It is really not necessary to come up with elaborate explanations for why Gordon Brown’s Labour Party did so badly in the local and European elections in Britain last week. In a democracy, sooner or later every government loses. The scale of the loss is usually proportionate to the amount of time the government have been in office, and the scale of the grievances that have built up during their tenure.

Labour has been in power since 1997, and they have made a lot of people very unhappy. Their leader was Chancellor of the Exchequer for ten years. If any single man was centrally responsible for the British economy, it was Gordon Brown. It is hardly fair to blame the global financial crisis on Brown, but it is not at all unfair for voters to notice that Britain has been particularly hard hit by the crisis and to blame Brown for the resulting collapse. Nor is it unfair for voters to believe that, if Brown was so exercised about the parliamentary expenses scandal, he should at some point in the past twelve years have noticed it and done something about it.

Brown, it is true, labors under some particular and individual burdens. He is not charismatic in the way that his predecessor, Tony Blair, undoubtedly was, and he has not been able to sell his brand of dour Scottish gravitas. Being stern in times of crisis worked for Churchill, so the task is not inherently impossible — but Brown has failed to pull it off, perhaps because, unlike Churchill, Brown often seems a man who lacks all hope.

The comparison with Blair, and with Churchill, is doubly damaging, because it exemplifies the Eden Effect. This is twentieth-century Britain’s tendency to follow, as one historian put it, Paganini with the village fiddler. After Salisbury, there was Balfour. After Baldwin, came Chamberlain. Following Churchill, there was Eden. Wilson dominated the system, while Callaghan did not. Thatcher was a legend, whereas Major was merely a nice man. And Blair won three elections, while Brown looks unlikely to survive for three years. The Eden Effect is so powerful that Brown would have had to perform a political miracle to beat it.

The main features of the election results are, by now, obvious. First, a collapse in Labour’s vote, down to under 16% in the European elections, and in Labour’s share of local government. Second, the fact that the Liberal Democrats, if anything, lost ground, meaning that they are no longer the party of choice for those disillusioned with Labour. Third, the modest rise in the Tory vote, and the complete Conservative domination of local government.

All that might be seen to fall within the normal gamut of politics: governments, after all, exist to get beaten. But three further features are outside the norm. Fourth, the very low turnout, which is both a reflection of and a contributor to the ongoing decay of Britain’s post-war – and, indeed, basically Victorian – political model. Fifth, the fact that about 40% of the European vote went to one of the so-called minor parties: the UK Independence Party, the British National Party, the Greens, the Scottish Nationalists, and other even smaller entities. And sixth, the fact that the Eurosceptic parties – the Tories and UKIP – drew almost 50% of the vote.

Taken all in all, this election was about one thing: rejecting the establishment, be that Labour or the EU – or, in the case of the SNP’s supporters, the Union. It might be thought curious that voting Conservative is now a protest vote, but given the social democratic dominance of Britain since 1997, it makes perfect sense. And much the same can be said of voters all across Europe, who, by and large, also drifted rightward, if they bothered to vote at all. Britain is more Eurosceptic than most of the continent, and in even deeper economic difficulties, so its revolt was larger. But across the EU, the votes that were cast ran against the makers of the left-leaning order.

Among academics who follow British politics, the internet is now alive with excited discussions about the ‘end of neoliberalism,’ the inevitable failure of the Cameron Conservatives, and the incipient rise of fascism in Britain. All that goes to show how deep the political partialities in the academy run: the wish, in most cases, is father to the thought. If neoliberalism means anything, it must mean some effort to restrain the growth of the state. By that definition, the Blair/Brown governments began to move away from neoliberalism in 1999, when spending began its first surge, and completed the break in 2007, when spending surged again. Brown’s defeat is not the end of neoliberalism: it is, if anything, a reassertion of it.

The question of whether or not Cameron is a good model for the GOP, or American conservatism, has been much debated. But, regardless of where one stands on this question, the fact is that while oppositions can move to the right or to the left, they remain the opposition. It is the government that makes the laws, because it is the government that commands a majority. Far from Cameron being in dire straights – trapped, it is argued, between a sublimated desire to cut spending and the supposed necessity of raising taxes to balance the budget – it is Labour that is in a hole, because it has lost the basis for its majority. Blair made Labour electable by moving it to the right, and, really, into the middle class. But the straddle has stopped working: too many working class or lower-middle class voters who used to vote Labour now regard it as the party of metropolitan liberalism, and last week, they stayed home or voted for other parties. It will be very difficult to rebuild this Blairite coalition, because the cracks in that coalition grew wider the longer the party succeeded in keeping them papered over.

The upshot is the much-discussed ‘breakthrough’ of the British National Party, which won two European seats. The BNP is commonly described as ‘far-right,’ but the reality is rather more complicated. First, as breakthroughs go, this was pretty feeble stuff. The BNP’s vote, on 6.2%, was up by only 1.3% from 2004. Second, the BNP won a European seat in Yorkshire only because of the collapse of the Labour vote. The European elections operate on a convoluted system of proportional representations that rewards taking a larger share of the vote: the BNP’s vote total in Yorkshire went down, but its share of the vote went up because Labour did so poorly. Third, the BNP is, substantially, a protest vote: a new poll finds that 46% of BNP voters “said they registered a protest vote because they felt the three main parties were indistinguishable.”

It is a myth that all workers have always supported the Labour Party. A moment’s thought will go to prove that the Tories could not have won so many elections after 1945 if they were taking only the votes of the rich. The voters who went for the BNP last week have two natural homes: the traditional, patriotic Labour Party of Ernest Bevin, or the traditional, patriotic Conservative Party of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, one of the distinguishing features of Britain, like the U.S., is that it has a strong, popular Conservative tradition to bring voters like this – they exist in all democracies – into the fold. As Michael Burleigh points out in his superb history of the Third Reich, one of the reasons why the continent has been prone to political extremism is precisely because it lacks this tradition.

Today, the BNP is not easily described in conventional right-left terms. It is anti-immigration. It opposes the EU. It also opposes free trade and advances a populist and corporatist economic program. And it draws its support from the upper ranks of the white working class, and the lower reaches of the middle class. In the 1970s, these voters would likely have been Labour supporters of Conservative Enoch Powell. Politically, therefore, they are hard to place, because they are with Labour by class, but with the Tories whenever Labour seems to fail to put Britain first.

Enoch Powell was a phenomena for many reasons. But one was that, before the rise of Margaret Thatcher in the late 1970s, the parties looked a lot alike, and none of their solutions appeared to be working. As some BNP supporters believe is true today, there was then no clear blue water between Conservatives and Labour: Powell provided an alternative. In the 1980s, the success of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government gave these voters a home; in the late 1990s, Blair, who ran in 1997 on a strongly patriotic platform, gave them another. But the decay of the Blairite coalition, which came to seem more and more aligned with the City of London, and more and more elite, left them in the wilderness. The BNP’s success – exaggerated though it is – is the natural result. Labour has lost these voters, but the Tories have not yet succeeded in gaining them.

There are the making of a tremendous Conservative coalition in Britain. The Tories themselves are back in a big way. UKIP is a Eurosceptic shot across the bow, but it took so many votes last week, paradoxically, because many voters agree with UKIP in holding the EU in low regard: the voters therefore feel free to vote UKIP because they do not much care about the European Parliament. When they are voting for a British government, they will be much less interested in voting for a symbol, because they will care about the results.

The end of the Labour coalition is manifest. The makings of the next Conservative coalition are there. No other party can challenge for it. David Cameron’s test was not beating Gordon Brown. Given the patterns of twentieth century British history, Brown was always likely to beat himself. Cameron’s real test now is before him: if he can pull together the strands of this coalition, he will win a historic victory on the scale of Blair’s 1997 triumph.

Ted R. Bromund is the Senior Research Fellow at the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom and a frequent contributor to Commentary.