Anaylsis: How will Reform impact the general election in Yorkshire?

Recent polling showing the Conservatives’ deep unpopularity of the public is due to an alarming exodus of Tory voters.

In April 2020 under Boris Johnson and during the pandemic, the Tories were polling over 50 per cent of the electorate. Now they are struggling to hit even 20 per cent.

We know many of these voters are going to the Labour Party, in some cases returning, and in others simply feeling that Rishi Sunak’s time is up.

Despite the merits in trying to stem the haemorrhaging of votes it is losing in the centre-ground, the Tories are most concerned about those which it is losing to a party on the right.

In 2019 that spectre was called the Brexit Party. In 2024 it will be Reform.

The lack of certainty of how successful it will be is an existential question for the Tories’ power in opposition.

What we do know is that an anti-immigration and pro-Brexit party on the right of the political spectrum is a risk to Labour, after it helped deliver many of Labour’s Yorkshire seats and gave many MPs a real scare at the last election.

The party was painted as an obstacle to the Conservatives winning a majority in 2019, and one which needed to be removed.

In November of that year, that obstacle was removed when Nigel Farage stood down his candidates in all 317 Tory-held seats.

This tacit-endorsement of Boris Johnson and the Conservatives meant that the Conservatives only needed a small swing in their favour to collect dozens of seats across the North.

This election sees no such truce, and that lack of alliance is a real risk to the Conservatives.

Reform severely damages the Conservatives’ reputation among voters on the right in the same way it enhanced it in 2019 by uniting voters against Labour.

As things stand the party will now run in Tory-held seats, the ones it won in 2019 and the ones that it has held on long before, allowing Labour to reap the rewards of division among voters who don’t like voting for them.

This makes retaining anything more than a handful of seats in Yorkshire a daunting task for the Conservatives, where losing even a handful of voters to Reform could be the difference between keeping five and keeping a dozen.

Splitting Yorkshire broadly white, working class, anti-immigration and pro-Brexit vote is fine when the Conservatives are on the offensive to take seats from Labour, but it will become disastrous when trying to hold them.

Rishi Sunak views the solution as to go further to the right on immigration, making the election about stopping the boats, but without a pact to save his MPs from a Reform insurgent in their seats, this will not stem the Labour tide come polling day.