The House | Tory supporters willing to vote Labour are an overlooked problem for Farage

4 min read14 min

Governments rarely increase their vote share in by-elections. Turnout is usually well below that of a general election, and the stakes are lower. The Makerfield by-election was by all metrics unusual. Commentators speak of voters ‘sending a message’ to an incumbent government through the by-election ballot box. In Makerfield, the message they wished to send seems to be that they were happy to have Andy Burnham not only as their representative, but to effect change in the country’s leadership.

In local elections held in the Makerfield area just a few weeks ago, Reform had won half of the votes cast, and the seat would be high on any target list for the party at a general election (Makerfield is 29th on a list of the most marginal seats where Reform was in second place in 2024). But on Thursday, the party managed only a small increase on its 2024 share – a disappointing result when Reform’s national polling has doubled in the intervening period.

Reform was quick to suggest that the Burnham campaign had capitalised precisely on the ‘anti-Starmer’ sentiment that it had mobilised effectively in the local elections. Polling from Convergent Opinion for Persuasion UK suggests that Reform retained most of its 2024 voters and also won over around 1 in 10 2024 Labour voters.

But it faced two issues that resulted in its performance being below expectations.

Firstly, for the first time, Reform faced a significant challenge on its ‘right’. The newly formed Restore Britain, led by ex-Reform MP Rupert Lowe and whose key policy is the deportation of immigrants, contested its first election outside of Lowe’s home turf in Great Yarmouth.

It was able to secure almost 7 per cent of the vote, drawn almost exclusively from those who had previously voted for Reform. Not sufficient in this instance to cast them as ‘spoilers’, the combined Reform plus Restore vote would still be 10 percentage points short of that won by Labour, but a sign that it could cause problems for Reform where the margins are tighter.

That they [Tory voters] might be willing to vote for Labour in some circumstances is an important yet overlooked factor in an evolving party system

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A second – and possibly more important – factor for the prospects of Reform at a general election is that it was unable to gobble up the Conservative vote in its entirety.

Polling suggests around half of the 2024 Conservative vote went to Reform on Thursday, but a small group of Conservative voters were willing to vote for Labour. Data from the British Election Study immediately after the 2024 election showed that around 15 per cent of those who had voted Tory would ‘vote against’ Reform. That they might be willing to vote for Labour in some circumstances is an important yet overlooked factor in an evolving party system.

Analyses of contests at all levels since 2024 have highlighted a ‘block’ structure to voting: Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party forming a ‘left’ block, and the Conservatives and Reform on the ‘right’.

Those in the ‘left’ block, veterans of tactical voting campaigns, have been comfortable moving between these parties to deny Reform high-profile victories in key by-elections such as Caerphilly and Gorton & Denton. This was again evident in Makerfield, with both the Lib Dem and Green shares of the vote collapsing and costing the parties their deposit.

However, for the time being, the ‘right’ block remains less willing to consolidate around a single party.

And key to the shape of future contests is what happens to the remaining Conservative vote – if it continues to fragment along multiple lines, the smaller fragments (those willing to vote Labour, Lib Dem, Green or simply stay home) will be crucial in shaping the competition between ‘blocks’.

Critically, Reform now faces precisely the same sort of dilemma the Conservatives and Labour have wrestled with in a multi-party system: how to hold on to voters on one flank without losing them on the other. Perhaps an even more thorny problem for a party unable to lean into a unifying position on economic issues.

Often, the significance of a by-election for the direction of politics is only obvious with hindsight. Chesham & Amersham on a similar June day in 2021, revealed key trends in anti-Conservative voting that proved critical to the 2024 election.

While the significance of Makerfield may not need the benefit of hindsight, the lesson to be learned may be that in multi-party politics, there are no easy answers for any political party with ambitions to form a majority government.   

Paula Surridge is deputy director at UK in a Changing Europe