(CN) — Results released Friday morning reveal the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party suffered a pair of crushing special election losses.
The Labour and Liberal Democrat parties overturned large Conservative majorities to claim victory at the polls, in a strong indication that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government is headed for a decisive defeat in the country’s next general election.
In the Yorkshire constituency of Selby and Ainsty, Labour reversed a prior 20,000-vote majority to claim a comfortable victory, making 25-year old Keir Mather the youngest British member of Parliament. The seat had been Conservative since it was created and is indicative of the type of constituency the party would need to retain to remain in government. Mather described his new job as “the privilege of my life,” adding that “we have rewritten the rules on where Labour can win.”
“The people of Selby and Ainsty have sent a clear message,” he continued. “For too long, Conservatives up here and in Westminster have failed us, and today that changes.”
Meanwhile, in southwest England, the Liberal Democrats overcame a similarly-sized Conservative majority to claim victory in the constituency of Somerton and Frome. Party leader Ed Davey was jubilant as results came through, telling reporters that “the people of Somerton and Frome have spoken for the rest of the country who are fed up with Rishi Sunak’s out-of-touch Conservative government.”
Both results suggest that seats previously seen as safe for the Conservative Party are now vulnerable. However, the results were not quite as bad as some had feared, with the party holding on in a third contest in Uxbridge and South Ruislip – the ex-constituency of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who resigned from Parliament last month. The narrow result in the west London suburb saw the Conservatives retain the seat by just 495 votes over Labour, giving Sunak some reason to be cheerful.
Visiting the constituency after the result was announced, Sunak emphasized that “nobody expected us to win here,” adding: “Westminster has been acting like the next election is a done deal, the Labour Party has been acting like its a done deal, but the people of Uxbridge just told all of them that it’s not.”
However, despite the positive outcome in Uxbridge, the results broadly support current polling, which puts the Conservatives more than 20 percentage points behind the opposition Labour Party. The outcome strengthens the perception that the governing party is on course for a historic landslide defeat in the country's next general election, which must be held by January 2025.
The Conservative Party has won four successive general elections since they re-entered government in 2010, including securing their biggest parliamentary majority since 1987 in the last election in 2019. The party continued to ride high in polling until a series of scandals in late 2021 and 2022, which eventually toppled Johnson.
However, it was his successor, Liz Truss, who did lasting damage to the party’s reputation. Truss’s attempt to force through billions in tax cuts led to a financial crisis that caused mortgage rates to spike — an outcome anathema to homeowners, the party’s core base of support. Truss was forced to reverse her polices and resign in October 2022 after only 44 days in office, but mortgage rates have continued to climb ever since.
Despite Sunak’s more managerial approach to the job, he has struggled to regain the party’s reputation for economic competence or reverse the perception of the government as dishonest and chaotic. With inflationary pressure continuing to pound the British economy, much of the poll bounce that Sunak received when he first entered office has since eroded, and doubts over whether he can perform a miraculous electoral turnaround are growing.
The primary beneficiary of the crisis-ridden government has been the opposition Labour Party, led by Keir Starmer. Starmer is actively seeking to emulate the approach of Tony Blair, whose 1997 landslide victory delivered the largest parliamentary majority in post-war Britain. In a public discussion between Blair and Starmer earlier this week, both sought to emphasize the similarity of their approaches, prioritizing electoral performance over ideology.
However, the failure to capture Uxbridge may worry some at Labour headquarters. The party was widely expected to take the seat, which had been a target constituency in the previous two elections. To an extent, local factors can explain the Conservative victory, with the party focusing their campaign on opposition to an unpopular traffic congestion fee being introduced by the Labour-led local government.
But concerns about Starmer’s approach are also growing within the Labour Party, as he continues to distance himself from promises he made during his leadership campaign. Having pledged to maintain the high-spending policy platform of his left-wing predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, during his bid for party leader, Starmer has since transformed into a staunch fiscal conservative and sought to lower expectations of what Labour will be able to achieve in office.
Divisions in Labour emerged in the run-up to the special elections, after Starmer pledged to maintain strict limits on child benefits — a policy introduced by the Conservatives that is deeply unpopular within his party.
Nevertheless, Labour is in a far stronger position than their opponents as the electoral term approaches what is likely to be its final year. Sunak’s shaky inheritance from his turbulent prime ministerial predecessors means he has limited options to try and regain public support.
On the economic side, the need to demonstrate fiscal discipline following the Truss debacle means there is little room for any spending increases or tax cuts to alleviate falling living standards across the U.K. Meanwhile, politically, Sunak does not appear able to reconstruct the electoral coalition of working class northern voters and middle class southern voters that was built by Johnson. His fiscally conservative policies are alienating the former, while the latter are put off by his administration's more socially authoritarian policy platform.
The Conservatives are expected to defend two more seats in special elections in the coming months.
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