Reform
In the UK, the local elections caused an earthquake in British politics. The press is inflating this into a "devastating blow for Labour" when the Reform candidate wins a by-election with a margin of 6 votes. Six votes is not a mandate; six votes are a few people not being bothered to vote in an election that doesn't even remotely shift power in Parliament. It is also not a surprise, when the previous MP resigned in disgrace because they violently beat a constituent and then proceeded to lie about it. That sort of disgrace for Labour is so terrible that the candidate should be proud they only lost by 6 votes. This sort of scandal could easily have resulted in Labour being at the very bottom of the vote tallies.
However, with the loss of the by-election, and Reform’s takeover of 10 councils, I fully expect the press to start demanding that a new general election be called immediately because the Labour government is a complete failure. They’ve been arguing this for months already, but this is the first time that there has been an actual vote that they can point to, rather than polls. The coming onslaught will be horrific and calculated to try to force Labour out of power.
This is sound and fury, signifying nothing. It is simply quaking in fear.
First of all, one year of electoral success does not necessarily mean Reform will be viable in the long term. For the first time, they now have actual responsibility. If they do a good job with the responsibility, then they will become a real threat, one that needs to be taken seriously. If they don't, they're going to be a flash-in-the-pan movement that flames out, and if they destruct spectacularly, their entire platform may become toxic. So, both Labour and the Conservatives are probably taking a wait and see approach. For the next few months, they may pick around the edges, but I don't expect at least Labour to make a fundamental shift, even on immigration.
It is important to remember, people expect their local council to get things done. They want local services to work right, and then want clean, well-maintained roads. They do not want grandstanding and performative acts that achieve nothing. Reform winning big this time is the absolute worst thing (probably) that could have happened to them, because they will have 4 full years of governance on their CVs going into the next general election. If you look at the things they're doing it of the gate, I'm not holding out much hope that they're going to be effective. They're already importing all of Trump's culture war idiocy (By the way, can the UK please slap a massive tariff on that import?). They're talking about ending work from home, firing DEI officers, and shutting down green investment, rather than letting it a plan to turn cash strapped, struggling, councils around.
People might enjoy a couple of weeks of that, but if they don't accomplish tangible improvement, they're going to become yet another party of incompetence, and because they don't have a broad and deep base, voters will abandon them fairly quickly. If this does happen, none of what follows in this essay will come to pass, because Reform will have lost their viability.
That said, this wait and see position is reinforced by the fact the money donors are not (at least as of yet) flocking to Reform, and further, a lot of Reform's positions are things the donor class wouldn't want to happen. So, if either of the main parties were to adopt some of Reform's positions, their traditional supporters might cut them off. This means their hands are kind of tied, at least until people start voting with their feet and quitting party memberships for Reform, and the big donors turn off the taps of money.
But there is an actual earthquake building, and the major parties must address this.
There's a fundamental restructuring going on in British politics that we haven't seen since the Whigs folded. Similar to what happened then, I suspect the Conservatives will probably fall apart in the medium term, and wind up in some new amalgamation with Reform. The Tories have been flailing around since the Brexit vote was called, because what was supposed to unite the party and end the talk of leaving the EU blew up in Cameron’s hands and terminally fracturing the Conservatives. Even though the shrapnel even heavily damaged every other party, the Tories took the brunt of the blow, because this was a populist movement, and was opposed by the majority of the business community, which was the core constituency of the Conservatives. In one moment, business was left politically homeless, and the Tories pivoted towards being a populist party, abandoning their roots.
It this was America, it would have been simple. The Tories would have run Farage as an MP, named him party leader, and then made him Prime Minister at some point. IT would have been his only route, and in the aftermath of Brexit, he probably held enough cards to force this to have happened.
But because this isn't a binary system like the US, where Donald Trump could, and had to, take over an existing party, Farage wasn't under the same obligation. As I said, he might have tried to force himself on the Tories, but with their pathetic performance over the last few years, there was no advantage in that. By the time Sunak called a general election, their brand was so damaged that it would have stuck to Farage and brought him down. So, he struck out on his own. There wasn't even an advantage in a simple alliance, as shown by Reform winning like they did this week on their own. In the General Election, an electoral confidence and supply deal would have delivered Parliament to a coalition, but that would have been a fraught and uncomfortable pairing.
Still, it doesn’t look good for the Tories. They are fading; business has largely deserted them, and Reform is pulling away the Brexiteers and anti-immigration voters of all stripes. This leaves the Conservatives with a shell of their former constituents. Ultimately, Reform will likely eat the Tories, although, I suspect, once that happens, the party that emerges will take a new name, just like the Whigs did.
But this depends on two things. First it depends on Farage stepping back a bit and letting it become a real party, not just his personal enterprise. But more importantly, it depends on how Reform does in governing. They have control of a lot of councils now, and they're going to have to actually lead and accomplish things. Voters will need to know what a Reform government would look like, and they need to know that it will be somewhat effective. The first thing might be negotiable. The second one isn't. But if Reform achieves this, then the Tories are in their deathbed.
For Labour, the challenge is different, if they want to stay viable as the primary opposition, they will need to have a platform that is distinctly different from Reform's position. They will need to sweep up some of the Tories that abandon their party but also offer a compelling and most importantly, competing, vision. It isn’t going to help them to mirror Reform, because that will just set them up to be devoured in the same way that the Conservatives will be. Parties need to provide distinction to voters. One of the reasons that Labour did so poorly in 2019 was that they didn’t stake out an anti-Brexit position. Their milquetoast position about doing Brexit “better” was a non-started. If they had campaigned on stopping Brexit and reassessing the UK’s relationship with the EU, the election would have become an actual second referendum. They might still have lost, but they wouldn’t have had the blowout they did.
For the moment, Reform is a mostly one position party, without a clear articulation of critical things for a government, like military, foreign relations, and trade policy. Labour will need to be able to create distinctions with Reform to compete against them, but it's hard to do that until your opponent has actual positions. (On a side note, that's one of the things that made Trump so hard to campaign against, because there was never any coherent policy, it was just personality. But UK doesn't vote for a person, so the cult of personality doesn't work as well. This is a country that even voted out Churchill at the end of World War 2.)
This isn't to say Labour survives either. The reconfiguration of UK politics could very well wipe them out as well, especially as they're not coming across as any more competent in government than the Tories. It may be after this is all done, the two main parties will be Reform and the Lib Dems. The Lib Dems are being smart. They are staking out actual positions that are in direct opposition to ones that a Reformed Tory party would take, which will clarify things in the next General Election.
If Labour doesn’t look at what the Liberal Democrats are doing, and take a page from that playbook, although with their own distinct policies, especially for the working classes, then they are also doomed.
