Reform just short of a majority. Nigel Farage the most likely figure to be Prime Minister in an election held today. A shattering of the old order. The end of post-war Britain’s two-party system.
The YouGov projection for the Times / Sky this week points to Reform winning 311 seats in an election held today. Labour would take just 144. And for the Conservatives, just 45 seats.
And yet none of this feels new. Polls have been painting this picture, however, for the best part of five months now. The Britain Predicts model, which as its creator I must note had better form at the last election than YouGov, paints a similar enough picture.
It was borne out in the May local elections just gone, too. It is not normal. But it is our new normal.
Often, when I talk about the rise of Reform, and how this is something we haven’t truly seen in post-war history, some clever-dick puffs up his chest to tell me: “This is just like the SDP-Liberal alliance. It will all fade away.”
He refers to the Alliance between the Social Democratic Party and the Liberal Party that was established in 1981. While it polled as a major threat to the Conservative government, it never performed as one in elections. This thread of, frankly, cope, follows me wherever I talk of Reform. That because they were able to see off the SDP in ’83 and ’87, they can see off Reform in ’29.
It is true that we are still four years away from the next election, and that nothing is guaranteed. But we certainly are in a new, abnormal era of politics. If Reform’s surge was like the Alliance’s, it would have been over long ago. The Alliance had a consistent lead in the opinion polls for a grand total of 120 days. They surged, they peaked, and then they dropped.
[]Reform has been ahead in the opinions for more than double that. Its lead is only getting wider. And no by-election, council or parliamentary, has told us otherwise. In addition, there is the performance of the other parties. Whereas the official opposition during the surge of the SDP never went south of 26 per cent, today’s Tories are sitting at 17 per cent.
The insurgent party are disrupting the government and the opposition in a way not seen in our era. That is a statistical fact. Whatever poll or forecast you believe, it would be a fool’s indulgence to gesture it away with deference to the election of 1983.
These are not normal times. Reform is here to stay.
[Further reading: Exclusive polling: How Burnham beats Reform]
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