Yves here. This post on the longer-term prospects for the Reform Party is certain to annoy some readers. As Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway wrote in her book, Sense and Nonsense in the Office:
In my experience, prejudices make for good reading. They either confirm your own, or make you cross, either of which is better than nothing in these bland times.
The fact that Murphy over-eggs the pudding at points in his depiction of Reform positions does not make his core points about the party’s prospects wrong.1
One issue is that Farage has repeatedly tried starting parties only to see them fizzle out. Farage does not appear to have changed his operational playbook despite that. The second is that when you translate Reform rhetoric into policies, they look set to harm people (or their close family members) who might like Reform talk at a distance.
I am doubtful about Murphy’s point, that some voters will wake up and realize that supporting Reform amounts to self harm and will thus turn away from the party. Thomas Frank wrote an entire book, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” on how red-state Republican voters were regularly backing the GOP even though it was against their personal interest.
By Richard Murphy, Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University Management School and a director of the Corporate Accountability Network. Originally published at Funding the Future
Farage’s political track record is poor. The moment anyone tries to hold him to account, he runs a mile. How long will it be before Reform falls apart, because he and it will fall out?
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
How long is it before Reform implodes?
I ask the question for a very straightforward reason, and that is that Nigel Farage has, of course, had three political parties in his career. He started with the United Kingdom Independence Party, which was not founded by him, but which was totally identified with him from very soon after it started, and then he had the Brexit Party, and now he has Reform. And if we look at what happened to UKIP and the Brexit Party, both of them basically imploded.
Farage proved himself absolutely unable to manage a political party.
He is capable of running a personal fiefdom.
He’s capable of running what might be called a cult.
But he is not capable of managing a group of people who might actually challenge his leadership of a political party.
And if we look at Reform, his latest so-called party, it is in fact no such thing. It is a private limited company controlled by him and the party chairman, and there is no right of representation for anyone else within the party at all. Even its MPs are not reflected in the ownership of this private company, which runs the political party that they supposedly represent in parliament. And this is deeply problematic and an indication of problems to come for Reform.
How soon will those problems arise? Well, actually, they are already arising.
Remember that in July, 2024, Reform had five MPs elected for the first time to the UK Parliament, but one of them, Robert Lowe, a person for whom I have no great affection, I have to admit, has now defected from the party, or rather been suspended from it because he and Nigel Farage have fallen out. The words that he is using about Farage are pretty blunt, and there’s a libel action now in progress about whether or not Farage libelled Lowe when he was suspended from the party.
But this is not the only occasion when this has happened. There’s a more recent suspension from the party. A person called Donna Edmunds, who was elected as a Reform councillor in Shropshire only a week or so ago, has now been suspended from the party because what she said after she was elected was that she believed that people had lent their votes to Reform, they may not continue to do so, and that she thought this was a perfectly acceptable form of protest vote, creating political debate in the UK.
Reform did not agree with her. They said that she had undermined the national party and damaged its interests, and as a result, she’s been suspended.
She is not happy about that, it’s fair to say, and has made various comments which have been reported by the BBC, and basically, her suggestion is that Nigel Farage is running a cult and not a political party.
There is some evidence to support that. The relationship with Robert Lowe is clearly one indication.
Another is the relationship between Farage and Richard Tice, who headed the party for some time, but who was cast aside the moment Farage decided he wanted to get back into Parliament and would stand for the Clacton seat at the last general election. Tice just stood aside and let Farage do what he liked.
And that is the problem of this whole party. It is an organisation where Farage does what he likes. And what we know is that Farage and accountability don’t mix.
But what we also know is something else, and that is that Reform is a party based on hate.
I do not think that is a provocative statement to make. I think it’s a statement of fact.
It is very clear that Reform does not like migrants.
It does not like people who care, who they call woke, but actually, all they mean by that phrase is people who literally show empathy and compassion for others who are not as well off as them or who are different to them.
It doesn’t like civil servants and makes that fact very obvious. Nigel Farage told all the people working in local authorities where Reform has taken control of councils that they should beware for their jobs if they were doing things that Reform did not like.
He doesn’t actually like government itself. One of the major policy platforms for Reform in 2024 was that it would cut 5% out of all the costs of government, and it was sure that such savings could be found, although nobody had bothered to do the research to find out.
It doesn’t like the arts. It’s very obvious from their comments that they think many of the subsidies provided to arts in the UK are unacceptable, and that is completely consistent with the standard far-right line that freedom of thought and expression is something that they do not like.
For the same reason, Farage does not like universities. They are proposing that many university courses be cut from three years to two, not because they think that will improve the quality of the education, but because they think education is not about learning how to think, but it is all about learning specific skills for use in the workplace. And the idea that education might be of merit for itself is alien to Reform.
They don’t like those with disabilities. Farage has questioned whether many people who now claim benefits, whether that be because they have mental illness or because they have autism or ADHD or other conditions which mean that they have difficulties in managing life in the way that neurotypical people do are going to be subject to much greater scrutiny if he ever gets near power. And yet those people really do suffer those difficulties, and he basically is therefore saying, if you are not the type of person who I like, I am going to make your life very much more difficult. And this is, again, part of a standard far-right agenda, all of which is always based upon the idea of hating ‘other’ groups in society, where ‘other’ means people who are not like us, who are the people who Farage is trying to appeal to.
So, if you run a party based upon this idea of otherness, unsurprisingly, you will fall out with some people in your own party. It is inevitable when division is your primary political strategy.
You will fall out with your councillors, your MPs, your party, the local membership, or whoever else it might be, and that will be particularly the case if you run a party where one person is deemed to be in control of everything, which Farage clearly is within the cult that is Reform. And I use the word cult advisedly because their own members do.
So, how long is it before Reform fails?
My suggestion is that it actually won’t be very long at all.
There are already too many people now associated with Reform for it to survive.
We saw that with UKIP, in particular. The moment that it had a lot of MEPs, and the moment it had a lot of councillors, everything began to fall apart. Nigel Farage couldn’t manage it. He couldn’t handle criticism. He didn’t know what to do with it. And he left in a huff and formed Brexit, where the same thing was seen. The Brexit Party fell apart, and now we have Reform to replace that, and my prediction is very clear, very strong, very loud, and very certain, and that is that Reform will not survive for very long, because Farage cannot handle accountability. And yet, accountability is at the very core of the democratic process in the UK.
Reform is a phenomenon. And, let’s be clear about it, Farage is a phenomenon. He is a totally singular character within inside British politics in the way that he has managed to create ideas that have had influence, very often without him ever having political power. My suspicion is that Reform will prove to be part of this pattern.
It is so obviously structured in a way where failure is the almost certain outcome of the fact that it is not accountable to its membership, to its elected politicians, or anyone else. That failure is hardwired into it.
Farage cannot succeed because Farage cannot handle success, and Farage cannot handle accountability.
So, for all those who are placing their faith in Reform for the future of the UK, I suggest you think again.
This is not the party that is going to transform British politics.
That is not possible with Nigel Farage.
And the far-right agenda in the UK cannot exist without him either.
It is therefore time for us to look at politics afresh because there is a world post-Farage that is available to us, but it is not one in which either Labour or the Tories are going to play a significant part because they both moved far too far to the right, and it is one in which Reform will not be playing a part either.
We are going to look at a political future where the players might be very different, and Nigel Farage’s Day might be done.
____
1 I cannot respond to his “party based on hate” claim, not being in the UK to see what Farage and his followers have said. But that seems like hyperbole. I can see depicting a hard-core conservative party as being based on resentment and/or anger. Those feelings are in the same emotional color family as hate but are not intense enough to amount to hatred. Again, perhaps I have missed it, but have Reform voters engaged in what we in the US would call hate crimes like vandalizing homes or businesses of immigrants or, say, charities supporting trans initiatives?
Even yours truly, who has described some Trump Administration actions as deliberately cruel, finds statements about Reform like this to be a caricature:
It does not like people who care, who they call woke, but actually, all they mean by that phrase is people who literally show empathy and compassion for others who are not as well off as them or who are different to them.
IMHO, no one has yet well articulated the anti-woke position, perhaps because it is actually more than one position. There are admittedly some hard-core conservatives who take offense at traditional power/status hierarchies being threatened at all. But there are many more layers. Traditional affirmative action was concerned about “fair” results, as in countering the effects of discrimination in practical settings, importantly hiring and promotion. There have been a few instances of effective remedies, like blind auditions to professional symphonies, which resulted in the elimination of the former, and considerable, discrimination against female performers.
But in nearly all other areas, there are no such tidy mechanisms.
And as far as I can tell, “woke” goes much further. It appears to assume that all members of existing elites (primarily white men, although it can be extended in context to include other high-status groups) at a minimum hold deep-seated prejudices against various “out” groups and act on them, and in some cases do so consciously and deliberately to preserve their advantaged position. This amounts to shaming as well as what are seen and often are heavy-handed measures to promote “out” groups and even worse, “correct” speech and thinking.
Note that the Harvard Implicit Bias test often find that members of “in” groups are neutral in their unconscious reactions to member of “out” groups or even can be prejudiced in their favor. And the results of the Harvard Implicit Bias test hold even after taking the test an initial time and understanding how it works. So these blanket attacks on in groups, which are every bit as prejudiced as the alleged behaviors they deplore, have backfired.
I commented to his video almost immediately after he posted it, alerting him to how Reform is already being vile but is also already falling apart here in Notts. They’ll lose their overall majority by September at this rate.
PS I should have remembered to add this to initial comment but forgot. It was 6 days. Just SIX days after election that the we got the first Reform Councillor announce his resignation. So our local tax will fund a by-election. That’s in addition to the by-election already scheduled in one of the main towns in Nottinghamshire due to death of the main candidate shortly before polling day.
The resigning guy might have had a sudden health diagnosis. But nobody round here believes that. They all think that Reform achieved a “Blair 1997”: never expected a landslide. Blair infamously let slip that always expected only a small overall majority and was ready to give the Lib Dems electoral reform in return for coalition to get his agenda through. Then when he got his landslide he told everyone else to sod off. I think a bunch of these new Reform councillors wanted coalition with the Tories so as to learn how local parliament works and to give them plausible deniability for mistakes. Now the tory minority are just smiling and saying “OK let’s see you do things”.
Yeah people vote against their own interests. But when Reform try to strong arm the Local Health Trusts into shutting down or radically downsizing ADHD and autism services that affect voters’ kids the voters get very very annoyed and volatile with their vote here in middle England. Notts was Reform’s biggest prize. The country is watching us.
I’m not sure I agree with Murphy’s somewhat optimistic prediction… There will absolutely be increasing levels of chaos in a rapidly growing Reform, but when looking at the dismal election turnouts, it’s clear that Reform’s success is built on the total disillusionment with British politics. I spent quite a bit of time leafleting and speaking with folks about the pain Reform policies can bring to them. Their response wasn’t disagreement but rather “it’s all bollocks”. They’ll gladly sacrifice what little they have left just to see the Tories and Labour lose, and so they can retain some sense of dignity.
Until another party can come along, earn the trust of the British people, and provide an alternative positive program that they believe in, I’m not sure who will even be capable of beating reform. You don’t need to inspire people when only 20% of people come out and vote.
Thanks. I haven’t been as systematic as you in terms of actually door-kocking etc but I do over-hear and join in to discussions with locals around here – one of the most marginal parts of the country, never mind Notts – at the bus-stop. I agree totally that people want to kick both major parties in the privates, even if it hurts them too: that goes a long way towards explaining why we got BREXIT.
The low turn-out thing is also a big worry that you identified. The UK and US both see much reduced turn-outs outside of the general election in many areas because people correctly recognise that those levels of government have less/no influence on things. For instance the Conservatives since the 1980s have made local government increasingly reliant on central government funding (to keep them on a tight leash): this has led to the only “locally based” taxes (Council Tax on residents and business rates for companies) to become disproportionately important in terms of allowing the cities and shires to “do anything”. They are shackled and voters either don’t know or don’t care enough to enact national change so as to reverse this despicable state of affairs.
It’ll take some out the box thinking to kick-start a new positive-policy party. Unfortunately you must start with people’s wallets: find things you can cut to reduce Council tax that doesn’t materially degrade this country further. I’m thinking a lot about that myself and have some ideas that would appeal to the older people round here (who, let’s be honest, are the only ones likely to actually go out and cast a ballot rather than just create a funny online meme). Sometimes some somewhat negative stuff (based on real experience) is required to kick-start something new…..if people saw a 20% reduction in their Council Tax round here I’ll bet they’d be more open to listening to subsequent more positive policies that actually leads them to think someone CARES about Notts and not just the Islingtonistas in London and the financiers in the City. Maybe I’m now being the over-optimist but I’m throwing around some ideas with people on social media to get a feel for what might appeal to those who don’t normally vote or who otherwise might go Reform just to show frustration.
Terry,
I’m in Notts too. In my county council constituency/ward a Labour defector got in. She left Labour due its lurch to the right. The Broxtowe Independent Alliance. So when there is a visible alternative to Reform they can win. There are rumours of Corbyn and others about to announce a new left party.
I don’t think voters went for Reform in the hope of reduced council tax. In my conversations I am amazed at the general political ignorance and in particular about Reform. Farage is a character (although not one I like) and is on TV all the time, the BBC like him, which helps Reform. I also think ‘a pox on both their houses’ drives a lot of Reform’s popularity, along with anti migrant sentiment (‘they are given council houses, clog up the NHS etc). Someone I know voted Reform in the general election because ‘they were the only ones who mentioned the NHS (on a leaflet)’, she was completely unaware that Farage is against the whole concepts of the NHS. Farage never seems to be really tackled by the media about his policies while a left wing politician (are there any) or union leader would be treated very differently.
Maybe we will see a left) social democrat) party founded soon. Or maybe not as the ex-Labour left have traditionally been wedded to the Labour Party.
Thanks. I am very glad some of the Broxtowe Independents got in – IIRC they actually won against the Labour leader of Broxtowe council, which they quite rightly shouted to the high heavens. If you follow Starmer rubbish then we in Nottingham and its “ring” of boroughs around it that together constitute “Metropolitan Nottingham” will give official Labour a damn good kicking.
We don’t like Westminster imposed people. They’re the borg and we know resistance is NOT futile. I think the BBC has manifestly failed on the news front by platforming Reform to a degree they are not entitled to. I personally want their charter revoked when it’s up for renewal in a few years. I want the BBC to be privatised BUT to be made like Channel 4: Majority state owned. You could argue for a merger between the two media. C4 adverts don’t generally bother me because they have to be OKed by statutory bodies. So a “new BBC/C4 service” majority state owned but with a light touch approach by govt suits me fine.
PS why can’t I find that article about a local Labour leader being defenstrated? More google crappification, grrr.
Terry,
The ‘left’ has generally supported the BBC, or at least the concept of a non-commercial broadcaster, but frankly BBC news and current affairs is so right wing partisan now I wouldn’t be bothered if they just sold it to Murdoch. The entertainment side is mostly outsourced now anyway. Your idea about a merger with C4 might be OK. C4 news is better than the BBC, although still not great.
The top of the BBC is nowadays packed with Tory appointments who were often openly Tory party supporters when appointed. I suspect these are now hedging their bets with Reform in case the Conservatives collapse between now and the next election. As you say, the charter expires at the end of 2027. I hope the Government takes the opportunity to make radical improvements. At present the BBC is not even properly meeting its obligation to be impartial, let alone to inform and educate.
I would however worry about allowing advertising as I fear it would be the thin end of the wedge. I believe US experience is that media do not cover stories that are disobliging to advertisers.
Thanks. Gladly get your concerns. But as others in this thread have said, most of the BBC is good….. it’s their news stuff that is awful.
We need to clean out BBC news dept. Start by moving BBC news wholesale to the Midlands.
Watch this which just went up and tell me you couldn’t imagine Farage giving exact same speech. Jeez.
Plus those companies that you say should invest if they’re to be allowed immigrants to fill key skill gaps. Where do the private savings for investment come from if the government fetishizes a balanced budget and won’t incur a deficit in order to enable private savings. FFS. This is perfect example of aping Reform slogans with no remotely cogent plan to implement them with proper policies.
People, unless they see Reform continuing to do stuff to directly hurt their kids, are going to think in 2029 “why vote for Reform-lite when we could have the real deal?”
Thank you, Yves.
I agree with Terry and NM. Public revulsion with the red and blue Tory duopoly is likely to overcome Reform’s performance in local government.
Reform will also be helped by Labour fighting on Reform’s turf, as per https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/05/12/labour-are-playing-to-the-fascists-whilst-hurting-hundreds-of-thousands-of-people/.
Reform’s organisation is getting more professional. It helps that the organisation is owned by two people. The media is also on side. Over the week-end, it was interesting to see some centrist log rollers online make the journey from Blair to Cameron to Starmer to Reform.
I can see some red wall and red wall adjacent Labour MPs defecting to Reform before 2029. My money is on Dover’s Mike Tapp being one of them.
Thanks Colonel. That “electoral journey” thing was something I pointed out in the comments right after the election results came out. It looked like massive move from Conservative to Reform. Yet people forget that a large part of central and north Nottinghamshire used to be much more red (mining etc).
Thatcher was determined not to have the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) bring the country to its knees again and her be another failure like Ted Heath. Thus she bought off the Nottinghamshire miners so they split off and defied the strike in the 1980s. The freebies they got didn’t last for long after the strike was broken but Notts coal had helped keep the lights on across the UK. But the NUM was broken and a lot of northerners never forgave the “Notts scabs” who enabled this. Meanwhile the Conservatives turned a lot of red wards and red/blue marginals blue across central and North Notts.
So there are a lot of quite leftish but socially conservative people who got used to now voting Tory (or not voting at all) across central/north Notts who previously would have been the type of people to support Tony Benn who attacked the then EEC from the LEFT. This helps explain why things like BREXIT etc resonate with them when they want to kick both parties. They have realised they were tricked by the Tories and since the Labour candidates came from Starmer and had NO links with the locals, Reform naturally benefited from this “pox on both your houses” mentality.
That’s interesting re defections: Reform needs to get more professional if it’s serious because those newly elected Notts Reform candidates do NOT want to be taking their (pre-election single Reform) colleague as the exemplar of how to do things. The guy was/is a clown and repeatedly sanctioned in council for his antics. That kind of “being a character” stuff goes down quite well in certain boroughs (Ashfield and Broxtowe, the latter of which had Anna Soubry as MP til she defected from Tories to the briefly lived Change UK and when she lost in 2019 gave one of those classic interviews eviscerating Tory grifters like Boris). Soubry had tried to win Gedling (my constituency) during the Blair-Brown years but “characters” don’t go down well in this part of metropolitan Nottingham, hence why she shifted to Broxtowe where firebrand rhetoric goes down better.
One final point, getting back on topic re Yves’s parallels between MAGA type voting against their interests and Reform. Yes there are definitely worrying similarities but some differences that make the UK different. Farage, following one of his multiple trips to the USA came back and suddenly autism diagnoses were a key policy issue. WTF? We all know who he must’ve been talking to. But I suspect, like I say elsewhere in the thread, that it’s one thing to vote against your own interests, but quite another to vote for cuts to previously free automatic services that help your kids so you can keep working etc – so I expect that guff will be quietly dropped in favour of other populist messages. As the Colonel says, they’re learning from some defectors who are already “in the system”. Their main trouble in Notts is that they have nobody “even vaguely normal” to learn from, hence why rot has demonstrably set in rather quickly at County Hall. But they could do better at Westminster since there are Reform MPs round here to teach candidates. Labour round here is panicking.
Thank you, Terry.
Reform and Labour (and Blair and Mandelson) have many of the same US donors once one strips away the proxies.
After Murdoch cynically rushed to the aid of the (likely) victor, Starmer ordered the Clacton Labour party to ease off, handing Farage victory. This could have been a quid pro quo as Starmer and Johnson have much in common in terms of domestic arrangements.
Farage and Murdoch go back thirty years. As Major sought Blair’s help in cracking down on the media (barons), Murdoch identified a young firebrand to unseat the academic leader of UKIP, Alan Sked. Murdoch wanted someone to threaten the Tories and even Labour. That meant broadening UKIP’s platform from Europe / brexit. Sked, a former Liberal candidate, isn’t like Farage. Farage sought Murdoch’s permission to appear in the BBC series about the family.
Blair refused to cooperate and flew to kiss Murdoch’s ring at Hayman Island.
In the late 1980s, a young Tory trying to engineer a rapprochement between the Thatcherite Tory party and the likes of the British National Party, Paul Delaire Staines, came to the attention of Murdoch. Murdoch set him up as Guido Fawkes for exposes that the Murdoch press would rather not be associated directly with.
A dozen years ago, the City began to court Farage. That included hedge fund manager Crispin Odey delegating staff to UKIP HQ. The secondees from Odey, known for employing “earls and girls”, had some horror stories about UKIP.
Thanks Colonel. Just when I think things couldn’t be worse, you provide hard data about what’s going on. Keep on with the good work, even if it depresses people like me.
A little anecdote: the National Front (proper fascists) fielded a candidate here in Gedling right up to 1997. That should worry people. Those people haven’t entirely gone or died……you look at the Nottingham Post comments section to see that they passed on their views to new generations. It can be scary and validates what you’ve said about considering a move from UK. We’ve become a nasty little country thanks to the dreadful media.
My favourite pastime is baiting someone “patriotic” who has the Union Flag the wrong way round. Apparently more than 50% of the population don’t know which way it should be flown. It’s a stupid test but fun to bait people with. I remember the test I had to do to gain Aussie citizenship. Apparently new immigrants wanting British citizenship have something similar. It is ironic how many native born Brits would fail this utterly.
https://www.blackagendareport.com/liberalism-fascism-good-cop-bad-cop-capitalism
Report and thoughts from Devon here.
REPORT
In the county council elections (the tier below the national election, for US commenters, i.e. like a state election), the entire county is now a four way marginal (Reform, LibDem, Green, Labour/Tory), three of which are not the uniparty….
Libdems are the largest party but the council is in no overall control (NOC). More interestingly, Reform are the runner up, often very close, in many of those constituencies.
I spent all day today in a meeting that included a senior council officer today and in the breaks they were talking about the fallout from the election.
First, they said that the Libdems propose to govern without a formal coalition agreement but relying on votes from Greens and Independents. Reform are the official opposition.
Second, they also said that 90% of the councillors elected are new, either to county level politics or elected office at all! I think this is an important point: voters wanted the incumbents out, of whatever stripe.
Third, they said that the Reform leader has been punctilious about taking to all council employees and impressing upon them that Reform is not prejudiced, racist, sexist or homophobic; that there will be no bans on flags being flown etc and that – interestingly – Reform has no policies on these issues at the centre.
This last point rather implies that the experience in Notts is alarming the Devon party, who know that their electorate may have firm views on immigration etc. but the county is an “each to their own” farming county and doesn’t care to impose on its neighbours (save that it considers immigrants as non-neighbours imposed on them…).
Finally, they noted that the local government reorganisation (of merging county and local councils into unitary authorities) has now been thrown up in the air. The new councillors are “cleanskins”, without much vested interest in the political machines of the local councils or in some case the county council (many of those local councils are not Reform) and so the plans that were being cooked up between local and county councils have fallen apart and new plans are being made. The old plans being pushed included a unitary county or various splits of one I.e. some but not all councils merging together). Their parting thought was that several options would now would result in Reform majority councils….
THOUGHTS
Richard Murphy over-eggs the pudding.
-Farage quit UKIP because the new leader adopted anti-isllamist policies and appointed Tommy Robinson (Mossad and MI5 sponsored fascist) as an adviser.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-46448299
– Farage didn’t quit the Brexit party and it didn’t implode. It was simply renamed Reform.
That said, Farage has one great skill: he knows how to get in front of a mob and call it a parade, in Yves’s phrase.
And if Murphy is right and Farage fails as a leader of a coherent political machine, he will just be trampled under the mob and they will keep coming behind another figurehead.
The Uniparty needs to deal with Reform – or preferably not and be wiped out because it is rotten and has led the UK down a forty year cul-de-sac of technocratic neoliberalism….
And if leftists want to stop Reform, they need a party if their own that is socially unwoke and fiscally unaustere.
I hope that Murphy is going to write two more follow up articles. One for the present state of the Labour party and one for the Tories. After all, you would not really have Farage and the Reform party making any headway at all without how both parties are imploding and the UK political system has essentially stalled out. As an example – when you have one party take away money from pensioners so that they do not freeze in the middle of winter and use it to give to the most corrupt country in Europe, you would think that the opposition party would rip them a new one which would boost support for themselves. Instead you had crickets. Sure, Reform would probably be hopeless and be full of corrupt opportunists but I could see people giving them their votes just to burn the whole establishment down and some would even ask it that was so different to Labour and the Tories. In any case, would this be so different to so many Americans voting for Trump back in 2016?
Yep. But you might like to read this which is an interesting analysis showing that the Labor landslide in Aus conceals some phenomena which might be early indications of collapse of both main parties (and yeah yeah I’m treating the coalition as one party) in near future.
In short, the apparent collapse in number of Green and other non-duopoly parties conceals some interesting trends that might be early indications that Aus is at the “Blair stage” but might be on a trajectory that leads to similar breakdown to that observed in places like the UK. Ranked choice voting essentially gives the median voter “ultimate power” to decide which of left or right gets “elected dictatorship powers”. I wish my late co-author Tony was still around since voting and psephology were his side interests as part of his “proper” tenured job in mathematical psychology. He was born in UK but spent most of his life in California then Canada and he was definitely sceptical about the claims put forward about ranked choice voting.
We know from Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem that no voting system is objectively “fair”. Some are just better at achieving a given society’s priorities than others. You made a comment about Albanese not being great (just a lot better than Dutton) and I sense from my Aussie friends that you’re not alone. That landslide might not be half as stable as people currently think it is. Interesting times.
Yeah, Albo is just a party hack and is thin-skinned to boot. Dutton, on the other hand, was a bit of a maniac who wanted nuke power stations built all over the country. It was a program that would cost several hundred billion dollars, take decades before even the first one came online, and provide only nominal power for our grid. When he and his people started to spout about using Trump’s ideas in Oz (‘Make Australia Great Again’) and forcing people back into the office, that was it. He was done. Here is a video done by the girls at Honest Government about him-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euE8eZTyQQg (3:06 mins) – extreme language alert!
Yeah I love their videos. But you’ve always gotta be aware of who around you might overhear them when you watch….headphones always advised!
Incidentally how come there are still 3 seats over a week later not declared? Ireland does the complex multimember preference system of counting in 3 days. When we were in EU and had to use preference based voting we had declared results in 48 hours.
I get that some constituencies in WA are larger than most of Europe but this is taking the p!ss. WTF is going on?
Precisely. These “anti-system” parties like Reform spring up and thrive in an environment when the “radical centrists” cling to power for too long, either as a single dominant party, in a coalition of like-minded parties, or via a ping-ponging duopoly between two parties with superficial differences but whose programs are materially indistinguishable.
Jonathan Hopkin discusses this in his Anti-System Politics: The Crisis of Market Liberalism in Rich Democracies
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41551679-anti-system-politics
Arguably the emergence of Reform in a certain sense demonstrates that the system of democratic accountability in the the UK isn’t entirely dead — even if they ultimately fail (either as a government or to get elected in the first place) their existence and current polling success is itself a sort of signal to the system. Whether or not the response to this signal has positive or negative socioeconomic consequences remains to be seen.
Arguably the lawfare and “firewall” approach to the emergence of these kinds of anti-system parties currently in play on the continent in Europe is evidence of decay in the system of democratic accountability itself — one I believe to be far more dangerous than a scenario like the emergence of Reform. Ironically I believe that these radical centrists (whom I loathe) are undermining themselves by these undemocratic responses — they ought to let these emergent parties expose themselves by allowing them into governing coalitions, since failure to do so only gives the outsiders greater credibility in denouncing the status quo, while further identifying increasingly obvious system failure with the incumbents.
Of course, they are too thick to understand any of this, so … 🤷♂️
Thanks. I have a LOT of sympathy for the “let them govern and fail” approach that you espouse (if I understand you correctly)…..trouble is in UK there’s not much more damage we can take before we collapse so giving Reform power is playing with fire.
There are alternatives. I have to put forth the obligatory statement concerning a potential conflict of interest: I co-wrote the global textbook on Best-Worst Scaling. HOWEVER I never thought about the special case of using it in voting and have had no part in the research to investigate how it might play out (done by researchers in Belgium/NL) nor said anything that might be used as ammunition either way concerning how (I believe) it was tested by one or two Baltic countries immediately post-USSR. Apart from anything, they tried it long before I got into the topic!
So here’s the voting idea. It is based on some long established findings: people hate ranking more than 3 candidates. Their degree of confidence becomes demonstrably less for all “middle rankings”. So why not exploit this and in the interests of keeping a “single member constituency” like the UK and USA certainly seem to like for their lower house of parliament, just do best-worst voting? Minimal change from existing system. You still indicate which candidate you like most. For your ballot to be valid, however, you must identify another candidate as the one you like least. Then, akin to “net approval ratings” all candidates have their “worst” totals deducted from their “best” ones. The one with highest net score wins the seat.
Warning: this system, whilst penalising extremists, also has the potential to give power to the candidate who is the representative of the “ultimate median voter”. I once made up an artifical example of this, thinking “that’ll never happen” only for me to observe that it EXACTLY happened in the Iowa 2016 Democrat primary in terms of preferences (had BW been in play): the guy who came third (O’Malley) who was in the middle with tiny first preference vote, would have won because the Hillarybots and Sanders supporters would have cancelled each other out.
Like I say, I’m hesitant to campaign for such a system because perhaps it will just lead to a parliament of nobodies from the exact middle. But maybe that’s what we need? Dunno.
I used to live in Llanelli, which had a Liberal as its original MP when it became a constituency and has had Labour MPs ever since. I was amazed (and alarmed) by how small the Labour majority over Reform was in the last election. If Reform can win in Llanelli, they can win anywhere.
Richard North (of EU Referendum and now Turbulent Times) seems to have had a few dealings with Nigel Farage and doesn’t have a very favourable opinion of him; there aren’t many things he and Richard Murphy agree on, but this seems to be one of them.
Thanks for that insight. It backs up what I said that there is a “somewhat” diagonal line stretching from South Wales, through the central Midlands and up into north-east England that increasingly show where Reform can win or is winning. The line DOES meander but it’s a rather good rule of thumb: if you live north-west of this then Reform has a good chance. The places south-east of this are certainly not unwinnable for Reform (Farage’s own constituency!) but, if you’re a betting person, you’d be wise to be careful about thinking Reform will win.
A little titbit: GP friend of mine during Blair years when Blair gave huge bonuses to GPs to work directly for central NHS to work in the most socially deprived areas, was a GP in Jaywick (Farage area). He has lots of funny anecdotes but overall he realised “we can’t solve most of these problems……they’re due to the fact government has failed these people and a medication or whatever won’t work”.
Thank you, both.
I live in the vale of Aylesbury / mid-Buckinghamshire. Recent polling gives Reform a good chance of winning all of Buckinghamshire except Liberal Amersham and Labour High Wycombe. One poll gave the Vale to the Liberals.
My MP, toff Laura Kyrke-Smith is a friend and former colleague of David Miliband. Miliband and Alastair Campbell campaigned for her. She won by 500 odd votes last year, ending a spell of Tory representation going back to 1929, and, within a month, was being targeted by the Tories. She’s toast.
It seems Starmer was the gateway drug to Reform.
I think the “gateway drug to Reform” should be used a LOT more and trade-marked or something by you!
After the video I posted elsewhere in this thread, it absolutely fits.
Thank you, Jeff.
Years ago, I heard North talk about that. I got the impression that a he felt betrayed by the toffs pushing for Brexit. One could detect some class element to the resentment. It was more than Farage.
Gary Stevenson has a short video about how Labour and Trump (both offering some version of “reform” are going to fail.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCnImxVWbvc&t=40s
Why Labour and Trump will both fail
Farage and the Tory right between them have been very effective in ensuring that immigration remains a key election issue and Starmer’s “island of strangers” comment is a reaction to that.
Starmer seems to be shifting to meet Reform rather than propose a meaningful well thought out alternative. Like Blair he is a technocrat so trapped in that strait jacket.
He cannot win back the lost left with this policy framework.
Reform are a top down private company which is populist led but oligarch funded, (so very similar in many ways to the British Union of Fascists in the 30s) which has needed to recruit a lot of mostly disaffected right wing Tories to become its foot soldiers.
Some have form as Tory councillors, and one was even a Militant member before seeing the light. Many have questionable records, some already had breaches of party rules whilst standing as Tories. They have not proven to be especially high class candidates.
They will not be able to deliver either their vague ragbag of core policies or Reform’s Pavlovian adoption of DOGE and DEI because UK local government does not have the powers, funding or structures to allow that.
There are no DEI officers in either Lincolnshire or County Durham, much to the chagrin of the ignorant local Reform councillors.
Many of the Reform enthusiasts will gradually lose their impetus and fade into the background, or just drop out. They are a one trick pony, and with a short shelf life. Like the Gang of Four’s rise before, they are a protest party, but are currently peaking. In two or three years time they will fade, but they will retain some geographical high spots, mostly in the east of England, so from Essex into the East Midlands, may be as far north as Wearside. .
What will be left is the situation where the two main parties of government have alienated many of the core voters, let alone the swing voters needed to tip the balance electorally.
Neither leader is trusted, especially Starmer and his clique, since his total retrenchment on his ten pledges and other policy reversals like the GND since his elevation to the leadership.
Badenoch is recognisably a third rate politician, with a penchant for culture politics.
SKS really has lost a large wedge of core left support, relying now only on the centrists and right within the party. Reportedly half the membership have deserted, and the relations with the trade unions are not exactly cordial. But they are being increasingly funded by the corporate and business sector, whicb may well embed more rather than less of Reeves’ neoliberal tendency. SKS is still excavating his own electoral mantrap.
The disaffected voters will probably coalesce in future around the Greens and Lib Dems, depending on local strength, and much tactical voting.
The Tories are totally disorganised, and with a leader far closer to Reform than those traditional one nation Tories lost during the purges Johnson initiated to bolster his own hold on the party.
The Tory party has a void there.
There is even strong support for bringing Johnson back as leader from within the right wing core 100,000 or so membership, in a recent poll.
That would be another act of self harm, given his reputation and achievements.
We now have voids in the traditional left and centre right, plus two less competent main party leaders with relatively poor public presentation skills and little electoral trust.
The only party leader with good media skills is actually Farage, heavily bolstered by the right wing media bloc of GB News and their ilk, who have had a very helpful propaganda role in supporting the Reform agenda.
Even the BBC have given both Tice and Farage disproportionate coverage.
Now we know Farage really wants to privatise the NHS, a longstanding personal commitment, but which is a vote loser even with most disaffected Labour voters and centre right Tories.
However, he is currently making populist murmurings about increasing its funding and bringing English water companies, with their appalling record, into public ownership. So we have a far right populist fomenting racial discord and anti European dogma on one hand, but who is temporarily painting himself with left social and economic policies to gain power with the other. The parallels with NSDAP really are there, barely buried beneath the surface. Whether his true position can be exposed is unclear.
What happens next is probably that electoral turnouts will ebb further, and both main parties slide to their average core vote of below 30% each across the whole UK. If the two nationalist parties, Lib Dems and Greens can take say 15-20% of the vote between them, ideally concentrated geographically to win most seats, then a fairly even spread of Reform voters even at about 20-25%, are not going to make the very large gains needed to take power, though it is a fair bet Labour will not retain their current massive majority, built on the sands of FPTP.
We may well end up with a lot more marginals with small majorities and a fairly even split between four or five parties.
The SLabs are not doing well in Scotland, and Labour may well lose most of their 2024 gains here, leaving the SNP with about 50 seats, but we won’t know til after the 2026 Holyrood elections if Reform can usurp the Scottish Tories, whose recent leadership change is still somewhat dodgy.
But many electoral certainties no longer exist and all bets are currently off ….
i truly wish there was reason to care more about British politics. to me this all seems like an argument over who gets which deck chair on the Titanic. the U.K. has become largely irrelevant internationally and, internally, i am quite sure its decline will continue regardless of who lives at no. 10. the coal is gone, the oil is quickly following, Britain has cut itself off from the only cheap, reliable source of fossil fuels and, as recent events in Spain demonstrate, solar and wind just are not ready for prime time.
You cared enough to comment.
How come?
I did find it amusing that all the new Reform councillors in East Lincolnshire said “no renewables here” because unless they have a plan to help their people grow gills they’re gonna be underwater in a few decades due to the glacial rebound effect and general sea level rises which you can practically see in real time causing sections of Lincolnshire fall into the sea. So whilst we have huge uncertainty about sea levels there we won’t be putting any solar panels or wind farms there anyway. They’ll get exactly what they want. (Lots of my family are from Lincs BTW and they’re not the sharpest knives in the drawer, though they were shafted by being the dumping ground for immigrants with no commensurate increase in funding for GPs, hospitals and schools etc so I understand their frustration, even if I think their votes are misplaced).
(Comment moved due to skynet not putting it into proper position as response)
Some 30 years ago I was visiting my mother who lived in New Holland and I walked the dike holding back the Humber river estury, the water level was above the top of the bank and only the concrete wall was holding back a flood. It made me think about the rising sea level.
So far, so superficial.
There’s a different, maybe deeper view of the state of the UK here:
https://newsfromuncibal.substack.com/p/the-country-is-fd-and-it-needs-reforming/
If this is even partially true, then we are indeed faced with some interesting times.
We know our country is in deep doo-doo. The question is “how do we climb out of the hole we’re in to at least be a mid-ranking European country”?
Personally I am pessimistic until we do things like:
(1) Forbid any major media outlet to be run by anyone who has non-UK citizenship and is not resident here (no “Channel Islands shenanigans”)
(2) Land value taxation – especially down in the south-west
(3) Close half the universities and go back to vocational colleges
(4) Have ANYBODY who has senior position in media/politics/economics to have ONLY UK citizenship. No dual citizenship allowed. I speak as someome who DOES have this but if I found myself in a powerful position would happily be filmed getting rid of my non-UK citizenship.
(5) Reform the 2nd chamber so it is NOT fully democratic (maybe 100 out of 150 seats are multi-member constituencies like Ireland) but have 50 seats set aside for top people in various key fields. Not just “members of the Royal society” but the top member of the national plumbers association etc so we can veto vote-chasing idiots.
(6) 4 day week with day 5 being civic education courses teaching stuff like MMT with ultimate aim of eliminating all talk of the national credit card. Spend in right areas so private sector can save and invest.
But I know full well 99% of you will laugh at my naievety. Fair enough. I have no offspring so no skin in the game.