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November 24, 2024 - 8:00am
Before this year’s general election, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said his aim was to follow in the footsteps of the Right-wing party that usurped Canada’s Progressive Conservatives in the early Nineties. “They are the model. That’s the plan,” he claimed, even naming his own party after the Canadian upstarts.
When the Progressive Conservatives were defeated in 1993, the Reform Party won a staggering 26 times as many seats as the established party of the Right. In the UK’s July election, the situation was almost exactly the reverse. The Conservatives, although suffering the worst defeat in their history, still won 24 times as many seats as Reform. But while the Tories remain the principal centre-right party, Reform’s success at recent by-elections shows that the party might not have to wait until the next election to shake up the British political system.
Some 2,240 councillors are up for election in May, more than half of whom are Conservatives elected in the heady days when Boris Johnson was popular and the Tories were receiving credit for the Covid-19 vaccine rollout. Reform barely featured in the contest and won just two seats. They are determined to be a bigger force this time, having snapped up two victories in recent council by-elections in Kent.
Farage has said that he will be “throwing the kitchen sink” at next May’s elections and has pledged to stand in every single English County Council seat. Analysis by Election Maps UK shows the net impact they could have. Since the election, in seats where Reform hasn’t stood a candidate, the Tories have recovered and gained 3.6% of the vote share; where Reform has been on the ballot, the Conservatives have lost 2.8%. A repeat of those results would certainly get in the way of the Conservative Party recovering its electoral strength.
Of course, Reform could lose salience with a good performance from new Tory leader Kemi Badenoch and her fresh shadow cabinet. And playing the role of spoiler to a Tory recovery could also pose a risk for Farage’s popularity. It could associate Reform not with taking on the government or the “establishment” but with enabling Labour and the Lib Dems. To coin a phrase: if you come for the Tories, you better not miss. If you do, as so far Farage has, you will simply fracture the Right and embolden the Left. Reform voters may grow disillusioned with voting Reform and getting Labour or the Lib Dems.
Farage will be hoping that 2024’s election, which saw the party pick up four million votes, could merely be a stepping stone to their eventual dominance of the Right. Instead of England’s local elections, Wales’ Senedd contest in 2026 may be their best opportunity. Back in July, Reform were nipping at the Tories’ heels in Leave-voting Wales, polling just 17,000 fewer votes. (Reform could have been closer still; the party failed to nominate a candidate in Blaenau Gwent and Rhymney, where their candidate withdrew after allegations of reposting racist content online.)
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SubscribeThe road from protest vote to main stream party in a first past the post electoral system is an extremely hard and rocky one.
The advantage that reform has over the conservatives is that they are clear about what they stand for and have articulated what they would do in their manifesto (albeit only at the first derivative level, there is a lot of detail missing) and they have a charismatic leader who can connect with people.
The conservatives, on the other hand, are currently not clear about what they stand for but have the benefit of being the current right wing incumbent, with reasonably strong local representation and a long established party machine (although how well this still functions is debatable) but their new leader is as yet unproven.
It will be interesting to see how the local elections unfold. If reform do well and the tories do not then Badenoch will become vulnerable and might be ousted. Yet another change of leader would be a strong indicator that the party has truly lost its way and could provide provide the catalyst reform needs to cement itself into the publics mind as the the true heirs of the right.
Maybe. There are an awful lot of ifs and maybes and coulds in here, the crystal ball is very cloudy. The one thing one can be sure of is that labour will continue to be an unmitigated distaste and will suffer hugely in May 2025 at the local elections.
In a post from 17 minutes ago, JW speaks of “more of the loons Reform attract as candidates”. I have said many times that the big test of Reform will be in 18 months’ time with the Assembly (Senedd is pretentious) elections, exactly because of the loons in charge of the Assembly at the moment.
Wales has been controlled by Labour since devolution and it’s decisions have been sillier and sillier every year:
1) People will have read recently that they want to focus on minorities. To this end they have commissioned many expensive reports by idiots. The latest suggested that dog walking in public places was racist – the researchers asked one black woman who said that she didn’t like dogs. It also suggested that fishing was racist and male. Last year the Assembly paid £120,000 for two Muslim women to go fly fishing for the day and they didn’t enjoy it.
2) Still on minorities. At the end of last week they announced that they would pay the winter fuel allowance – to travellers only. To add to this, travellers will get free SIM cards (indefinitely?).
3) In the 2026 election they have increased the number of seats from 60 to 96, whilst paying an allowance to candidates from ethnic minorities. Will they help Tory candidates as well? This seems to be trying to buy a majority for ever.
4) Every week there is a televised 40 minutes of questions to the First Minister. Are the questions about the NHS (worst in Britain), people on benefits (worst), jobs…? No, the questions were as follows:- Should Wales set up a dog’s home inspectorate…Wales must have a new National Park somewhere around the Dee Valley….”What will Wales do for women”…. Can Wales pay to open an old tunnel in the Rhondda Valley. This is for cyclists apparently and will cost £20 millions.
What Wales could do for women is to improve the NHS. If there is a new National Park there will be no new roads and the existing roads will force visitors to drive at 20mph.
So much for Reforms loons.
Reform must take on labour not the Tories. Labour is in control so let’s hear what reform will do.
In the marginal seat where I live I have no doubt that Reform’s performance in the General Election resulted in the Conservatives losing the seat the Conservative vote share dropping by 20% compared to 2019 whereas the Labour vote was down by only 6%. The real test will be in the Assembly elections in May 2026 with the latest polling suggesting that Labour is down to 33% with Reform on 21% overtaking the Conservatives polling 18%. My forecast would be that Labour would still be in control propped up by the Welsh Nationalists (Plaid Cymru) and/or the Liberal Democrats if necessary. History shows that Wales has never voted for a centre right party in over 150 years. Labour however disastrously it performs (see Caradog Williams below) always comes out on top.
Hi. I am really depressed about the way we are going – and I agree with everything you have said. The problem for me is that to point out the abuse of power by Welsh Labour has the effect of belittling Wales in the eyes of English people. But to make these things public is the only way to stop them.
Reform is the only answer for the medium term future but the chances of success are minimal. Where I live, nobody would vote Tory because of the ghost of Margaret Thatcher. Plaid Cymru doesn’t have a policy except independence but it doesn’t actually know how to achieve that – I say this because last year I paid £60 to join and I just got loads of rubbish about an idyllic future but nothing about the present. Last year Plaid paid a lot of money for a report, “Is independence viable?” The report said that it was viable with serious poverty in the short- and medium-term. Plaid issued a statement – “Yes independence is viable!”
Better a Labour government, as much as I despise them, than a Tory government run by wets.
The Conservatives have been sabotaged from within. That is clear now especially after Nadine Dorries has supplied all the evidence. She asked at the end of The Plot “Has Gove’s 22 year quest to burn the party to the ground finally come to fruition?” Obviously so. The Tories, or what’s left of them after the manufactured media scandals, the toppling of leaders, Ian Duncan Smith, Liz Truss and Boris Johnson, are toast. The right wingers have been culled. The Tories have morphed into the Left, accepting all the their values. On finances, on immigration, on the Left’s Theory of Gender and Race, hate crime, non-crime. They are now what Gove and Cummings and his Movement friends wanted all along, a new party, a woke copy of labour.
Will Reform get their act together in four short years? How can they? They lack experience of working in Westminster. They will need time to build up their activist base, their MPs, their support, their policies. Even if they did all this the vote of the Right will still be split. Many will vote conservative out of loyalty, not realising their party is no more.
Expect two terms of Starmer. God help the UK. You’ll need it.