Labour’s Farage problem

The Reform leader has showed how easily Labour’s majority could be demolished.

Nigel Farage, photographed by Chris Floyd for the New Statesman

Back in September 2023, we named Nigel Farage the most powerful right-wing figure in Britain. Mr Farage was then not even an MP – having failed seven times to enter parliament – and his Reform party was a marginal force. But we pointed to the Conservatives’ positioning on immigration and net zero as signs of his enduring influence. Where Mr Farage leads, others often follow (as Brexit, above all, proved).

Since then his prominence has only grown. Mr Farage was comfortably elected as the MP for Clacton last July and support for Reform has surged to around 25 per cent. The party has led several national opinion polls and may overturn Labour’s 14,696 majority in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election on 1 May. A new MRP survey by More in Common projects that Reform would finish first with 180 seats were an election held today (evicting nine cabinet ministers in the process).

What began as a Conservative headache has become a Labour one. At the last general election Mr Farage helped enable Keir Starmer’s landslide victory by splitting the right-wing vote. But his advance showed how Labour’s sandcastle majority – achieved with a share of just 33.7 per cent – could be demolished. Of the 98 seats in which Reform finished second, 89 are Labour-held.

Mindful of this, Mr Farage is repositioning himself as a leftish populist. He has led calls for the renationalisation of British Steel and Thames Water and vowed to forge “a good partnership with the unions”. Even Arthur Scargill, the Marxist former president of the National Union of Mineworkers, has been praised.

But Reform’s policy programme remains incoherent. While championing an expanded state, it has also backed an increase in the 40p tax threshold to £70,000 as well as the abolition of inheritance tax (Mr Farage, recall, praised Liz Truss’s mini-Budget as “the best Conservative budget since 1986”). And though a gifted populist, the Reform leader has significant vulnerabilities. His past praise for Vladimir Putin and his closeness to Donald Trump alienates British voters of all parties.

Yet Mr Trump’s 2024 victory proved that incoherence is no obstacle to electoral success. The US president won over working-class trade unionists by promising to reindustrialise America while also attracting wealthy voters by pledging tax cuts. However cynical Mr Farage’s populist turn may appear, Labour must take him seriously.

By embracing the active state, the government has shown a willingness to discard past economic orthodoxy. The Employment Rights Bill, the renationalisation of the railways, the establishment of GB Energy and higher infrastructure investment are welcome interventions. But in an age of economic insecurity and electoral volatility, Mr Starmer must do more to convince voters he is on their side. There is a disjuncture between the government’s increasingly bold rhetoric and its more cautious actions.

One group that recognises this is Blue Labour, which advocates a fusion of economic interventionism and social conservatism. On 22 April it published a manifesto calling for the government to reconsider public ownership of water and steel, to scrap the current fiscal rules and to raise taxes on assets such as land and property.

Despite declaring that we have entered “a new economic era”, Mr Starmer and Rachel Reeves have so far shown little desire to rethink their approach. Labour, like all successful governments, must strike a careful balance between radicalism and credibility. But as we have previously argued, it is unthinkable that Ms Reeves will not need to loosen her fiscal rules or raise taxes to prevent a return to austerity. The Chancellor should begin preparing the ground for an economic reset now.

The last decade has proved that governments that do not lead change are condemned to be overwhelmed by it. On the European Union, immigration and the economy, the political establishment has been forced to embrace positions once considered extreme.

Mr Farage, an astute political entrepreneur, senses another opportunity to smash the political consensus. After almost two lost economic decades, he is finding a receptive audience in Labour’s northern heartlands. Confronted by this stark challenge to its founding purpose, Mr Starmer’s party must choose action over stagnation. If it does not, voters will not hesitate to discard it as ruthlessly as they did the Conservatives.

[See also: Inside the Chaotic Map of Doom]