A week ago, Westminster was emerging dazed from Reform’s triumph in the local elections. A week later, Labour has announced a panoply of measures designed to reduce immigration including a ban on new care worker visas and an increase in the normal automatic settlement period from five years to 10 years. Keir Starmer may have used the weekend to confirm that Labour now regards Reform as its main opponent but for liberal critics here is proof that he is chasing Nigel Farage’s tail. Yet it was in a speech to the CBI in November 2022 – long before Farage’s return to the political frontline – that Starmer told businesses that “our common goal must be to help the British economy off its immigration ...

What on earth is happening with Reform in Scotland? Without much effort on its part, it keeps breaking new ground. It is the best story in town. A marmalade-dropper of a poll this week put the party on course to become the official opposition after next May’s Holyrood election. With something similar predicted at the Welsh Assembly, Reform may be on the cusp of achieving an extraordinary and unprecedented breakthrough at all political levels across the UK. It is only one poll, of course, and it is the only one so far to suggest such a dramatic outcome in Edinburgh. But given Reform’s momentum and apparently growing appeal, it may not be the last. Conducted by Survation for the PR company True ...

Keir Starmer is living out the wildest dreams of the Brexiteers. Buccaneering Britain got a trade deal with India on Tuesday, and now, No 10 has bagged the first post-liberation day deal with the US. JD Vance and a coy Ambassador Mandelson stood beside President Trump in the Oval Office as he proclaimed a deal that secures “billions of dollars of increased market access for American exports, especially in agriculture”. Starmer phoned-in to laud the deal as “historic”, before reminiscing about the bunting outside Buckingham Palace the day Churchill proclaimed Victory in Europe 80 years ago this week. Huzzah, right!? As ever, nostalgia for the Second World War served to mask the reality of this vaunted alliance. On the surface, this gives ...

Last week’s election results have proven to be far more consequential than normal. Much of the focus (including mine) has been on the dismal results for the Tories but there is no doubt that Labour has cause for alarm too.    Its decline in support was much more substantial than Labour a year after 1997 or the Conservatives a year after 2010, when our vote remained flat (helped to a large extent by a collapse in support for our coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats).  Cutting winter fuel payments and disability benefits, and increasing employers’ National Insurance Contributions were all, apparently, issues on the doorstep. No doubt that is all true, although to some extent this simply reveals that governing at a time of ...

In 1976, as Harold Wilson announced his surprise resignation, Labour was wracked by questions over its future direction. A vivid new play, The Gang of Three, depicts the fate of a trio of modernising candidates: Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins and Anthony Crosland. Even five decades on there are parallels with our own time: a chancellor seeking to impose spending cuts on a wary cabinet, tensions over European integration and an energy secretary regarded by some as a progressive hero and by others as a dangerous radical (Tony Benn/Ed Miliband).  Back then it was the spectre of Margaret Thatcher that loomed, a free marketeer intent on breaking the social democratic consensus. Today it is that of Nigel Farage (who likened himself to ...

For every political problem, there is always an answer that is simple, obvious and wrong. In the case of Labour’s disappointing results in these elections – losing Runcorn and 198 council seats, reportedly double what party strategists had expected – the wrong response would be a panicked government reshuffle and a policy shift to the right. Political defeats are chastening but they can be instructive if they are analysed properly. The strength of Reform in creating a multi-party electoral contest has to be acknowledged, but it is part of a decade-long trend. Brexit, the Corbyn surge, Boris Johnson’s landslide, Keir Starmer’s victory last year. They were all a demand for change. Support for Reform is the latest manifestation. Labour rode that tide ...

When it comes to candidates for most blatant attempt to bury bad news, the government’s release of its impact assessment of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill is right up there. Releasing the publication at 4pm on the Friday before a Bank Holiday weekend, when the nation’s media is preoccupied by the most exciting set of local election results in decades and a seismic shift in UK politics, takes some beating. On 1 May a government source denied the timing was a deliberate attempt to dampen media coverage: “When something like this is ready, you can’t sit on it,” they said (the IA had originally been planned for release nearly a month ago).  If it was a deliberate tactic, it worked, with ...

The problem with Reform, a Labour MP told me at the start of this week, is that they’re hopeless at expectation management. Rather than boasting that they would sweep the board, he suggested, they should speak of gaining a “toe hold” in local government. In the event, it didn’t matter. Expectations were high – and Reform surpassed them anyway. By winning a parliamentary by-election, 10 councils and two mayoralties, Nigel Farage has confirmed his ascent to the political mainstream. Once a single-issue campaigner, he now leads an expansive populist force capable of routing the left and the right (Italy’s Five Star Movement is one model) and insurgent across England, Wales and Scotland. Reform’s projected national share of 30 per cent makes it the first ...