Elections aren\u2019t earthquakes. They\u2019re more like aftershocks, reflecting shifts in public opinion that usually take place some time earlier. This week\u2019s election results are a catching-up exercise with the big shift in May last year: Labour\u2019s support imploded then, at a time when the Tories were unforgiven. Nigel Farage exploited this brilliantly. Things haven\u2019t changed much for about a year, with predicted humiliation for both Tories and Labour. We can s ee old political architecture collapsing around the country.<\/p>\n
A party that barely existed two years ago is now the second-largest force in Scotland and Wales, with a string of significant power bases in England. It has a great many more targets in view and is raising more in donations than any other party. Most may come from Thailand but they have been put to effective use to create a genuinely national fighting force. Farage himself is the best campaigner in politics and his new, well-funded apparatus meets a demoralised Labour Party and a long-neglected Tory machine.<\/p>\n
When an organised campaign meets the hollowed-out remnants then the results look something like what we have just seen: Tories and Labour losing in their heartlands, although perhaps not by quite as much as had been predicted. But when it comes to drawing other conclusions \u2014 trying to work out the direction that the country has taken, and what the next general election may bring \u2014 then it\u2019s far harder. The earth is still moving. Instead of a new consensus, we see a state of flux.<\/p>\n
The Liberal Democrats have been a national irrelevance since the general election, so what are we to make of them taking every single seat in Richmond upon Thames? How did they vanquish the Greens, the only other party in the council? My own focus group (I live there) suggests that alarm over Zack Polanski pushed Tory and Labour supporters to back LibDem incumbents. It was tactical voting against the upstart insurgents.<\/p>\n
Then look at Wales: until recently, Farage was set to win it outright. This seems to have led to a repeat of the tactical voting seen in the Caerphilly by-election last October. If you didn\u2019t want Reform in power in Cardiff Bay, then you\u2019d do some tactical voting for Plaid Cymru. The Scottish National Party\u2019s victory is also quite stunning: its fifth term means it will spend 23 years in power, surpassing Viktor Orban\u2019s record for holding power in Europe.<\/p>\n
But support for independence is not surging in either nation. If anything, Reform\u2019s success in Scotland and Wales shows how much the people of our islands have in common. How they\u2019re wrestling with the mess of a multi-party system in a culture where two rivals have tended to dominate. How new dividing lines \u2014 of identity, nationalist, unionist, radical \u2014 have put our whole system up in the air.<\/p>\n
The old 2016 divide of Brexiteer and Remainer is a still crucial metric in understanding how our politics is divided. Take Basildon, Rochford, Hartlepool, Hull and Havering: all voted to leave the European Union in big numbers ten years ago. Reform now has at least 30 per cent of the seats in all of these councils. And the the Remain areas? At the time of going to press, none had given Reform more than 10 per cent of their council seats. It\u2019s quite a correlation.<\/p>\n
This seems odd at first glance: what relevance can Brexit have to running a local authority? The sad truth is that local elections are seldom a verdict on local service performance; if they were, the SNP would not be entrusted with a fifth term. Labour\u2019s team in Barnsley had been one of the most effective councils in England, yet they were always going to be crushed by national political forces. Namely exasperation at Sir Keir Starmer and the gap between his promises and his delivery.<\/p>\n
The Brexit vote was never just about the EU; it masked a cry for a better economic model. To dial back globalisation and move away from a new norm where employers will import workers rather than train locals. It was all really about the nation state: community cohesion, a sense of place. Labour\u2019s problem is that the only button it knows how to press \u2014 more spending \u2014 doesn\u2019t work. It boasts of free school breakfasts, lifting the two-child welfare cap. But such measures won\u2019t change the trajectory of the places now rebelling against it.<\/p>\n
We can expect the aftershocks to keep coming. In May next year it will be Brexit-voting places like Dudley and Rotherham that are likely to fall to Reform. The year after, Walsall, Tamworth, Pendall. There\u2019s nothing inexplicable about the dismay that these voters feel. Starmer was quite right, yesterday, to say they\u2019re appalled at the lack of progress in the cost of living. But every economic forecast \u2014 inflation, interest rates, disposable income \u2014 suggests that this misery will intensify under his current policies. As will voter anger.<\/p>\n
But what we don\u2019t yet see is a sense that Reform UK has the solutions. I made a film about the party last year and we set up a focus group to try to understand the nature of its support. It was the politics of Hobson\u2019s choice; a choice of the lesser evil, a belief that a gamble on Farage was less risky than the certainty of failure with Labour or the Tories. Polls show many Reform voters think Farage is unfit for office; a quarter regard him as racist. This is unfair, but shows how thin loyalty lies.<\/p>\n
If our politics is being pizza-sliced \u2014 left and right, then systemic v anti-systemic \u2014 we\u2019ll see unlikely alliances. The anti-Reform, perhaps anti-Green tactical voting will render opinion polls less reliable. \u201cWho do you back?\u201d and \u201cWho would you actually vote for?\u201d may well become different questions. Farage has just taken the perfect stepping stone to No 10, and will soon lead a genuinely national party rich in local government experience. But it\u2019s also easy to see that backfiring as Reform meets the test of governing \u2014 and scrutiny.<\/p>\n
What we are heading towards now is a five, even six-party politics piled upon a Westminster system designed for two parties. This is not a country rushing headlong towards a Farage ascendancy: it\u2019s a country where anything could still happen. The question is whether any party can answer the demand that has been there since 2016: for control, belonging, prosperity and competent government. Until one emerges, the tremors will keep coming.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elections aren\u2019t earthquakes. They\u2019re more like aftershocks, reflecting shifts in public opinion that usually take place some time…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":932062,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5226],"tags":[802,748,2000,299,5187,1699,4884,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-946904","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brexit","8":"tag-brexit","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-european","13":"tag-european-union","14":"tag-great-britain","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116541071559817002","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/946904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=946904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/946904\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/932062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=946904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=946904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=946904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}