February 14, 2025 - 3:10pm
The latest policy announcement from Reform UK is an incoherent mess. On the promise of lower energy bills for householders, the specifics include a pledge to impose taxes on subsidies for renewable power (why not just cut the subsidies?), and to force the National Grid to put electricity cables underground (which would put up our bills, because burying power lines is much more expensive than building pylons). To top it all off, the party wants to ban battery energy storage systems — a strategically important technology that competitor countries are developing on a massive scale.
If Reform were still a fringe party, its unserious policies wouldn’t matter. But as the latest election model from JL Partners shows, the Faragistes are now up there with Labour and the Conservatives as a major party that could win over a hundred seats at the next general election. An MRP model from Electoral Calculus and PLMR shows Reform doing even better and vying for first place with the Tories.
With all three parties well short of a majority on current trends, it’s assumed that we’d either get a Labour-led coalition of various centre-Left parties, or, if they have enough MPs between them, a Tory-Reform coalition of the Right.
But there’s a third possibility that’s not receiving nearly enough attention — and that’s a German-style “grand coalition” of Labour and the Conservatives.
For the moment, the very idea is taboo. The reds and blues haven’t teamed up in peacetime since 1931. That was when Ramsay MacDonald, the sitting Labour prime minister, led a small group of Labour MPs into coalition with the Conservatives and Liberals. He and his colleagues were expelled from the Labour Party and have been regarded as traitors ever since.
Would any Labour leader today risk such a fate? It depends on the choice available. In the wake of the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the decision concerned whether to implement spending cuts or go into Opposition — and Labour MPs overwhelmingly preferred the latter. A hundred years later, the dilemma could be a very different one. If at the next election Reform UK wins the largest number of seats, but not a majority, then Labour would need to choose between coalition with the Tories or allowing Nigel Farage to become prime minister with Tory help. The party might just opt for the lesser of two evils.
Of course, the Tories would have to agree to cooperate with Labour — so why would they do that in preference to a deal with Reform?
The main reason is that the Tories would need a coalition partner with the basic ability to govern. For instance, there are over a hundred ministerial positions in the UK Government — so how many of those would Farage demand for his MPs? More to the point, who on earth would he nominate? Given Reform’s current strength in the Commons (just five MPs), most of his potential ministers would have no experience of Parliament, let alone government.
And then there’s the matter of policy, because a coalition government needs to agree on a joint programme. For all their ideological differences, Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch do share some basic assumptions about how this country should be governed. For instance, a first-past-the-post electoral system, the need for a fiscal policy that doesn’t scare the markets, unquestioning support for Nato, belief in the scientific consensus on climate change, and accepting the fundamentals of the 2020 Brexit deal. If by the next election Reform UK insists on a programme of proportional representation, unfunded tax cuts, more realist foreign policy, unrestricted carbon emissions and restarting from square one on Brexit, it might be easier for the Tories to compromise with Labour than with Farage.
Opponents of Britain’s political system sometimes dismiss the mainstream parties as the “uniparty”, supposedly at daggers drawn but actually part of the same team: two cheeks of the same behind, if you will. If Farage isn’t careful, he might find out the hard way just how much truth lies behind the insult.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
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SubscribeI think there is zero chance of that happening.
Labour are now revealing, day by day, in real tlme what they stand for. And it is not you or me. If they limp on for four more years they will be like nuclear waste. No one will touch them ever again.
Likewise the Conservatives. They lost my vote when they forgot what democracy is by sabotaging Johnson and replacing him with the political non-entity known as Sunak.
In my opinion we will soon have Reform and various yet unknown, unnamed political parties. One will be Islamic
‘In my opinion we will soon have Reform and various yet unknown, unnamed political parties. One will be Islamic.’
I totally agree. We can already see the form of an Islamic party. Reform itself has two wings: one supports free markets and economic liberalism and the other supports state intervention in the economy. The potential is that these two wings replace the Conservative and Labour Party respectively.
In fact I believe we have been living under a Labour/Tory Coalition for the last 15 years and that has been the problem
Well, in my view, anything is possible!
And I have no idea if this coalition idea is any worse than any of the others. Mind you a “Grand Coalition”, such as this would be seen by many, many voters as gerrymandering simply to keep Farage out of No10!
What happened when the Conservative Party went into coalition with the LibDems?
In a coalition of Conservative and Labour, who would be the junior partner? Who would be the fall guy for any unpopular policies?
The grounds for such a blue/red coalition would be what? ‘Keeping the fascists out’? But, blatantly, keeping themselves on life support. As one notable journalist has described them in the past: two corpses propping each other up.
Granting the assertion that these two legacy parties are ‘two cheeks of the same backside’, would their coalition be the @rse end of democracy?
If these two parties were really what they advertise themselves to be, their alliance would be as unthinkable as Georgian Britain entering an alliance with Napoleonic France.
But sometimes it is unfortunately necessary to allow people whatever they most want if they will not listen to reason. Either they will be satisfied, or learn wisdom, or suffer self-immolation. With them, there’s no other way.
It actually makes sense. Tory/Labour is truly the uniparty. They believe all the same nonsense the author clearly believes, so why not merge to thwart the one party offering a different version?
It makes complete sense. In America we have former Republicans like Romney and Cheney sounding like Democrats, former Democrats like Gabbard and RFK serving a Republican President. The uniparty exists and it is global, a beast that takes slightly different forms in different nations but ultimately serves the same corporate masters. Why not come out and declare openly what everybody with half a brain knows is already the case behind the scenes? If it happens, I can imagine a lot of Tory and Labour voters will be outraged given a lot of them are voting for a political side, left or right, more than a specific party. It would lead to a lot of disillusioned voters, and it would play into the populist narrative that Farage embraces in the same way Trump did. It could even lead to the destruction of both parties.
There is barely a fag packet between them anyway, going off the Tories last ten years.
Correct about the energy announcements. They were crass and avoidable. Must do better. Try talking to some engineers, as the government does not and has not.
“a programme of proportional representation, unfunded tax cuts, more realist foreign policy, unrestricted carbon emissions and restarting from square one on Brexit”
I don’t fancy all of it but is that really so bad?!
The “proportional representation” one is definitely bad, and if the “more realist foreign policy” means any kind of closeness with Russia, then it is bad too.
…belief in the scientific consensus on climate change…
Does science require a belief to be valid?
Politics operate by consensus. Is politics only valid with a required belief in climate change? A shibboleth.
The scientific outlook on the world – the expectation that there are always new things to discover – is not present in ‘settled science’. Science is always self-critical.
If science had been ‘settled’ in 1850, there would have been no cure for cholera. The Nightingales would be still dosing patients with emetics.
The problem is that scientists are human beings and capable of being just as political as anyone else and politicians, not being scientists, do not understand the scientific method and how real science is done. There are plenty of climate scientists who have gone well beyond the science and are now in the business of saving the planet rather than understanding it. There are plenty of politicians who are perfectly willing to use ‘settled science’, to scare voters into voting for them or supporting bad policy.
The term “Climate Scientist” immediately flags up the likelihood of the adopter of such an epithet is a grifter who has little scientific credentials. And any they have are not in the disciplines of physics, chemistry or mathematics.
I can remember a time when Climatology was a legitimate “Applied” science, part of those disciplines which were under the banner of Earth Science, similar to such other disciplines as Oceanology or Volcanology, rather than the debased ideology it seems to have become.
It seems possible, put like this, but still… If a breakthrough party were to win the most seats and then be systematically frozen out by the established parties then I think it could create a genuinely dangerous situation in which people would conclude that electoral politics had failed.
Labour and the Tories could perhaps get around this by committing themselves to implementing key elements of Reform’s manifesto (e.g. on immigration), as if in response to a referendum on those key points, but I fear they would instead cast themselves as the saviours of normality and resolve to block those very things.
Peter’s main point highlights why I think some kind of pact or merger between the Tories and Reform is desirable. Reform have a long way to go before they could be considered a serious government in waiting, and I don’t think they can do it by themselves in four years. If they were to win the election by channeling public anger but then blow up in office I really don’t know where we would be.
Anyone merging with the Tories is tying themselves to a corpse.
Why would “no experience of government” be seen in such a negative light?
It might, given our current circumstances, be a positive advantage, especially if Farage were to conduct a clearing of excess bureaucracy along the lines Trump is now executing?
A 2029 Reform-led coalition might be seen as akin to Trump’s first term but with the advantage of having that example to learn from, plus the experience of former ministers from coalition partners.
It would be very difficult for the Tories to do this without an agreement to reduce immigration massively. If they went into government and did nothing on immigration they would surely haemorrhage support, some of which would go to reform and some of which would just give up, but very little of which would ever come back.
Absolutely correct. 1) Slash immigration. 2) Bin Net Zero. If it embraces both of those, it’s half a chance of having the most seats in the next Parliament.
I don’t think this writer understands just how profoundly the world has changed since November 5th.
Winning in 2024 on what was de facto a hidden platform of rising energy prices and taxes and increased immigration has doomed the Labour Party to oblivion. It won’t win anywhere outside the home counties in 2029.
To neutralise Reform the Tories will have to commit to leaving the ECHR, repealing the HRA and all speech legislation and lifting the ban on fracking. They need to get moving on this now and get the internal bloodletting it will provoke out of the way in good time. Otherwise they will be fighting Labour and the Lib Dems for the leftovers.
Does Kemi understand this?
Liebore and CONswervatives are both finished. Reform maybe an incoherent rabble and something similarly populist and incoherently rabbleous may well arise on ‘the left’; but the country the elite has destroyed will turn against that same elite viciously and with finality and from all sides. Incoherent tumbrills may roll.
“…most of his potential ministers would have no experience of Parliament, let alone government.”. Yes, that’s one reason people support them.
Labour and Conservatives have effectively been in an informal socialist coalition since John Major introduced political correctness in the early 1990s. The fact that there is little to differentiate between the two parties is the evidence of this. In practice the UniParty exists, even if there is no formal marriage. They are both committed to the admission of millions of immigrants, to the DEI contagion that has blighted our lives and to the promotion and protection of the Woking Class elite with its contempt for the populists that need to be stamped down through devices like Non Crime Hate Incidents, imprisonment for posting memes on social media and coerced conformity to Woke policies.
They have flourished, and been permitted to flourish, by virtue of the absence of strong political leadership in the UK since Thatcher’s demise.