The Tories reclaim much of their former support in the patriotic working class.
By John O'Sullivan
National Review Online
Thursday’s local elections in Britain look somewhat less dramatic than people were expecting in the light of national opinion polls showing Theresa May’s Tories literally twice as popular as the Labour Opposition. The BBC summary was: Tories gain eleven councils and 563 seats; Labour lose seven councils and 382 seats; and UKIP retains just one seat nationally.
That looks pretty good for the Tories, very bad for Labour; disappointing for the Liberal Democrats; and terminally bad for UKIP.
For various reasons, however — mainly low turnout — this overall picture is misleading. Though chickens shouldn’t be counted before being hatched, the Tory prospects for June’s general election are even better than they look, which is terrific; Labour’s, very bad but short of terminal; the Lib-Dems’, purgatorial; and UKIP’s, terminal but with an escape clause. Unless all the pundits are wildly wrong — not an impossibility, as we know, but not likely either — the Tories will win a landslide with a three-figure parliamentary majority over all opposition parties. They are on course to be the natural governing party of Britain for the next three elections and two decades.
That’s a massive turnaround from the results of the 2010 election, when the Tories fell short of a majority, and the 2015 election, when they had a small and vulnerable majority. What happened in the meanwhile?
