ARTICLE AD BOX
How should what we used to call “the two big parties” respond to their mauling at the hands of Nigel Farage and Reform UK?
For the Labour Party, the sheer scale of the populists’ advance into their traditional areas is a relatively novel phenomenon – if not a shock – and one that the party leadership plainly hadn’t spent much time preparing for by the time these elections came around.
The assumption following the general election, one that was well founded by the psephological evidence, was that Mr Farage took far more votes from Conservative and former Conservative supporters than from Labour ones, but that has been changing visibly in the opinion polls this year.
The shift was not taken sufficiently seriously by Sir Keir Starmer and his colleagues until late in the Runcorn by-election campaign, at which point resources were poured in. As the tight result – a majority of six for the new Reform MP – showed, it was too little and far too late, and the swing, of 17 per cent away from the government, is proof of the genuine dissatisfaction with the Starmer administration.
Results in other contests, notably the now wafer-thin majorities enjoyed by Labour mayors, confirmed the slump in popularity and a deep sense of disappointment in the country at large.
The good news for Labour is that it is in power, and is thus in a strong position to frame its own destiny. Sir Keir, Angela Rayner, Rachel Reeves and their colleagues have the entire machinery of government and a huge parliamentary majority at their disposal.
They have money, albeit not as much as they would wish. They promised “change”; they have ample opportunity to achieve this. If the voters are impatient for things to “only get better”, as the campaign theme song insisted, then Labour’s task, and its new slogan, should be clear and simple – “delivery, delivery, delivery”.
The focus groups, the opinion polls and these election results carry a clear message – the British feel that Britain is broken. That was a slogan used by Labour last year, and it has now been appropriated to devastating effect by Reform.
Voters need to see, and feel, evidence that the country is being fixed. If the electorate can personally experience the benefits of this Labour government, it will reward the party with renewed support. The protest votes will be unnecessary if growth picks up, inflation remains more subdued, interest rates come down, and there is more of that elusive “feelgood” factor around.
That means being able to access GP appointments and emergency care promptly; rising standards in schools; the cost of living crisis easing; green energy that is genuinely economical and gets people’s bills down; the Channel migrant crisis finally being dealt with, and those arriving being processed swiftly and not being accommodated indefinitely in hotels; affordable homes and rent; and a welfare system that is fair.
Labour, in other words, needs to compromise with the electorate. If she can find a way to do so, the chancellor should reverse the deeply unpopular cuts to the pensioners’ winter fuel allowance, ease the burdens on business, including the disincentives to hiring contained in the Employment Rights Bill, and adjust inheritance tax on agricultural land to protect family farms. Pragmatic, practical moves can be taken to restore the trust many have lost in the government.
As for the Conservatives, Kemi Badenoch is in a far weaker position – and much of that is no fault of her own. Out of power, all she can do is make speeches, hold ministers to account, and reshuffle the meagre talent available on the Tory benches.
After dealing them such a historic defeat last year – the aftershocks of which are still being felt in these election results – voters are not yet ready to give the Tories a hearing. The resentments and the sense of betrayal that built up over 14 years of Tory rule are too deeply felt for the party to be forgiven in a matter of months. But the situation, though obviously dire, is not hopeless.
As Ms Badenoch says, there’s little point in coming up with random policies that are not properly thought through, and without a plan to implement them. Her instincts there are sound. When the Conservatives have been flattened in the past – such as in similarly historic defeats in 1945 and 1966 – they staged policy-led recoveries that returned them to power more or less within a single parliament. Indeed, Sir Keir’s restoration job on the Labour Party after its own debacle in 2019 is a more recent reminder that it can be done.
The very volatility of the electorate, the unpopularity of the government, and the flakiness of the Reform offering should give some comfort to Conservatives that they can come back – but they never will if they choose to try to outflank Mr Farage in his extremism. If she avoids lurching further to the right, then Ms Badenoch has at least a chance of attracting back One Nation pro-European Tories lost to Labour and the Liberal Democrats.
Neither Sir Keir nor Ms Badenoch will find much to be cheerful about in these results, but there is no cause for panic or despair. Reform UK remains a dangerous personality cult with no policies, and is eminently beatable. For the sake of the country, the other parties, including the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, need to do a much better job of exposing Reform for who they really are.
English (US) ·