How does Labour solve a problem like Reform? This is the question that transfixes Westminster. When Nigel Farage announced his return to politics last year, some Starmerites were jubilant – any chance that remained of a Conservative comeback was extinguished.
But what began as a nightmare for the Tories could become one for Labour. That much was clear on 4 July when MPs were overjoyed by Starmer’s landslide but troubled by its lovelessness. “The populist right will be the challenge of the next parliament,” one told me that evening, noting the number of cabinet-held seats with Farage’s party in second.
That has proved prescient. Polls are a snapshot, not a prediction, but they still make grim viewing for a new government (it was not until the 2000 fuel protests that Tony Blair briefly lost his lead). Were an election held today, More in Common’s MRP survey found, Reform would finish first with 180 seats, ousting nine cabinet ministers. Should Farage’s party win Runcorn and Helsby, a hitherto safe Labour seat, in next week’s by-election, and claim councils such as Doncaster and Durham, alarm will reach a new crescendo.
Yet as Robert Jenrick, the permanent candidate, vows to unite the right, some in Labour identify an equal and opposite problem – the fractures on the left. While the latest YouGov poll shows Starmer losing 11 per cent of his 2024 base to Reform, that is far outweighed by the 21 per cent lost to the Liberal Democrats and the Greens – a “forgotten flank”, critics say (there are 68 seats Labour would lose owing to defections). A government that has cut foreign aid, excoriated the “flabby” state and imposed the largest welfare cuts since George Osborne, runs this analysis, is offering little to cheer progressives.
No 10 strategists respond as if asked “What have the Romans ever done for us?” One speaks of “dozens of things that would simply never have happened under a Tory government”, including the establishment of GB Energy, “a landmark workers’ rights bill”, closer relations with Europe (the “reset” summit with the EU is just a few weeks away), renewable energy investment, the £22.6bn rise in NHS spending and the 6.7 per cent increase in the minimum wage.
Another senior Labour adviser emphasises that “we don’t target Greens and Liberals any less than Reform”, citing interventions by Steve Reed on rivers and sewage, Bridget Phillipson on free breakfast clubs and Ed Miliband on renewable energy aimed at precisely this demographic. Only blanket media coverage of Farage, they suggest, creates the impression that he lives rent free in Labour heads.
In an era of fragmentation, can the broad but shallow coalition that elected Starmer be maintained? Labour insists so. Its polling and focus groups show that the cost of living and the NHS remain the two issues on which its re-election will hinge. Support for economic interventionism cuts across cultural divides and – as even the radical left goes cold on identity politics – Labour believes these are fading too.
The biggest challenge that the government faces is delivering in time. “Reform have been doing better as people’s trust in politics has been broken, they are a symptom of that,” Steve Reed, Morgan McSweeney’s Lambeth patron, tells me, offering some reflection amid the partisan warfare of election season. “This government has to rebuild that broken trust and until there are visible proof points of change, I don’t think people will be prepared to give that trust back.”
The UK is a country in which living standards have barely grown for almost two decades, life expectancy is enduring a “Soviet-style slump”, energy and rail bills are among the highest in the world and Britons endure the worst access to healthcare in Europe. Will all of this – any of this – have changed enough by 2029? On this, far more than Farage’s political cross-dressing, Labour’s fate will depend.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[See also: Don’t blame the OBR for Britain’s economic woes]
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