero.

The key issue is that the Conservative Party won the 2010, 2015, and 2017 elections on the promise to reduce net migration to “the tens of thousands”, a clear signal to voters they understood their concerns on border control and demographic change and intended to act. Yet, 14 years later arrivals have surged to historic levels, and despite paternalistic promises open borders against the wishes of voters were essential to grow the economy, this evidently hasn’t happened.

The simple fact remains that there appears to have developed a very strong impression among the public that the Conservatives didn’t just change their mind after manifesto-promise time, but really never intended to deliver in the first place. It’s easy where this might come from. Indeed, as previously reported:

As things stand, the population of the UK will soar by 10 per cent by 2036. Of the 6.6 million new people in that period, half a million will be natural growth — having more people born than die — while the remaining six million will come as a result of international migration.

That this is government policy is particularly consequential because it is precisely the opposite of what the governing Conservatives promised to deliver for many years. Elections were fought and won on the promise of reducing migration “to the tens of thousands” a year — instead, it is now a million more people every 18 months.

It was impossible to keep this promise, the government said, because growing the economy is the most important thing and overrules other considerations. Fair enough, you may say: Chancellor (Finance Minister) George Osborne expressed this in his infamous words back in 2017, when in a mask-slip moment he revealed top Conservatives never planned to follow through with cutting immigration in the first place. They just kept these feelings to themselves at election time. He said:

“[N]one of [the Cabinet’s] senior members supports the pledge in private and all would be glad to see the back of something that has caused the Conservative Party such public grief… The damage to the economy from seriously reducing work visas was judged too severe by an expert migration committee; the impact on community relations of further limiting family reunion visas was seen as unpalatable; and few thought we were taking in too many refugees.”

The present chancellor Jeremy Hunt has been perfectly clear that this is also where his feelings lie. In 2022 he told the BBC that migration has a “very positive” effect on the economy and so was here to stay. Pro-government newspaper The Telegraph said of his position then that: “Jeremy Hunt is relying on a surge in net migration to more than 200,000 people per year to help deliver economic growth … The increase in migrant labour will help to buttress Britain’s economy as Mr Hunt imposes higher taxes on earnings, jobs and investment.”

Last year, Hunt claimed the government has “a plan to remove the barriers to stop people working in the UK”, and that this is what people who voted for Brexit truly wanted. There were angry noises about this from Brexiteers at the time, but still, the juggernaut rolled on.

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