Tag: Reform UK

Reform UK: reaching for the sky?

Another AI image from Copilot. Rather pleased with this one

My survey of the British political parties reaches Reform UK, the third most important party in terms of vote share. It is hard to understate the influence of this party, the creature of veteran British politician Nigel Farage. In the recent election it made more inroads into the Conservative vote than any other, allowing Labour to win by a landslide on a modest share of the vote; it also helped the rise of the Liberal Democrats, though to a smaller extent. It won only five seats itself, but even this was a bit of a breakthrough in Britain’s electoral system. One of the biggest questions in British politics is whether it can sustain its influence, or whether it will wither, as most third party challenges do in Britain.

Reform’s strategy is to channel the populist backlash that can be seen across most of the western world, from Donald Trump in America to the AfD in Germany. It rages against liberal “elites” and their woke policies, and most of all it rages against high levels of immigration. By and large the established parties handle this criticism badly, accusing it of being racist, amongst other things – even as more and more people from ethnic minorities subscribe to populist politics. The Conservatives are less inclined to do this, but they are badly split between those that want to hop onto the populist bandwagon, and the more establishment types who think that populist politics lead to bad policies. This strand of politics allows Reform to win 15-20% of the national vote, with an effective ceiling of probably about 30%. This invites three questions. What happens if the party reaches this ceiling? Can that ceiling be extended? And does the party have the leadership and organisational capacity to do this?

Supporters of Reform UK, including Matt Goodwin, often cited here, think they represent a forgotten majority. But polling consistently shows that support for their agenda is in the 20-30% region. The rest of the electorate diverges sharply in their views on most issues, and the party has very negative favourability ratings in the population at large. But 20-30% is still an awful lot of people, and if the party could find a way into winning the bulk of them, that would have a big impact. For a start, the Conservatives would be unlikely to survive. Reform’s achievement of about 14% vote share in July proved disastrous for the Tories. No credible route back to power exists for them without pushing Reform back to substantially less than this. Such a Tory collapse would then put Reform in contention to win many seats from Labour, especially in the old “Red Wall”, a swathe of constituencies from Wales to the Midlands to Northern England, based on towns with people who feel left out and left behind. These seats turned to the Conservatives under Boris Johnson in 2019. But how many could they win? I haven’t tried any psephological modelling – but it is surely unlikely that they could even challenge the Liberal Democrats for third place in parliament. They are stuck in the same place as the Lib dems used be in their years of relative success in 1997 to 2010. Lots of votes, but hard to turn these into seats – the Lib Dem vote is now a lot more concentrated, hence its substantial parliamentary presence. Labour would continue to do well in this environment, unless the Lib Dems started to find ways to break out their current geographical containment.

To move into true contention as a challenger to Labour requires Reform to seek an extra 10-15% of the vote, from people who currently disapprove of the party. This is what Donald Trump has successfully done in America, but which European parties in the same space are finding much harder. But our electoral system more closely resembles America’s than it does even France’s, still less those of German and Italy (although there the populists have found a path to power through alliances). Unlike America, Britain does not have a substantial body of active Christians who are appalled by the liberal values prevailing in the governing class. Neither are the liberal left quite as out of control as they have been in America, to stir up those resentments. But what America does show is that economic grievances, and the unsettling effects of mass immigration, can be stoked up among groups, such as younger voters and ethnic minorities, that used be reliable supporters of the left. Wokery played a role in the American realignment in supporting a “there’s madness on both sides” narrative – but it was economic grievance that clinched it for Mr Trump. It is possible for a winning coalition of voters to be built by Reform, or, indeed, by the Conservatives.

But can Reform pull it off? They first have to destroy the Tory challenge, in local elections, and the Welsh Senedd could play a role here. They then need to carry out the second part of the two-step I described in my previous post about the Conservatives. This means drawing support from a number of formerly Conservative politicians and businessmen to give the party some sort of aura of respectability. Reform starts with two advantages. Its leader, Nigel Farage, is an immensely experienced politician and a gifted communicator (the BBC can’t get enough of him). He (unlike the former academic Mr Goodwin) would understand the analysis I have just written, and clearly knows what he has to do. The second advantage is that the Conservatives have a toxic legacy from their years in government after 2019, when they showed themselves to be chaotic and incompetent. The party’s new leadership is clearly struggling to put distance between them and this legacy.

But the Tories have a huge advantage: they have political infrastructure – organisation, networks, administrative competencies. Here Reform are weak: they are way behind the Lib Dems, never mind the Tories. Uniquely amongst Britain’s main political parties, the party has a corporate structure, which makes it easy for the leadership to control, but much harder to build the networks the party needs to sustain a successful political movement. Mr Farage clearly recognises this, and building this infrastructure was a central theme at the party’s recent conference. But it doesn’t help that populist politics tends to attract event more cranks and argumentative types than other forms of politics, and fewer of the steady organisational types. Rapid expansion risks collapse into chaos.

But the potential remains. Reform’s poll share is holding up well after the election. There looks to be plenty of scope for stirring up economic grievance and resentment. Reform UK is very much the party to watch at the moment.

Britain’s politics is a function of its electoral system

The changed electoral map. Source: the Liberal Democrats

It was a dull election campaign but an earthquake of a result – not less significant for it having been widely predicted. Above all it shows just how much the country’s electoral system dictates its politics. That is how Labour won, and that is how they will stay in power.

I resisted the temptation to update my electoral predictions last week, as I didn’t have much more to add. If I had I would have talked up the Greens a bit, and also predicted that Jeremy Corbyn would win his seat of Islington North – notwithstanding a very dodgy local poll saying that he was well behind. I sensed that as people became more assured of a substantial Labour victory, with even the Tories saying so, that left-leaning voters, unenthused by the party’s relentless centrism, would vote for alternatives. The Tory tack of talking up Labour, referred to as the “Queensland Strategy”, to try and persuade people to vote Conservative to provide an opposition to Labour, was laughable. The Tories showed much more interest in fighting each other than opposing Labour.

The results proved me broadly correct, including those late predictions I didn’t publish – though I was surprised about how well the pro-Gaza independents did, unseating the prominent Labour front-bencher Jonathan Ashworth, for example, and nearly doing so to Labour big-hitter Wes Streeting. There were two main surprises for me though. The first was just how low was the overall share of the vote that Labour eventually got (about 35%) – much lower than the polling predictions, and with a much lower lead over the Conservatives (10% compared to a consistent 20%, though this dropped a bit in the last polls). This did not have much impact on the result in seats, though; a lot of this dynamic was happening in safe Labour seats, with Labour supporters moving to Greens and Independents, or not showing up to vote. The other surprise was quite how many seats the Liberal Democrats won. My argument had been that weakness on the ground would place an upper limit on the party’s performance of about 50 seats; in the event they won 72 – and nearly won a slew of others. There is an upper bound to Lib Dem performance – but it’s quite a bit higher than I thought it was. In about half the seats the Lib Dems won, pre-election campaigning was weak – but there was enough local council strength for the party to make the case for tactical votes, and there must also have been a bit of help from the national campaign, which managed to increase support for the party overall, over the course of the campaign (though it ended up in vote share more or less where it was in 2019).

Interestingly, the MRP polls, a big feature of this campaign, did not come off as badly as the ordinary ones, though they made similar mistakes with the overall vote shares for Labour and the Conservatives. The Labour victory was at the lower end of the range of these projections, but at least it was within it. They picked up more of a sense of how efficient the Labour and Lib Dem polling was in electoral terms, and inefficient was that for Reform UK and the Greens. They didn’t see the rise of the independents, and the projections for individual seats were often wayward, especially for the distribution of votes between the parties. As I suggested in my comments during the campaign, they exaggerated Labour strength in Lib Dem targets – allowing many a Labour leaflet to suggest that the party was in contention when it was in fact a distant third.

So the Labour victory was big but shallow, with many close results. Indeed, supporters of the previous leader, Jeremy Corbyn, noted that the party won fewer votes than when their man was leading – making the narrative of why Sir Keir Starmer’s stewardship proved so successful much more complicated than the mainstream explanation suggests. Labour did not win, so much as the Tories lost. Sir Keir Starmer did not win over many people to his party (and he lost a good few), but he did not scare as many Tory voters as his predecessor – allowing them to stay at home or vote for Reform.

To be fair on Sir Keir, he seems to understand the thinness of his mandate. He is not using the scale of his victory to suggest that he has public support for radical policies. He is trying to establish a reputation for competence – something the Conservatives lost in the wake of the Brexit referendum. Labour will, of course, relentlessly blame the country’s “14 years of Tory chaos” – never mind that these followed three years of Labour chaos, and that the first six years were not especially chaotic. But whether it was 8 years of chaos or 14 makes no real difference to voters. This is a sensible strategy. The populist right plan a relentless attack on Labour for being “woke” – attending to the “luxury beliefs” of liberals and the identity politics of some ethnic minority politicians. Sir Keir’s best hope of winning the next election is to contrast the wildness of these attacks with the unfussy competence of reality. Good luck with that. He has the discouraging examples of Francois Hollande in France, and Gerhard Schroder in Germany. Two uncharismatic but competent left-of-centre politicians who were/are unable to manage the stresses of modern politics. Still, those leaders were operating in a very different political systems. So long as Labour can keep the right divided, its chances are good.

On the question of the right, I continue to follow the writings of populist promoter Matt Goodwin. I like him because he is reasonably factual, unlike many of his fellow travellers, who trade in conspiracy theories and lies. He did not have a particularly good election. He was elated by the Reform surge after its leader, Nigel Farage, started to seriously engage in the campaign. He went on to breathlessly call an inflection point, with Reform surpassing the Conservatives, backed up his own polling organisation, which proved by some margin to be the least accurate of all those publishing polls. But then Reform flatlined, and Mr Goodwin started to talk about the French elections instead. Looking back on the election, he is now calling the Reform glass half full. It has indeed peeled off the working class/lower middle class part of the Tory 2019 coalition, but it is making little progress beyond that. The Conservatives outpolled them by 10% – and its much stronger ground organisation showed. A pile of second places is no use in the British electoral system – and you need a strong ground operation to turn those second places into wins – just ask the Liberal Democrats. Complaining about the electoral system doesn’t cut it. The chances of Reform doing that on their own in more than a handful of places looks thin.

That leaves a stalemate on the right. Clearly it needs to rebuild the 2019 coalition, across working class and middle class voters, and in the north, south, east and west of England and Wales. Reform can’t do that. The Conservatives have two strategies open to them: the first is to displace Reform from the ground they now hold, and then rope in the middle classes and professionals later. But that will be hard: they have lost trust, and now that Mr Farage is in parliament he is in a strong position to fight them off – unless they can find a way of bringing him on board. The other strategy is to regain the middle ground, and then attack and squeeze Reform nearer to the next election, rather as David Cameron successfully did in 2015 to Ukip, a Reform forerunner. But Tory grassroots seem to have little patience for such a strategy, and they need somebody to lead it who is untainted by the Johnson, Truss and Sunak regimes – their own Keir Starmer. The likelihood is that the party will tear itself apart while trying to decide. This is Labour’s best hope, as they inevitably get bogged down in the mid-term.

What of the Lib Dems? Their large slew of MPs will give them more money, and more clout in parliament. It is a very different party from the ill-disciplined and eclectic group of local activists of the early 2000s, who often opposed Labour from the left. The centre is much stronger – this year’s campaign was notable for the strength of its central campaign, and consistency of its message across the country. They will seek to consolidate their gains, and build up new prospects. Their campaigning will continue with the same voter-led messages (health, care and the environment). But there is a hunger within the party for something more idealistic, defining what the party is all about. There will also be pressure to ramp up messaging around Europe. Perhaps they are shaping up to be part of a coalition with Labour in 2028/29.

But the big message of this campaign, demonstrated by both Labour and the Lib Dems, and in reverse by Reform and the Greens, is that elections are won by constituency-led targeting. The electoral system is shaping politics as completely as ever. Will electoral reform come back onto the political agenda? There are three broad options. The first is the Alternative Vote, which is not much more than a tweak to the existing system, but one which would allow those disenfranchised Reform and Green voters (to say nothing of third-placed Conservatives and Labour ones) more of a say. This would suit the Conservatives best – the Australian experience is that such a system ultimately reinforces the power to the two main established parties. And yet they united in opposing exactly this system when it was put to a referendum in 2011. The more radical alternative is proportional representation, which would suit Reform and the Greens best. This would have Lib Dem support too, though it is unclear that the party would benefit much, and it also has the support of many Labour grassroots.

But such chatter is irrelevant. The Labour leadership is focused on its core “missions”, which do not include political reform – and turkeys don’t vote for Christmas. Until there is a public groundswell to change the system, as there was in New Zealand in the 1990s, there will be no serious move to change things. The British electorate is very conservative, as that 2011 referendum showed. And if such a groundswell was going to happen, I think it would have happened already. Reform and the Greens need to learn from the Lib Dems and embrace local politics.

Electoral efficiency in British elections. From The Economist

When will the Tory rot stop?

More from MS Image Creator. I’m getting bored of the “realistic” style so tried a cartoon instead

So just how wrong have I been about the UK general election? My first prediction was that there would be a limit to the Conservative decline (at about 100 seats), and that there was no chance that the Liberal Democrats would overtake them. The Reform UK insurgents would be unable to replace the Tories. In my second post I suggested that the Conservatives would narrow the gap on Labour by squeezing Reform, limiting the overall size of their loss.

The second prediction is not faring well. I was wrong-footed by Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage, changing his mind about standing himself, and being the formal party leader. His initial declaration got Reform off to a bad start, and offered the Tories an opportunity. But the Tories made a weak start, and Mr Farage is back, attracting media like bees to a honeypot, including the supposedly establishment-biased BBC. The Conservative attempt to squeeze Reform supporters has stalled, at least at the national level, and even gone into reverse. More than one MRP poll now suggests that Reform might even pick up a handful of seats.

But I’m holding fast to my first prediction. There is quite a lot of breathless talk about the Tories being crushed, with well under 100 seats retained. One or two MRP polls suggest that they will indeed by eclipsed by the Lib Dems. Reform cheerleader Matt Goodwin, whose Substack is one of my main sources of information on the populist right, is talking of an inflection point, with Reform overtaking and crushing the Conservatives. Even the Financial Times‘s Stephen Bush finds himself dealing with the speculation that the Lib Dems might overtake the Conservatives in terms of seats won – though he still considers this unlikely.

My logic is rather different from that of other commentators, though. It is that the actual results in many constituencies are determined by the activity of local activists on the ground – canvassing, leaflet delivery, posters and such, often referred to as “the ground war”, as opposed to the “air war” of media. The ground war helps voters decide who is really in contention in their seat, and then to decide on the least-worst option. This is more likely to change minds than anything that happens in the air war, that attracts most of the attention. I am a case in point. I have voted for the Lib Dems or their predecessors in every general election from 1983 (my first vote, in 1979, was for the Conservatives). The only thing that could possibly persuade me otherwise this time is if I thought my local Green candidate was in serious contention in my constituency of East Grinstead and Uckfield – she is my local councillor, and the only one of the candidates I know – and whom I’m quite impressed with. She claims that this is the case based on local election results; but the Lib Dem candidate makes the same claim based on 2019 election results (complicated by the fact it is a new seat); meanwhile the tactical voting recommendation from Best for Britain is for Labour, based on an MRP poll. It’s as clear as mud, though I think the Labour claim to be ridiculous. The Tory candidate (Mims Davies, the MP for the now-defunct Mid-Sussex constituency) has not given up, and has been canvassing in our village, in the extreme south of the constituency. She will surely have quite an easy ride back into parliament, even if she fails to get 40% of the vote, which is likely.

The Conservatives lack opponents with a proper ground-war capability in so many of their well-off rural strongholds. Labour have never been strong in these seats; the Lib Dem infrastructure is only there for some seats (locally to me in Lewes and Tunbridge Wells, for example), and the Greens in even fewer (the non-rural Brighton Pavilion in my area). Reform is not constructed as a grassroots organisation, and will struggle without a charismatic candidate and an experienced local organiser – which applies in a maximum of three or four seats, I suspect. The MRP poll methodology only picks up the ground war factor indirectly and underplays it. This makes its constituency predictions unreliable in each individual case, though more plausible in aggregate, which is how their success is usually judged. My guess is that the unique conditions of this campaign mean that their aggregate conclusions are out too in most cases – and that the Conservatives will do better than forecast. Though to be fair, there is quite a bit of variation in the MRP seat projections. The ground war factor mean that it is unlikely for the Lib Dems to pass the 50 seat mark, or the Greens 3.

Furthermore, I think Mr Goodwin is running well ahead of the evidence in his claims about Reform. So far I think only one poll, by YouGov, has placed them ahead of the Tories, and that was a week ago. Aggregated poll trackers tend to put them several points behind. Mr Farage’s volte-face gave the party a boost but it doesn’t look like sustained momentum. They may pick up a lot votes in areas where the ground war is weak, such as in safe Labour seats, which might lead them to widespread second places, but little impact on the overall result (a bit like the SDP-Liberal Alliance in 1983 and 1987, and the Lib Dems in 1992 – though in their case it was mainly safe Conservative seats where they did well).

Having criticised recent MRP polls, though, the overall result predicted by Ipsos-Mori (Labour 453, Conservatives 115, Lib Dem 38) is not far from where I think things will end up – though the individual constituency projections are wayward – giving Labour far too big a share in Lib Dem target seats, for example). MRPs are a poor way to guide for tactical voting decisions. The Tories may do a bit better than this, and Labour worse. I hope the Lib Dems will do a bit better too, but then my hopes have run ahead of the actuality for every election since 1983, apart from 1997.

So, to answer the question posed by my blog title, I expect the Tory rot to stop soon, with their ground war strengths serving to limit the damage. What happens next is the big question – but let’s wait until after the election to consider that.

Postscript

Just after I posted this, three new MRPs came out – and Matt Goodwin breathlessly reported a new poll showing a spectacular surge in Reform support to 24%, with the Conservatives languishing on 15%. This poll was conducted by Mr Goodwin’s own organisation, People Polling, for GB News, another Reform promoter. This is curious. Mr Goodwin is an academic and I have no reason to doubt his professionalism in conducting polls. But it is an outlier. It is clearly becoming harder to conduct opinion polls, and a lot of the result depends on how adjustments to the raw results are made. There is always a lot of soul-searching after elections amongst pollsters, which then leaves the impression that they are refighting the last war rather trying the win the current one. Mr Goodwin says that the key change is that a lot of the previous “don’t knows” are making up their minds, and that Reform are doing very well here and the Tories very badly. There is other evidence for the second of these contentions (though that suggested Labour doing well) – a disaster for Rishi Sunak, whose whole campaign was based on the idea that he could rally “don’t knows” who had previously voted Tory.

I don’t think the new MRPs add anything to my analysis, though I haven’t looked at them closely. They show the Tories coming in at roughly 50, 100 and 150 seats. My opinion is that the higher end of the range is the most realistic forecast. I think generally that the MRPs are over-reporting Labour strength in seats that the party isn’t targeting – probably to the benefit of the Tories, but maybe the Lib Dems too.

20 June 2024