Could the Tories experience a Canadian style wipeout?

in #uk4 months ago

In the 1993 Canadian Federal Election, the ruling Canadian Conservative party went from 156 seats to just 2 seats.

With opinion polls looking dire for UK Tories, some pundits are excitedly predicting the same happens here.

One big difference is that the Canadian Conservatives lost votes to a party on their right; Reform went from 1 seat to 52 with 18.69% of the vote.

You can see why the Brexit Party renamed themselves Reform UK - they're hoping to pull off the same feat. Though they may have made a mistake changing the name. The Brexit Party had huge name recognition, but many former Brexit Party voters have no idea who or what "Reform" is, especially as there are lots of other small parties with similar names, such as "Reclaim" and "Rejoin".

In order to reduce the Canadian Conservatives to 2 seats, Reform had to outpoll them - they got 18.69% to the Canadian Conservatives' 16.04%.

In the UK, as long as Reform are in single digits, they are no more threat to the Tories than UKIP were.