Reform’s threat to the mainstream parties is unique in UK political history

Martin Farr, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary British History, Newcastle University

Labour’s former shadow chancellor John McDonnell has declared that Keir Starmer’s government has driven “a knife into the heart of what I believed Labour stood for” and called for party members, unions and MPs to take back control.

The text was McDonnell’s, but the pretext was Nigel Farage. Earlier in the week, the Reform leader moved his tanks on to Labour’s lawn by promising to reverse the government’s withdrawal of winter fuel payments to pensioners, and remove the two-child benefit limit, a week after Starmer had committed the most perilous of political allusions: evoking the language of Enoch Powell over immigration.

Starmer has been singed (as was Tony Benn in 1970) by playing with Powell’s incendiarism. The disingenuousness of denials that so irregular a phrase as “an island of strangers” was not Starmer dog-whistling marked another low.

At the centre of Labour’s dilemma is political mutability; how those most elemental, political categories “right” and “left” have blurred into indistinction. Reform UK were ostensibly of the former – nationalist, individualist, authoritarian – but now parade the sacraments of the latter: nationalisation, collectivism, welfarism.

Betrayal

Betrayal narratives follow Labour leaders as night does day, but Sir Keir Starmer’s inconstancy and inability to offer mitigation by counter-narrative at least demonstrates his fidelity to his political hero Harold Wilson. His ministers in the 1960s and 1970s despaired at their electorally successful prime minister’s apparent lack of defining principle.

Of the many issues Reform UK raises, the most intriguing is also the least answerable: individual agency. It will never be known whether Britain would still be in the EU had Farage not survived his 2010 plane crash, but it’s more probable than not. Similarly, had Farage withdrawn, as he promised, from British politics to more lucrative pursuits across the Atlantic, the existential threat to both the Labour government and the Conservative party would have gone with him.

But Farage stayed – and Reform is now a threat of a different order to his previous vehicles. They were significant – UKIP with Brexit; the Brexit party providing Boris Johnson’s 2019 victory – without being serious. They lacked policies (or even policy processes), professionalism, personnel (UKIP was the only party to ban former members of the BNP because it was the only party to have need to).

Reform is now at the tipping point – both financially and electorally – of seriousness. It runs councils. It has mayors. Its triumph in the Runcorn by-election demonstrated discipline, and the importance of a sound candidate.

When parties split

In their public personas, Farage and Starmer are antitheses; the one glib, the other grave; the one with too much personality, the other too little. But charismatic politicians who “make the weather” can also break the party: Farage most recently and repeatedly. But before him Joseph Chamberlain split the Liberals in 1886 and the Unionists in 1903 and David Lloyd George again split the Liberals in 1916. Oswald Mosley caused chaos for Labour in 1931 and David Owen left Labour in the 1980s to form the Social Democratic Party (SDP), which he also later split.

In 1981, the SDP achieved (in alliance with the Liberals) a poll surge of the kind currently being enjoyed by Reform. And in the 1983 general election the SDP/Liberal Alliance won only 675,000 fewer votes than Labour. But thanks to the first-past-the-post electoral system, the Alliance won 186 fewer seats. Labour’s geographical concentration saved it; the Alliance came second all over the country.

In 2024, first past the post delivered what its advocates love, and its critics hate: a clear, and unfair, outcome. Labour won two-thirds of the seats on one-third of the votes. It was the most disproportionate result in history.

Britain’s new multi-party politics may deliver a multi-party parliament at the next election, but through an electoral system designed – insofar as it was designed – for two. With Reform set to breach the 30% threshold, safe seats will be fewer and farther between; marginal seats the norm.

This would present a challenge for a Labour leader much more nimble than Starmer. His dilemma is devilish: ape Reform and yield urban voters to the Greens and Liberal Democrats; repudiate and see the rebuilt red wall razed. There are other places for progressives to go. Indeed, there may soon be another: a new party of the left. McDonnell – who already sits as an independent, having had the Labour whip withdrawn last year – may see it as a lifeboat.

Kemi Badenoch – and Robert Jenrick, her most likely usurper – face a strikingly similar problem. Responding to Reform in kind will cede affluent voters to the Liberal Democrats. The Conservative party is the most electorally successful in history in part because it never had a challenger on the right. There’s now another place for conservatives to go. (Or, as it were, to remain.)

Threat

This is the historically unique threat of Reform. In warning of Farage – the most consequential politician since Margaret Thatcher – as a serious threat, Starmer and Badenoch may in overstating augment him, but to not do so is to risk acquiescing. Catastrophising and complacency were evident in 2014, when UKIP came first in the European Parliament elections. Two years later, Britain voted for Brexit.

Reform still has somewhat less than fully thought-out, never mind fully-funded, policies. Its talent pool is a puddle. It’s now in office and will have a record to defend. It’s dominated by one person, and one who repels as much as he inspires. It’s still unlikely that in five years’ time Farage will be in government, much less prime minister. But it is less unlikely than it was, and is likely to become less unlikely still.

This article was first published on The Conversation