The rise of the fallen angels?
Revolt on the right: the future of the fringes part one
Is it time to revise my view of Reform? Should I become a reformed Reformosceptic? Until now I’ve held the view that the Farage party (it has no democratic structure, there being just three members) was of little electoral importance. But a run of recent polls has put support for Reform in the double digits, now averaging around 12%.
At the same time the often-predicted Sunakian Conservative revival has not only failed to happen, but the party’s polling plight has got even worse. Under the first past the post system a major party is generally insulated against falling out of the running altogether – until (once in a century) suddenly it isn’t. Could it be that the leaking off to Reform of Tory supporters might lead to a fate such as befell the Liberal party between the wars? Or to the Canadian Conservatives in 1993?
Before we get into the main argument there are four things to bear in mind. The first is that no poll gives Reform enough votes to win any significant number of seats - and given their entire lack of a campaigning structure it’s hard to see that changing. The second is that consequently, it probably doesn’t much matter whether disillusioned Tories vote Reform or simply don’t vote at all. The result is the same. What might be more important is whether voting Reform cements that detachment of further Right voters from the Conservative party.
The third is that Reform haven’t suddenly become a competent political force. They have the one MP, the serial party defector Lee Anderson who broke with his own stated principle that defecting MPs should resign and stand again in a by-election. True, last week they broke the news that the Conservative candidate in the forthcoming Manchester mayoral election, a Dan Barker, had defected to the party barely six weeks before the vote. But when that vote was last held in May 2021 – on the same day that Labour lost the Hartlepool by-election to the Tories – the Conservatives received less than 20% of the vote. Now, as Reform candidates are being hand-picked by the party to fight over 600 seats, the inevitable background excavations are taking place, and the usual unsavoury artefacts are being unearthed by organisations like Hope Not Hate.
Fourth Reform’s actual vote performance has so far been dismal, up to and including the recent Rochdale by-lection, where the candidate, well-known local figure and former Labour MP, Simon Danczuk, saw Reform’s vote drop by nearly 2% to just over 6%. But again, another note – at the Wellingborough by-election a couple of weeks earlier Reform had managed 13% from a standing start.