The sky above the chalk cliffs of East Kent is enormous.
The villages above the white cliffs, with their brick and flint houses and churches with low spires, are small, conservative places.
East Kent, which I represented in the European Parliament, is wary, bolshie, patriotic and self-reliant.
Yet the voters of Guston, Kingsdown and St Margaret’s-at-Cliffe – three pretty villages close to the beach from which swimmers set off across the Channel – are now represented by a Green councillor.
How did that happen? Well, our first-past-the-post voting system can produce curious results. On Thursday, the Green candidate received 28.8 percent of the vote, the Reform candidate 27.5 percent, the Conservative 17.1 percent. Work 14.6 percent and Restore 10.7 percent. In other words, the three right-wing parties won more than 55 percent of the votes among them, but divided them in such a way that a candidate with half of their combined votes won the district.
What if something similar happened nationwide? What if the main right-wing parties split the vote in such a way that the left got very low turnout, as happened in 2024?
I have no party affiliation. I sit as an independent peer in the House of Lords. In fact, my partisan glands were cauterized when I took over the reins of the Institute for Economic Affairs, an educational charity. I simply observe the irony. Three parties that talk a lot about ‘putting country before party’ do the opposite.
For much of the past half-century, the left-of-center voice in this country has been slightly larger than the right-of-center voice; but it was divided, with Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens all fishing in the same pond, while the Conservatives had a monopoly on the right.
Ingrid Dodd, centre, celebrates the Greens winning the Guston, Kingsdown and St Margaret’s-at-Cliffe by-elections – the first time the party has won there
In the next election, it seems we will likely see the opposite: left-wing voters are piling up behind one party, while the right is disintegrating.
Those Kentish villages are not so different from parts of central England. Indeed, most of the things that happened to England happened to Kent first. Can the right-wing parties learn from the Dover result? Would they be able to reach some sort of accommodation? It’s hard to see it happening. There is bad blood between Restore’s Rupert Lowe and Reform’s Nigel Farage. There is also bad blood between Farage and Kemi Badenoch.
On paper, an agreement, even if unofficial, to contest unwinnable seats would make a huge difference. Reform and the Tories have complementary electoral geography: the former strong in northern England, the industrial Midlands, Wales and the old Red Wall, the latter in the southern counties and suburbs.
Only in a part of eastern England, stretching from Lincolnshire through East Anglia and Essex to Kent and East Sussex, are both the Tories and the Reforms competitive. Almost everywhere else it is clear who would stand aside.
Recovery is more difficult. It is difficult to imagine that party winning more seats than the one it already has: Great Yarmouth, where Lowe is popular as a local MP.
But if the party were to get 5 or 6 percent of the vote, it could swing the outcome in several constituencies. The majority is now lower than ever before, reflecting the multiplicity of parties.
But if Restore contested just two or three seats in Norfolk at the next election, and the Tories and Reform contested about 350 each – pitting a few constituencies against each other in East Anglian and Essex, but throwing themselves aside where it was clear they could not beat the other party – they would almost certainly win a majority.
Parties cannot transfer their voters. Some reform supporters cannot forgive the Tories for what they see as 14 wasted years. Some Tories see Farage as a thug and a megalomaniac. We shouldn’t just add up the poll scores, because many voters would withdraw from anything that looked like a coalition.
The alternative, however, is for all three parties to agree on every seat, producing Dover-style results across the country. Is that really what their supporters want?
- Lord Hannan of Kingsclere is an independent peer and director of the Institute for Economic Affairs.
