Is Reform UK inevitable?

An interesting discussion, but I think many nuances were missed. And I say that dispassionately, and not because I want Reform to win outright at the next election (which I do).

The first point to make is that there was an assumption by Tom McTague that the Tories will eventually lift upwards from the 23.7% they got in the election, but I don’t think this is the case at all. The discussion didn’t go into why the Tory vote fell so low and what it means for the future, so I will tell you. The sense of betrayal engendered by the 2019 Conservative government was so great, that it telescopes backwards all the way to the start in 2010. I can only speak for myself, but as someone who religiously voted Conservative from the late eighties onwards, I now view the lot of them, Cameron/Osborne, May/Hammond, Johnson/Sunak, and the sordid circus around all of them, as a bunch of incompetent chancers who took us for a ride. The proof that the various Conservative governments in aggregate made us very significantly poorer than we should be is now visible with crystalline clarity. I didn’t think of Cameron or Johnson in that light while they governed, but everything they did has become completely visible in hindsight, and I cannot now even hear the names of Cameron or May or Johnson mentioned without my rage levels rising. What I’m trying to say is, this former Tory ain’t gonna be voting Conservative ever again, and Badenoch has got her work cut out to win people like me back.

The second point that was only very lightly discussed, is that the Starmer government is palpably in a downward spiral, and no miracle is on the horizon to save them, on the contrary the global geopolitical and economic climate incoming looks utterly treacherous. In this situation I think Labour are very likely to slip from 33.7% to 22.7%, and the recipient of the bulk of that in the Red Wall will be Reform, not the Tories.

First past the post has this odd characteristic, that if your vote is evenly spread out, then it is incredibly difficult to win seats, until you hit certain tipping points, and then all of a sudden everything falls into your lap. A recent illustration of that is the SNP in 2015. If you hypothesise that Reform will start approaching 30%, with the Tories and Labour both around 24%-25%, which is eminently possible, then I think Reform could win an outright majority on just under 30%.

Ultimately, this is about disillusionment with the uniparty consensus. No one is under any illusions that Farage, Tice et al are anything other than far from perfect. But for people like me who have come to the conclusion that the existing settlement is rotten and has to be broken so something different and hopefully better can grow, then Reform is the only vehicle available to us.