The nation’s political hacks, news editors and TV producers can pat themselves on the back. This week they had some success at last. The party they all but invented, on whose behalf they have openly canvassed the public’s approval daily, whose leader they have deified, has at last had some success. It has been a long haul, after many years of incessant publicity for Nigel Farage (Clacton) and all those wild and rootless assertions, none of which ever had the merit of being true. At last, Thursday’s gallimaufry of elections around the country have produced a few successes for the Reform Party.
In a major irony overload, Nick Robinson asked Adrian Ramsay (Waveney Valley), the co-leader of the Greens, why his party has such a low profile compared with Reform. Mr Ramsay is a most polite young man, or he might have pointed out that Reform Party have become parasites living off a lazy, supine and welcoming news media, flatulent with its own complacent world view.
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Let us look at Reform’s results up to Thursday’s elections. Since last July, according to UK Politics, 202 council seats had been contested. Reform had won just 11 of them. They had only 72 out of 20,000 councillors across the country, and that’s just 0.36 of one per cent. And four out of five of those are disgruntled Tories who jumped ship. So until this week, only one in 300 councillors was from Reform. They had won only one election of every 20 contested. Yet still the hacks fawn, still they write their sophistries.
At the general election, Reform were predicted to win… ooh,15 seats, was it? They achieved five, so they have less than one per cent of MPs. For any other party, that would have been described as at least a disappointment and probably a disaster. But there was no such comment.
Reform are egged on by news editors who think there is nothing more exciting than pictures of Nigel Farage brandishing a pint of beer. What success the party has enjoyed at this week’s elections has been because Labour and the Tories bequeathed it to them, with the Tories quite likely in their death throes.
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So what do the elections tell us? At the time of writing this diary on Friday morning, what happened in the previously safe Labour seat of Runcorn is what happened at the referendum. People who never vote were so stirred that they turned out. It is too early to know much of other contests. But what were they voting for? According to the opinion polls, many Reform voters don’t agree with the party’s policies. So, in fact the punters are voting for them in spite of their intentions.
Politicians always claim it’s policies that win elections, and the manifesto is carved in marble by monumental masons. But actually, nobody ever reads the manifesto – often not even the MPs – and voters frequently become confused over whose policy is which. We can’t blame them: they can vote on whatever they choose. They might well give their vote to a party just because they liked that smart young woman who came canvassing.
So all those strictures by HQ, the whips and the local parties that those members who actually meet the public should stick strictly to the catechism of what it says in the policy and not get side-tracked, couldn’t have got it more wrong. People vote for people, and for people who appear in most characteristics to be human. People to whom they can relate.
Now compare this to the dry-as-dust lectures we hear from MPs, Labour in particular scared of getting as such as a comma out of place in the script.
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Pecksniff watched a Labour candidate during the general election, strolling about in a market square, meeting voters. Not once did he try to press a leaflet into their hand, or buttonhole them for an earnest discussion on immigration. To young mothers he asked after their children and shared mutual parent jokes. To a shopkeeper he asked about the fruit on display, how it was affected by the weather, when the cherry season would begin. People liked him. They left the conversation smiling. He was to them a genuine human being. People like to think they understand other people because they meet them every day. Policies are utterly foreign to them, and usually of no interest.
Now tell me, dear reader: for which is our voter likely to place his cross?
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“We obsess over the angry young men going Reform. But what of the anxious young women going Green?” That was the headline for a piece by Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian last weekend.
An excellent question. In last week’s diary we mused on whether in trying to blag votes from Reform, Labour was barking up the wrong tree. There is an indication that where Labour loses votes it’s quite likely to the Greens. We are told that last July twice as many young women voted Green as did young men vote Reform. This shouldn’t necessarily come as a surprise, though if you are a political reporter it simply doesn’t register. The world is (at least as imagined by this media-ocrity) full of young men beating their chests, whereas young women only obsess about refugees.
Ms Hinsliff also makes another excellent point: “But deeper down, perhaps, she’s angry that despite slogging diligently through school and university… she still can’t count on a lifestyle like her parents had. For all the girls who put their heads down and worked at school while the boys kicked off and absorbed all the teachers’ attention, there may be something grimly familiar about a Labour Party that takes them for granted while bending over backwards to placate noisy Reform voters.”
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Research this week by Ipsos confirms what Pecksniff wrote about last week: the susceptibility of Labour voters to go Green. In fact, they seem noticeably more likely to vote Green than Reform, where all Labour’s attentions are focused. (We will see what Thursday’s results tell us after we have examined the entrails.) The political tectonic plates seem to be shifting, but as they do, they expose with increasing cause for alarm the deficiencies of our present first past the post voting system, (as clearly set out by Stephen McNair in East Anglia Bylines’ “A new study shows a way out of Labour’s electoral dilemma”).
It is quite common at the moment for elections to show a genuine five-way split in the vote. So under the present system, one party can win complete control whilst garnering only about 16% of the vote.
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One of the findings of the Ipsos research (above) confirms once again that it was younger middle-class professionals who won the government for Labour last July. Yet where, we ask, is the recognition of that? Labour’s strategy is discrepant with reality: the party is still besotted by its previous core working class vote who have been drifting away from them for years.
But a moment’s thought tells us more, to our exasperation. At the election, Labour made no bones about trying to appeal again to their traditional base. But this was no strategic triumph for Morgan McSweeney. He got everything wrong. Analysis shows he backed the wrong voters: it was those young professionals who saved his bacon. Labour won not because of their electoral plan, but in spite of it. And it is a continuation of this extraordinary farrago of delusion which we have to put up with now, heading into our most parlous period since the war.
The party’s problem is, every Labour MP wants to be a working-class hero. There is very little kudos in being the champion of affluent young graduates in the south.
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Where Liz Truss will forever be remembered for the shelf life of a lettuce, Kemi Badenoch (NW Essex) is likely to go down as the answer to a question in some future pub quiz.
The question will be something like: “Who, in 2029, led the Conservative Party to their worst election defeat in history?”
Does Ms Badenoch have any ideas of her own? Is she really content to leave all those abandoned and bewildered centre right voters to the LibDems? Do she and her advisers really think sucking up to Reform, their main rivals, is the best way to restore the party’s fortunes and its reputation?
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Radicalism is a quality to which it seems unlikely the prime minister will make any claim. So Keir Starmer’s defence of the flag of St George this week came hardly as a surprise. It reminded your diarist of a comment by Peter Ustinov: “I can take no allegiance to a flag if I don’t know who’s holding it.”
In his interview, Sir Keir implies the wrong people may be holding it at the moment, but we should give allegiance to it because the right people may be along presently. In a curious way, this seems to sum up the present state of our politics: “Yes, we need radical change, but now isn’t the right time”. As if it ever were.
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Last week this diary wrote of a letter promoted by Andrew Lewin (Welwyn and Hatfield) regarding closer ties with the EU. At the time we didn’t have a full list of signatories, but in all, eight of the region’s MPs supported the cause. As well as Mr Lewin, they were Alice Macdonald (Norwich N), Ben Goldsborough (S Norfolk), Jenny Riddell-Carpenter (Suffolk Coastal), Josh Dean (Hertford and Stortford), Matt Turmaine (Watford), Pam Cox (Colchester) and Peter Prinsley (Bury St Edmunds & Stowmarket).
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Jenny Riddell-Carpenter has the pleasure and responsibility of being the MP for Suffolk Coastal, one of the most beautiful (and most chic) constituencies in the country. So it is good to see she is taking that responsibility seriously.
Ms Riddell-Carpenter has highlighted a particular concern of her constituents, asking the environment secretary whether he has plans to improve responsible access to nature and increase the right to roam. But as so often, the question is rather more interesting than the answer.
Junior minister Mary Creagh told her about plans for nine new national river walks, three new forests, and repealing the cut-off dates for registering historic rights of way. All to be applauded, of course. But extending the right to roam is going to make some landowners bristle, and we will have grounds for confidence when the government shows the bottle to take them on.
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Chris Hinchliff is the Labour MP for North East Herts. He has written in PoliticsHome about his concerns over his government’s ideas for reshaping the planning system. He warns that they may mean disempowering local people, who will lose control over their own communities.
Mr Hinchliff points out that to declare we simply need to build more houses overlooks the predatory instincts of the major house builders; that “private finance will always prioritise profits over meeting housing needs”. He will be working on amendments to the government’s bill, promoting a wider-reaching approach, which would certainly involve taking on powerful developer lobby.
So once again, no doubt, the government will tell us: “Yes, we need radical change, but now isn’t the right time”.
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