Simon's Blog

Many years ago when I used to write computer programs I used to create errors that caused Cascade Failure of the whole system. Not very good programming and usually the only way clear the error was to use the great IT hack – switch off and on again. Today we may have reached such a failure for the Conservative Party at this election – the Reform Party have now overtaken the Conservatives in an opinion poll. Now all the usual caveats apply: the result of the poll is within the margin of error, this is just one poll, the only poll that counts is the one on the 4th of July etc. Of course Nigel Farage won’t mention any of these and he will claim that this is the day that reform replaced the Conservative Party as the official opposition. This is nonsense but to be expected.

But what if they are not nonsense, not the Reform Party being the official opposition, but all of the caveats? What if this is the day that the Conservative Party has their own cascade failure and nothing they do corrects the error from the last process but rather makes things worse? They are floating around the inflection point where all of a sudden the first past post system, rather than being a help to them starts to really hammer them as other parties start to get more votes than them in constancy after constituency and so they sink to second, third or worse. Then what?

At the time of writing what is clear is that it won’t mean a sudden rush towards Reform who are probably at somewhere near their high point. The votes have to go somewhere and I suspect that in most Conservative held seats they will go initially to the Liberal Democrats. But here comes another failure – they might switch directly to Labour if this is the best way to cause the Conservatives to lose that constituency. So the Conservative’s will suffer something they rarely have done – a split of the vote on the right whilst at the same time a consolidation of the left of centre vote to one party, be that Labour, Liberal Democrats or even the Greens.

One final thought. We will hear Conservative spokespeople claiming that the election is still 3 weeks away and lot can change. This is true but only up to a point. In the next week the postal votes will be sent out and this may represent up to 20% of the electorate. If most of those who requested postal vote actually cast their vote, a reasonable assumption as they have gone to trouble of asking for a postal vote, then what is happening now is very important indeed.

We’ll not know the answer to any of this for another 3 weeks. However, if the next 3 weeks are as bad for the Conservatives as the first 3 weeks then we could be looking at the Cascade Failure of Cascade Failures.