The Fragility of Left-Wing Majorities
In Britain, the Right has only failed when it's tried to govern from the Centre
The history of British politics teaches an obvious lesson often missed.
Since the emergence of mass suffrage in the 1880s, the British public will consistently vote for a right-wing party that governs from the right, and will never sustain a left-wing party which governs from the left.
Prior to 1997, there had only been three general elections which produced landslide - or even double-digit - left-wing majorities: 1906, 1945, 1966. Each of these majorities produced governments which embarked on a series of landmark reforms. In every case these majorities immediately disappeared at the following election. By contrast, the Conservative Party has consistently achieved what no left-wing leader except Blair ever managed: repeated majorities in consecutive elections, in which their programme of government has been endorsed.
In a two-party system, winning a general election is therefore not the challenge: the challenge is to sustain that majority throughout subsequent elections, establishing your party as the natural party of government for a generation. With the sole exception of Tony Blair, no left-wing leader has ever managed to do this.
The Conservative Party has been the natural party of government since the extension of the franchise following the Third Reform Act (1884). From 1886-1906 the Conservative & Unionist alliance governed from the right and won elections consistently: in each election emerging as the party with the most votes and seats. In 1906, following the Boer War, the tariff reform split, and fatigue from twenty years of almost-uninterrupted Tory rule, Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberal Party achieved the first of the great left-wing majorities. On coming to power, the Liberals embarked upon a series of huge social reforms: granting immunity to trade unions, introducing a state pension, unemployment insurance, health insurance, and the earliest attempts (in the 1909 “People’s Budget”) to engage in a redistributive fiscal policy.
None of these reforms had been included in their 1906 manifesto. Despite the high esteem in which this government has been held by historians, the British public immediately repudiated this government once they got the chance. By 1910, just four years later, voters had abandoned the Liberal Party, and their majority disappeared.
This pattern has been repeated ever since. Throughout the 20s and 30s, the Conservatives consistently won elections: two brief Labour minority governments were immediately repudiated. The Conservatives won more votes in every single election between 1886 and 1935 with the sole exception of 1906.
After two decades of Conservative dominance, hostility to the “Guilty Men” of Munich produced the second of the great left-wing majorities. Much like in 1906, this left-wing majority embarked on widespread reforms held in high esteem by historians, before being immediately rejected at the ballot box by the voters who supposedly benefitted from them. Attlee’s majority fell from 146 to 5 in 1950, before disappearing altogether the following year. By contrast with Attlee’s Labour - held up by historians as one of the greatest governments in history - the Conservatives in the 1950s were able to improve their majorities in successive general elections.
The third great left-wing majority of 1966 followed the same blueprint as the previous two. Voters grew bored with a decade and a half of Tory rule and voted in a Labour Party which embarked on a series of radical social reforms unmentioned in their manifesto. The general public’s reaction to this was to abandon Labour at the 1970 election.
Ted Heath was the first Conservative leader to query this basic axiom of British politics. Under his leadership, the Conservatives made the fatal error of believing that electoral success relied on appealing to the centre ground. For the first time in the Conservative Party’s history, it struggled to win and sustain general election majorities. Only after the twin defeats of 1974 did the Conservative Party revert to a rightwing platform under Margaret Thatcher, enabling them to win four general elections on the bounce - the only time this has been achieved since the Napoleonic Wars.
The fourth great left-wing landslide would be the exception which proves the rule. Tony Blair was only able to win his majority in 1997 by repudiating traditional left-wing economics: discarding Clause IV; disavowing nationalisations; denying tax increases - and by having the good fortune to arrive after Major’s simultaneous move to the centre. His ability to sustain a majority over successive elections came not from an electorate that voted for the left, but from the fact that he had lurched his party rightwards. Blair inherited a strong economy, and was able to sustain himself in office through extensive ‘off the books’ funding of schools and hospitals which enabled him to improve public services without raising taxes: these were for future generations to pay. He was therefore able to deliver the alleged benefits of a left-wing government without having to alienate the country through the taxes necessary to deliver these programmes.
Leaders of the Conservative Party mistook the anomalous Blair years as heralding a new age of British politics. Instead of reflecting on the previous century of electoral history and recognising the obvious truth that the country votes for (and sustains) right-wing parties, Conservative politicians convinced themselves that the only way to return to office was by repudiating their core beliefs and heading to the centre ground. Conservative leaders drew an analogy with their opponents. They argued that the Labour Party after 1979 had failed because they appealed to their base - moving to the left under Michael Foot - and had only been able to return to office by rejecting their core beliefs and moving to the centre. Conservative modernisers argued that their party had done the same thing in 2001, appealing to their base and moving to the right under William Hague. Much like Blair’s ‘Clause IV moment’, they argued that the Conservatives needed a similar renunciation of their core doctrines and a movement towards the centre ground in order to appeal to the widest selection of voters and return to office. What the modernisers failed to appreciate was that Tony Blair’s movement towards the centre worked because it was a movement towards the right, where the electorate typically sit. By contrast, when the Conservative Party attempted to move towards the centre, they moved to the left, and therefore further away from the electorate.
The movement to the centre ground under David Cameron was similar to that under Ted Heath, and in both instances the party under these leaders struggled to win or sustain a majority. Unlike Heath, however, the effect of Cameron's leadership has been much more corrosive and long-term. Traditional conservative approaches to law and order, balanced budgets, and the family were jettisoned. Instead the focus shifted to environmentalism, foreign aid, social liberalism, and rehabilitative justice. Each of these drew the party further away from the electorate.
Worse still, Cameron compounded this liberalisation through the use of an ‘A’ list to fundamentally alter the character of the parliamentary party. When he returned to office as Foreign Secretary in 2023, it was widely commented upon that he seemed intellectually, verbally, and presentationally head and shoulders above his Cabinet colleagues. Whilst true, this ignored the fact that the condition of the Conservative front bench was largely the result of his electoral engineering. The contrast between Cameron’s suave competence and Liz Truss’ evident deficiencies is striking; but it was Cameron who accelerated her career by promoting her through the ‘A’ list in the first place. Other notable exhibits of his attempt to secure premiere talent for the party included Anna Soubry, Louise Bagshawe, Amber Rudd, Gavin Barwell, Margot James, and Nick Boles. When Sayeeda Warsi failed to get elected she was given a peerage and placed into the House of Lords. These people became the face of 2010s conservatism, and came to define the character of the Conservative Party.
Because Cameron misunderstood that the British electorate votes for and sustains right-wing governments in the short and long term, he attempted to capture and retain office by appealing to an alleged centre ground of liberalism. He was able to return to office, but only by alienating huge numbers of core supporters. For two decades, a large and inherently conservative demographic of voters have not been represented by either parliamentary party. Many have continued to vote dutifully for the Conservatives, who have taken their votes for granted safe in the knowledge that the prospect of a Labour government would retain their loyalty. Many others have increasingly stayed at home on election day, or cast a protest vote for one of Nigel Farage’s carousel of political parties.
Cameron and his successors endorsed all the core tenets of Blairite social liberalism (mass immigration, diluted penal policies, environmentalism, family breakdown) and extended them further than Labour ever had. Extended over two decades, this has slowly fractured the conservative vote, as the public have been offered a choice between a diluted liberal toryism or a Faragist protest party.
The consequence is that after a decade and a half of being abandoned by the party ostensibly meant to represent their interest, voters have abandoned them in turn. The “natural party of government” for 111 years is now practically unelectable. The paradox is that it is precisely because the country is inherently right-wing that Keir Starmer has achieved the fifth of the great left-wing majorities in British history: Starmer’s majority was achieved with fewer than 10 million votes (fewer even than Corbyn in 2017 or 2019) - the lowest number of votes to produce a majority in 100 years. This huge left-wing majority was produced simply because voters who seek to support a right-wing government were split between loyalty to the Tories, giving their vote to Farage’s protest party, or staying at home and giving up on the whole thing entirely. Starmer’s majority owes everything to the Conservative Party’s mistaken idea that voters wish for them to move to the left.
Only right wing political parties can win and sustain majorities in Britain. As the Conservative Party has moved to the left, they’ve been unable to do either of these things. The only significant majority the Conservatives have won since the Major years was as a result of Boris Johnson’s immense (and unearned) reputation for being right-wing. Instead, they were subjected to the largest immigration the country had ever seen, compounded by an economy stifled by a low-growth Net Zero agenda. The reality of his fundamentally liberal politics caused support for the party to collapse. Since the 2024 General Election, support for Reform - Britain’s most right-wing mainstream party - has only grown. In some national opinion polls, the Conservative Party - the most successful party in history - is now polling fourth.
The country will vote and sustain right wing parties if they are given the option. Over the course of a century the Conservatives were the natural party of government. On the three occasions when the left won a majority, they immediately lost the next election. Tony Blair was only able to buck this trend by abandoning left wing economics and moving to the centre. Rather than recognising that this is a relevant fact about the left in Britain, the Conservatives, rattled by Blair’s unprecedented success, believed that this same analysis applied to the right. They spent twenty years moving to the centre whilst failing to achieve the success that came so naturally to Conservative leaders since the time of Salisbury.
Our politics is a paradox: there has never been more support for explicitly right-wing solutions, nor more recognition that the liberal policies of the previous 60 years - on crime, immigration, family policy, welfare, and schooling - have utterly failed. This situation has developed precisely during the period in which the Conservative Party threw themselves behind this entire liberal agenda.
Britain may be locked - unwillingly - into a period of sustained left-wing government, simply through the inability of the political right to unite and offer a credible alternative. Starmer’s majority may be as fragile as those in 1906 or 1966; but unless a unified right-wing opposition emerges it might be as long lasting - and as damaging - as Blair’s.
This is outside the scope of this essay, but what do you make of the fact that Britain had a 2-Party system before it had universal suffrage?
The same is true for America, which I mention only because both also have First-Past-the-Post.
Could we be entering into a multi-party dynamic under FPTP?