In an 'increasingly socially liberal' UK, are Tories headed for the political wilderness?

With just days to go before snap parliamentary elections here in France, President Emmanuel Macron has warned that the policies of his far right and hard left rivals could lead to civil war. Polls published over the weekend suggest that Macron Centrist will finish in 3rd place behind both Marine Le Pen's National Rally party and a hastily assembled left wing alliance. Macron called the election after the far right secured a landslide in European elections, a shock move that's increasingly likely to see him forced to share power with the Prime Minister from an opposing party. The UK is heading to the polls in just nine days time, an election that looks poised to deliver the opposition Labour Party out of power for 15 years, the second largest majority in Parliament since the end of World War Two. Well, to discuss those UK elections, we can bring in Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University, London. Thank you very much indeed for being with us here on France 24 today. Now the latest polls suggest that the ruling Conservatives are polling at just 20%, with Labour at around 40%. Are we looking at a decimation of the Tory party as we know it? Decimation might not be a bad word. Certainly if we look at the balance of the polls, it looks as if the Conservatives will end up with nearer to 100 seats than 200 seats, and even 200 seats would be a bad defeat. So yes, it's looking very, very dark for them. Now a number of the polls we saw this week suggest that the Conservatives and now in a close battle with Reform UK, headed up by Nigel Farage for 2nd place. To what extent has Reform stolen support from the Conservatives here? Well, in as much as Reform has really risen in the polls since Nigel Farage declared that he was coming back to lead it, that rise does seem to be accounted for mainly by people who voted Conservative back in 2019. So I'm absolutely sure that but for Reform, the Conservatives would probably be nearer perhaps 25% than 20%. But even 25% would be a pretty terrible result. It's important, of course, that people remember that Reform may win fairly large vote share. Who knows? It may even beat the Conservatives, although I doubt that. But it won't win many seats because of our first past the post system. It's likely only to win a handful of seats even if it touches near to 20% on Election Day. And do we have any idea about the extent to which Reform has stolen votes from Labour? Yes, we do in as much as you can poll that it looks as if it's maybe nibbled at the Labour vote at the edges. But any decline in the Labour vote has actually not been due to reform, but has been due to the Liberal Democrats, this third party, the more centrist party. But that actually isn't that much of a problem for Labour because it suggests that there's going to be a lot of tactical anti Tory voting. So where Labour supporters live in places that Labour can't hope to win in, they're switching across to the Liberal Democrats in order to get rid of the Conservatives. So that's no comfort for the Conservatives either. Now, a poll published in the Financial Times, I think it's today or yesterday, indicated that the Conservatives have lost or may have lost up to 1/3 of voters who'd planned to go back to the party just four months ago. What went so wrong in just four months? Well, this is the campaign in which everything that could go wrong has gone wrong really for Rishi Sunak. He's made all sorts of gaffes. He's obviously coping at the moment with this scandal about people betting on the announcement of the election. It's also, to be honest, a problem of the fundamentals. The economy has not recovered in the way that he promised it would. Growth is there, but you know, it's not very impressive. The National Health Service is still in crisis. Small boats are still coming across the channel. So all the pledges that he made when he first became Prime Minister really haven't been fulfilled. So although the campaign has obviously got something to do with it, it's actually those long term problems I think that they've done for the government. And he touched on it just there. This betting scandal whereby several party officials and candidates even are being investigated for allegedly betting on the date of the UK general election before it was announced. Just how damaging is that particular scandal? Well, very. There's been some very interesting polling actually on that. And it shows that it really has cut through to people. There are three things in this campaign that do seem to have cut through that have hurt the government. The first was Rishi Sunak leaving the D-Day commemorations early. The second was his admission in an interview that he'd had to deprive childhood by not being able to get digital or cable TV. And the third one, is this what people are calling betting Gate, so or Gamblegate, it really does seem to have cut through to the public. I think it's one of those stories that's actually quite easy to understand. And it plays into this narrative that for the government anyway and for the Conservatives, it's one rule for them and one rule for the rest of us. And of course that was what hurt them during party Gate as well. Nigel Farage, the leader of course, of Britain's anti Immigration Reform Party over the weekend faced very strong criticism in the press and also from his political rivals for saying that the West had provoked Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Any sign that those comments have dented his popularity? Well, it might be too early for polling to pick that up. We might see that in the next few days. Certainly it's something that the Conservatives are really pressing him on quite understandably. And he's not just getting pressure actually from Conservative sources, it's also military sources. And if you like the foreign policy and security establishment in the UK, who have absolutely no doubt that those remarks are in some ways ridiculous and perhaps give comfort to Vladimir Putin. And you'd have to say that, of course, Nigel Farage has got form on this. He's long been an admirer, as he says, of Putin as an operator. Even if he says, and I find it quite hard not to laugh here, he doesn't think much of him personally. So I, I do think that those remarks may put some voters off because there is a very, very strong support in the UK for Ukraine's battle against Russia. And Putin is certainly not someone who many Brits admire. Now Sir Kier Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party, does very much look poised to become the country's next Prime Minister, the electorate seemingly getting over Starmer's somewhat detached demeanour. Or has that rather cool exterior possibly worked in his favour here? I think it may have done. I mean, we have to remember that certainly since 2016 we've been through a lot of political turmoil in this country. We've been through so many prime ministers. You know, politics has been a real roller coaster. And there may be an appetite for a rather calmer and some would even say slightly more boring regime under Keir Starmer, who is definitely, as you say, more of a kind of safe pair of hands politician than he is an inspiring or charismatic 1. So it could be that, you know, the hour coming with the man now we are of course just days away from EU KS general election. What do you think it would have to take for the Tories to secure more than one in five votes as it's currently the, the, the, the picture on the ground? To be honest, I think we would have to see Keir Starmer being indicted for a criminal offence at this stage. I mean, I think it really, it's probably all over for the Conservatives now. I think we're talking really about the extent of their defeat rather than whether there will be a defeat. So I think it's unlikely, given the fundamentals, given how people regard Rishi Sunak and given as we've already talked about reform eating into the Conservatives vote, that actually the Conservatives are really heading for a pretty bad defeat. And if indeed we do see, as you tell it, a pretty bad defeat, which I think is possibly putting it lightly when you take into consideration what we're seeing in the polls, what does the future look like for the Conservative Party? Well, this is the question that everybody is debating now. I mean, if you look back at 1997, which was also a bad defeat for the Conservatives, what they tend to do is go into denial mode and go into double down mode. So instead of really stepping back and taking a good hard long look at what went wrong for them, they will almost certainly go straight into a leadership election. They will almost certainly, given the character of the membership which has the final say on that leadership selection, pick someone who is similarly, if you like, Thatcherite to Rishi Sunak but even more of a culture warrior and go down that route. And I'm afraid in part because they worry about Nigel Farage and the impact that he's had on their vote. I'm just not sure whether that is the right route for a Conservative Party in a country that is becoming increasingly socially liberal over time and to be honest, now feels that perhaps the state needs to be doing a little bit more rather than a little bit less for people. Of course, it depends partly on the performance of the Labour government and whether the Labour government can deliver to some of the expectations that it's created. But if 1997 to 2005 is anything to go by, the Conservatives are out of power perhaps for quite some time. Tim Bale, thank you so much for taking the time to speak to us here on France 24 today. Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, thank you.