The launch of Labour’s local election campaign over the weekend revealed what is at the front of the party strategists’ minds: Reform UK.

Just look at this X post featuring a chimeric composite image of Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch. “Reform and the Tories are closer than you think”, boasted the tag line. There’s another one featuring the Reform leader as a Russian doll that opens up to reveal the Conservative leader within, with the message: “Reform candidates are just Tories in disguise. Don’t let a Tory sneak through.” Just in case we didn’t get the point, a third post highlighted something more substantial: according to Labour Party research, “more than 60” of Reform’s local candidates (1,630 in total) are Tory defectors. The message is: vote Reform, get Tory.

Obviously, Labour is worried that its traditional voter base is turning to Reform, as well they might be. But rather than trying to paint Farage’s party as extreme, Labour’s latest campaign is centred on an appeal to class solidarity. Toryism, not populism, is the main danger. But is this strategy quite as smart as it looks? Indeed, it could backfire horribly.

For a start, in many Labour-held seats, the taboo against voting Tory has been broken; in 2019, 50 “Red Wall” seats across the North of England and the Midlands went temporarily blue. These didn’t revert back to Labour in 2024 because voters suddenly remembered that the Tories were the class enemy, but because Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak all failed to deliver on promises to control immigration and level-up the land. It’s therefore dangerous to attack Reform as being full of ex-Tories, when so many Red Wall voters are ex-Tory voters themselves.

That said, it’s possible that Labour strategists have already written off the Red Wall and are trying to save the Labour heartlands instead. According to some projections like the latest Electoral Calculus MRP poll, Reform gains threaten to go well beyond the seats that Labour won back from the Tories last year. Indeed, the turquoise tsunami could sweep all the way into Labour strongholds like the urban North East and the Welsh Valleys. These are places where the Conservatives have never been in contention. So tarring Reform with the Tory brush might make sense there. However, if that is the logic, then it’s a tacit admission that Labour is in deep, deep trouble.

One also has to wonder how the party expects to get away with accusing Reform of Tory tendencies, when in government they’ve been slashing welfare spending in order to please the markets and buy more guns. There’s also the rather awkward fact that, in opposition, Keir Starmer was all too happy to welcome Tory defectors to the Labour camp, like the MPs Dan Poulter and Natalie Elphicke.

The most awkward issue of them all concerns what might happen after the next election. On current trends, neither Labour, Reform nor the Tories will have a clear majority. It’s mathematically plausible that the only way that Labour could stay in government (and keep Nigel Farage out of Downing Street) is to form a grand coalition with the Conservatives. But that would mean “letting the Tories sneak through”.

Of course, Starmer could shut down any such speculation by ruling out a Labour-Tory deal. Given Labour’s current campaign, that’s not too much to ask, is it?

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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