David McKee works in financial services.
Protest votes are a common feature of by-elections. The voters choose to ignore Labour or the Conservatives and vote for an individual or party that has no chance at all of forming the next government. The 2024 general election was extraordinary, with less than 60 per cent of the votes cast were for either of the two main parties.
Should we be surprised? Many did not believe a word uttered by Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer and went to the polls convinced that the election would change very little. These are by-election conditions. The general election was 650 by-elections, held simultaneously. This would explain why the features often associated with by-elections were present: the multitude of candidates, the low turnout, tactical voting, the focus on local issues, the handful of unexpected upsets, and the plethora of protest votes.
We use the term ‘protest votes’ in a lazy and formulaic way, as though all protest votes had the same motivation. But do they? The aim here is to challenge that assumption. I will look at protest votes as they were grouped in the 2024 general election. Based on my conclusions, I will suggest how we Conservatives should respond.
Liberal Democrats
The USP of the LibDems is that they are nice people, unsullied by the grubby compromises of office. Nine years after they were last in power, this is true, except for their leader. Ed Davey’s involvement with the post office scandal was nicely buried under his portrayal as a loving father, and being the kind of good sport who does not mind looking ridiculous when doing silly things.
The LibDems love by-elections. They are practised at articulating middle-class discontent and focusing on local issues – ‘pavement politics’. In the election, they were in their element, and they cleaned up. They appeal to voters whose problems are niggling rather than crushing. They have nothing to say to the hard-pressed masses in our big cities, as their vote in the London mayoral election exemplified. They reward the voter with a feeling of virtue: they are the feelgood protest vote.
Reform UK
Reform does not aim its message at the comfortable middle class. It articulates the anger of those who feel ignored by the other parties. These are the left-behinds and, increasingly, young people. This articulation does not have to make much sense, and it does not need to produce workable solutions. It just has to resonate. The effect is reinforced by a subtle reference to Britain in the past when men wore a collar and tie in public.
Greens
The Greens are sometimes compared to a watermelon: green on the outside, red inside. In the election, they portrayed themselves as true socialists in the urban seats, outflanking Labour. In the rural seats, they emphasised environmentalism. For example, in North Herefordshire, they protested effectively against the pollution of the River Wye. They are the shapeshifter protest vote: they have a shamanic ability to alter their appearance to the voting public, as the situation requires. Gaza? Trans rights? Protecting the environment? They are flexible enough.
Muslim Vote
This covers a rag-bag of protest votes: George Galloway’s Workers Party, Jeremy Corbyn’s fratricidal tussle with Labour, and various independents. What they have in common is they campaign on issues that most interest to Muslim voters (and to those of like mind). Gaza is the current unifying factor, but this faraway conflict is only a mobilising proxy for concerns much closer to home.
Muslim Vote coordinate efforts. What does this eclectic group of campaigners want? Their ambitions are poorly understood. Noisy extremists want to establish a caliphate in Britain, and many non-Muslims believe this. A rather more likely guess is they want an informal state within the state. There, they would be free to impose on their fellow Muslims a recreation of 1950s Pakistan, where women know their place and apostates are punished. (It is important to state that they do not represent all Muslims in Britain.)
Nationalists
It makes sense for nationalists to stand for election in the devolved assemblies of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. There, they have a chance of obtaining power. In Westminster, their only hope of real power is to be the deciding factor in a hung parliament, as the Irish Nationalists were between 1910 and 1918. Instead, unable to demand anything, they are reduced to a plaintive plea for independence: “Please release us, let us go.” Yes, it’s the Engelbert Humperdinck protest vote.
Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland is a rich political subculture, where rivals in the unionist and nationalist camps take turns to be the protest vote against the protest vote. Once, Sinn Fein used to be the protest vote against the SDLP protest vote. Now the roles are reversed. TUV is a protest vote against the DUP, and so on. There is no space here to do this subculture justice, so we must content ourselves to acknowledging its existence.
Abstentions
We don’t normally think of abstentions as a protest vote, but maybe we should. For the very poor, and now for an entire generation of young people, they have learned from bitter experience that democracy does not work for them. The politicians ignore them, so they return the compliment. This is the protest vote of deep despair.
Whither the Conservatives?
Not all these protest votes threaten us Conservatives. The Muslim Vote and Reform UK are, principally, Labour’s problem. The former is embedded in Labour’s strongholds, the latter aims its fire at the party of government. Northern Ireland should be our problem, but we choose to ignore it. That leaves the LibDems, Greens, nationalists and abstentions.
We can establish three principles. First, fighting these protest votes on their terms dooms us to failure. We will never be as nice as the LibDems, as irresponsible as Reform, as opportunistic as the Greens, or as single-issue obsessive as the nationalists. We should be sympathetic to the frustrations that drove the voters to vote the way they did. That is necessary, but insufficient. What will win them over is to play to our strengths. Only we can aim to be a credible alternative government. That gives us an edge lacked by the protest votes.
Second, we should recognise that our USP with the voters is competence. Our value to the electorate is that we get stuff done. Right now, we are in a very poor position. After the last five years of government, we have a lot to live down and apologise for, and a lot of credibilities to re-establish. This will take years of hard work, so the sooner we start, the better.
Third, we should be thinking squarely about the next election in 2029. We should not be aiming for today’s middle ground, making us even more indistinguishable from Labour than we already are; nor should we chase will-o’-the-wisp Reform votes on a one-way trip to the political wilderness. Either course would get us nowhere.
Instead, we should think carefully about where the voters will be in 2029 (assuming Labour makes a hash of its term in office), and aim to get there first. This would be enough to persuade voters to abandon protest votes in favour of a practical programme of government. Then we can welcome our new electoral coalition to its natural home.
The road to 2029
It’s natural and right to look to our past for inspiration. We should consider what Margaret Thatcher did. I don’t mean we should copy Thatcher’s policies. That would be foolish: they were crafted to meet the problems of Britain in the 1970s, a very different creature to the Britain of today. Her significance to us is that she was the last Conservative leader who was good at winning elections.
So, we should evaluate her strategy after the defeat of 1974. Some start with John Hoskyns’ ‘Stepping Stones.” For me, I start with one of Stuart Hall’s most celebrated essays, “The Great Moving Right Show”, first published in Marxism Today in January 1979. Hall was not remotely sympathetic to Thatcherism, but his acute observation of the political scene told us how her strategy succeeded.
Thatcherism was not some ‘levelling-up’-type slogan that was dreamt up overnight. It was a rigorous, long-term project.
First, there was a ruthless determination to slaughter any sacred cows that stood between the Conservatives and power. Second, a coherent set of intellectual arguments was chosen with great care. Third, these arguments were distilled into ideas that could be grasped by the electorate, and disseminated widely in speeches, debates, and op-eds. Fourth, these ideas were sufficiently vigorous and robust to frame the political debate in Britain. Fifth, these ideas resonated with voters who had had enough of failed orthodoxies, and there was enough of these voters to form a viable electoral coalition. And sixth, Thatcher maintained her electoral coalition over some fifteen years by telling a continuous narrative, so the voters could see how the strategy evolved.
Conclusion
The existence of many protest voters presents us with a wonderful opportunity. First, we have to accept that people were not just protesting against the main parties, they were voting for something. We need to be clear about what those somethings were and be sympathetic to the underlying frustrations of the protest voters. If we play to our strengths, we can win the protest voters (plus disillusioned Labour voters) to our side. It will require ruthless determination, a willingness to grasp the scale of Britain’s problems, intellectual curiosity, immensely hard work, and the courage and self-discipline to stick to the chosen strategy.
