Donald Trump has remade American politics. Having secured the Republican nomination three times in a row – and on every occasion at an absolute canter – the GOP is now unrecognisable from the party of Bush (both senior and junior), McCain and Romney.
MAGA is not just a slogan – it’s a movement that has brought about a full-blown realignment in US electoral behaviour.
Elon Musk – officially the second most powerful man in the world – has taken quite an interest in affairs on this side of the pond.
How on Earth he finds the time to share his thoughts on X whilst also taking up a major role in the new Trump administration is anyone’s guess. He also has to undertake whatever duties go along with being the world’s richest man.
Donald Trump’s election has triggered a realignment of America
GB News
One of Musk’s latest musings was that the UK’s establishment parties are in for a battering at the next election. This is about as close to predicting a major Reform UK breakthrough as you can get without actually tagging Nigel Farage in a tweet.
Musk would surely consider Labour, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats as our establishment parties and probably the Greens too.
Perhaps he’s onto something. There’s not a direct correlation between US and UK political trends, but Farage and Reform UK have many of the hallmarks of a MAGA movement with a British flavour.
More likely to be found in tweed than in a baseball cap perhaps, but nevertheless they are a growing movement who have tapped into widespread discontent with an out-of-touch and out-of-control political elite, a fury at the rise of weird wokeism and an anger at the total failure of the UK government to be able to implement anything approaching a sensible immigration and asylum policy.
They tend especially to appeal to white working class men in “left behind” areas, a trait they also share with Trump’s Republicans.
Our recent general election also shows that the two dominant political parties of the last century are haemorrhaging support. The Tories and Labour secured just 57.4% of the vote between them on July 4th.
In contrast, Harris and Trump together polled more than 98% of the vote. Third parties in America are measured in decimal points. Here in Britain, if there is a time to smash Britain’s party duopoly, all the signs point to that time being now.And yet, and yet…there are still good reasons to believe that our current two-party system will remain entrenched.
The Tories had their worst ever result since the dawn of democracy at the last election but still came a comfortable second. In their darkest hour, the Conservatives still outscored Reform by nearly 10% of the vote and, owing to the nature of our electoral system, Tory MPs outnumber Reform MPs by more than twenty to one.
The Conservatives are diminished in the Commons, but you’d still need a decent sized bus to transport them around in, not a mere taxi. The polls also point to a modest Tory recovery.
A few even suggest that the party is slightly ahead of Labour. Reform is seeking to build a more efficient grassroots network, but still has about 40,000 fewer members than the Conservatives.
The Tories also have thousands of councillors across the country, Reform a mere handful. All that said, complacency would now spell the end for the Tories.
An approach of trying to be all things to all men resulted in having an electoral offer that enthused almost no one and opened the space for Reform to explode onto the scene. The new Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, seems explicitly to understand this. Her challenge is to articulate this in a way that truly resonates with the electorate. Early signs are promising but, after just three weeks, obviously not definitive.
She will have to oversee a transformation of the Conservative Party as dramatic and permanent as Trump’s complete rebuild of the Republicans.
Crucially, Kemi will have to take the Tories into territory way beyond their normal comfort zone. The party will need to advocate radical, wide-ranging reform and a complete overhaul of Britain’s broken governmental machinery.
Swathes of quangos, committees and departments will need to be abolished, not merely trimmed. Immigration needs to be tackled, not talked about. Ruinous carbon net zero targets must be abandoned.
Wokery needs to be smashed, not merely tutted at. Perhaps Musk was right after all. The establishment parties will get eviscerated at the next election. To thrive the Conservatives will have to become an anti-establishment party.
If they do so, the current two-party system will hold. The Tories will bear the same name and the same branding, but they will otherwise be unrecognisable.