Labour at the Cliff Edge

This month’s​ elections in England were significant without being surprising. They were dire for the Labour Party and cataclysmic for the Conservatives: neither has ever lost such a high proportion of the seats it was defending. The day belonged to Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, which took 30 per cent in projected national vote share. Labour narrowly lost the Runcorn by-election to Reform’s Sarah Pochin, a former Conservative. Reform took control of ten councils, where it will now administer budgets in the hundreds of millions. Farage took centre stage in the aftermath, declaring Reform the ‘main opposition party’: ‘We are the agents of change.’

It is tempting to reach for a comforting scepticism. Local elections punish the incumbent government. Wayward voters rally in general elections. Farage has made big gains before and seen them break against the rocks of first-past-the-post elections, or fracture under his titanic ego. There is a long and unpredictable three or four years before a general election.

These are false comforts. Our antiquated and grotesquely unfair electoral system proved a bulwark against Reform in the 2024 general election, but a boon for it this time. Its 14 per cent of the 2024 vote is underrepresented in the current parliament – it has only five MPs, including Pochin – while 37 per cent of the vote in Kent this month gave it 70 per cent of the county council seats. A similar pattern obtains in Staffordshire and Lincolnshire. Even at its height in 2015, Ukip never managed so broad a success. It is unwise to imagine the system will somehow provide a prophylactic against a Farage victory in Westminster: it is implausible now to call Reform a wasted vote.

One reading of Reform’s success is that the UK is not very different from other mid-size European countries, and its old right-wing party is being cannibalised by a newer party of the radical right, like the Fratelli d’Italia or the Rassemblement National. Another view is that the highly polarised elections of the Brexit period concealed a longer-term fragmentation of electoral blocs, in which class background and ethnicity have become less clear predictors of voting behaviour, and disillusionment and volatility prevail.

These perspectives are not incompatible, but much depends on which is emphasised. If the former, then Reform’s potential base is primarily the anti-Labour right (74 per cent of their 2024 voters had not voted Labour in the past two decades). If the latter, then Labour’s electoral coalition is threatened at both ends, losing not only the Farage-curious but also those repulsed by the party’s attempts to keep that faction on board. Farage’s own improbable positioning – for nationalising British steel and refusing to criticise striking bin workers – suggests he’s going after Labour votes. (Keir Starmer has denounced the bin strike and is trying to find a private buyer for steel.) The Reform vote was, on average, as strong in wards defended by Labour as by Conservatives.

Labour is governing badly. It has pointlessly squandered the popular goodwill that accompanied its return to office. Its leader is a besuited void. It is embarrassed by its few real achievements (a rise in the minimum wage, expanded workers’ rights, partial nationalisation of rail) and cowed by corporate tantrums. It says and does nothing about water monopolists stealing money from the public purse and fouling rivers. Homelessness and drug addiction are ever more obvious on the streets. The cost of living still bites hard. The government has imprisoned itself in a cage of fiscal rules and taxation promises wholly inadequate to the rapidly changing global picture, and its most eye-catching economic strategy is a further reduction of welfare. Ros Jones, narrowly re-elected as mayor of Doncaster, warned that Labour’s cut to pensioners’ winter fuel allowance had become emblematic of its approach; a few Labour backbenchers – most prominently Louise Haigh – have broken cover to join the criticism and warn against a further slide to the right. Downing Street quickly stamped on a rumour Labour might reconsider the cut.

Labour politicians are right to say they did not cause these problems, and that a country cannot be quickly turned around after years – decades – of neglect. Nor is it merely a communications problem, though injecting government communications with some urgency or contact with reality would be welcome. Starmer’s lack of political commitment leaves his government rudderless, its only real politics an amplified antipathy to the party’s own left. But it has made many bad decisions in its first year. Ministers inexplicably defended the taking of free gifts by MPs, widely and rightly understood as licensed corruption, while presiding over benefit cuts. Starmer failed to give any clear national leadership when racist riots erupted after the Southport stabbings. The party has shattered its moral credibility by its assiduous support for Israel as it starves and murders in Gaza. Change, as promised by Labour’s manifesto, seems in very short supply.

If your country appears to be presided over by a caste of broadly interchangeable, hectoring and insincere politicians, none of whom ever delivers on their promises, why not vote for someone to upend the table? Behind this anti-establishment mood, which has rankled in British politics for many years now, lies the nastier promise of Faragism. It is not only that his voters are angry or disenfranchised, though some of them are. It’s that he offers a kind of political desublimation, a pleasurable release of all the prejudicial impulses kept under wraps, the right – as one jubilant Reform voter put it on his Facebook page – ‘to say what I REALLY think’.

Exhortations following the election have been as predictable as the results. Tony Blair got in ahead of time, training his crosshairs on Ed Miliband and Net Zero (all roads, for Blair and his epigones, lead to the culpability of the Wrong Miliband Brother, though Blair’s lucrative contracts with oil-exporting Gulf autocracies may also have moved him). For the resurgent if never entirely cogent ‘Blue Labour’ tendency, the answer is to embrace the rightward social shift while making nebulous gestures towards leftish economic nationalism. One sad indicator of the ideological shift is that Dan Carden, once a Corbynite Green New Dealer, now convenes the Blue Labour Group and writes self-flagellating articles calling for a wave of reindustrialisation through rearmament. The remainder of the party’s left that has not been expelled or gagged implores its leaders to take on vested interests and raise taxes on the rich. All agree on the need to ‘deliver’ in a way that’s visible and tangible, though the belief that delivery will somehow supersede the awkward business of politics now looks delusional.

Most of the media-political nexus is perfectly comfortable with the rise of a populist right party led by Nigel Farage. He, and, occasionally, other Reform politicians, can always be booked to say something outrageous. The right can claim an electoral warrant for intensifying its favourite prejudices: against ‘woke’ officials – however fictive – and against migrants, multiculturalism or simply modernity in all its forms. The liberal left can chastise itself for having beliefs, and try to disown them. The socialist left can declare itself analytically correct, to compensate for its political irrelevance. In declaring Reform the ‘main opposition party’, Farage is only formalising his outsize influence on British politics over the last two decades.

It runs against instinct for any observer of British politics to pronounce the Tory Party dead. Yet it’s hard not to hear the death rattle behind the thin excuses: people still hate us for ruining the country; we’ve only lost so many seats because we were popular when we last contested them. It isn’t simply that Kemi Badenoch is an erratic and tin-eared leader, and Mel Stride a supremely witless shadow chancellor: most contenders for the leadership are tainted by their years in government. The miasma of corruption wreathes Badenoch’s most plausible challenger, Robert Jenrick, who has been pumping out Reform-tinged jeremiads on X. Polling suggests he’d be even less popular. Given its efflux of activists and politicians to Reform, the eventual fate of the Conservatives may be as a vestigial electoral appendage, a vehicle for prosperous right-wingers who can’t quite bring themselves to vote for Farage.

It would be hard to feel pity if Badenoch led the Tory Party into its grave. It might be that the brand really is too toxic, and the middle class from which it would once have repopulated its support finds a political home elsewhere. (The liberalising effect of education is part of the longer-term trend, too.) Yet what replaces it could easily be worse. Although the Conservative Party has often been pulled rightwards by extraparliamentary forces, and occasionally acted as a vehicle for their ideas to enter the political mainstream, it has also functioned as a cordon sanitaire. Reform’s attitude has been contradictory, occasionally disavowing Tommy Robinson while maintaining a very porous boundary with his movement.

It has been suggested that Reform will implode on contact with office. The press will certainly discover that some of its elected officials are not-so-crypto-fascists, cranks or crooks. It is very likely that they will run their councils into the ground (or simply leave the difficult bits to the officials they decry). They will find their hands are tied with statutory obligations and their budgets consumed by adult social care. But for the opportunist politician this simply provides an occasion for congenial fights: we could collect your bins better if we closed that migrant hotel, or the money we would have spent on potholes was eaten up by mandatory diversity assessments. Farage could well tour the news studios and accuse central government of shunting problems it doesn’t want to deal with – social care, special needs provision, statutory homelessness duties – onto local councils while slashing the funding needed to deal with them. And he’d have a point.

Peter Mandelson is famously supposed to have said of working-class voters in South Wales that ‘they have nowhere else to go,’ so Labour need not worry too much about them. (Reform placed second in most South Wales seats in 2024.) The thin margins of many Labour MPs – praised last year as hyper-efficient – leaves them prey to relatively small fluctuations in voter behaviour. The Mandelson dictum is today most often directed at progressive voters. Yet research consistently shows that far more Labour voters are tempted to vote Green or Liberal Democrat than are tempted to vote Reform. If the fragmentation thesis is correct, and if lost votes are the only thing that makes Labour pay attention, then the rational strategy for progressive voters must be to vote for somebody else. Next year’s local elections take place in many metropolitan districts likely to be receptive to such a strategy, though whether the perpetually befuddled Greens and timid progressive voters could actually make a run of it is not clear.

Since the election, government communications have centred on new trade deals with India and the US. The US deal staves off the political nightmare of British car manufacturers collapsing under American tariffs, though its durability depends on Trumpian caprice. The India deal, which exempts Indian workers in Britain from employer National Insurance contributions (long a sticking point in negotiations), seems tailor-made for a Farage campaign.

Starmer’s sole response to his party’s dismal showing has been to commit to ‘go further and faster’ on Labour’s plans. Yet the prime minister should recognise that Britain is not immune to the sudden changes in political dynamics visible across the developed world. It’s wise not to panic after a bad election, but such a peremptory rejection of any counsel to change course suggests there is more ideological zealotry swirling around Number Ten than is generally recognised. A vote on £5 billion of cuts is due in June, with more promised for the autumn. MPs whose seats are at risk will become harder to discipline. Further and faster is an excellent approach if you’re speeding to a just, equal and prosperous future. It is a crazy way to approach a cliff edge.