Last Saturday, Rupert Lowe (Gt Yarmouth) announced he was re-launching his Restore Britain movement as a political party. Attentive readers will recall he has already set up one, Great Yarmouth First, and at the moment it is not clear where and how this fits. (Great Yarmouth Second, possibly?)
But the tectonic plates of British politics are still moving; and far from showing that the far right are in the ascendant, it shows they may have come almost as far as they can go. Pecksniff has frequently pointed out that the revolution always eats its children. Reform were the revolutionaries: they undermined the Conservative Party. But they needed the blinkered extreme right to do it, and now they need to try to behave with comparative rectitude in order to be taken seriously by those among the electorate still in command of their faculties. (That old chestnut about a Tory/Reform pact has come up again.)
So the migrating tribes of knuckle-dragging racists and xenophobes are drifting away further to the right. This week, seven Reform councillors on Kent County Council defected to Restore.
All of this churn will mean a split vote and the kind of visceral hatreds between factions which the left knows only too well. Each party will see its closest rival as its worst enemy: A Popular Front of Judea of the right.
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This week too, Nigel Farage announced his shady ‘shadow cabinet’, only he didn’t, since the shadow cabinet is drawn from the official opposition party, which is the Conservatives, (even if you wouldn’t know it). But then Mr Farage knows very little about the House of Commons, probably because he spends so little time there.
But his problem comes with those he has chosen – a freemasonry of former Tories looking to resurrect their thwarted ambitions. Presumably Mr Farage reluctantly welcomes them into his tent on the basis that it’s better having the camel inside peeing out, rather than outside peeing in. But Suella Braverman, Robert Jenrick and the rest of the recent postulants represent an all too obvious potential source of embarrassment and persecution.
Robert Jenrick for example has been appointed ‘shadow chancellor’ in spite of internal bickering over the idea. It is also clear Mr Jenrick and his party leader hate each other. Mr Jenrick is not a man made restless by his conscience, so what does Mr Farage think Mr Jenrick is going to be up to over the coming months? Mr Farage has already publicly slapped down Honest Bob over a policy dispute, only one day into his job. Is Newark’s MP (the only man whose constituency is an anagram of what people think of him) really going to spend the next three years paving the way for Clacton’s finest to walk into power?
The idea brings mirth to the wise men at the Muckrakers. (That always makes George suspicious. He assumes somebody has once again referred to the Old Unprintable as the Old Undrinkable.) As one toper observes, borrowing a phrase from the Blessed Mick McCarthy: “If Farage and Jenrick are still pretending to be besties at the next election, ‘I’ll bare my bum in Burtons’ window’”.
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Mr Lowe may hanker for an England of Gaumont British News, which went out with Izal toilet paper. But he is a professional hater, whereas Mr Farage is just a golf club bore with an eye for the main chance. (On the other hand, everyone knows who Nigel Farage is, but 92% of poll respondents this week had no idea about Rupert Lowe.) But there is reportedly alarm at Reform HQ, and indecision as to how to deal with the Restore arrivistes. The strategy seems to be to paint Restore as – mind your beer – ‘extremists’.
Robert Jenrick is already claiming Reform is actually centre-right, and to try to prove it he has produced a budget plan identical to that of any Tory chancellor over the past 10 years.
But of course, Reform’s appeal has always been as the insurgents, the china-breakers. Their voting base isn’t going to feel too mollycoddled by a party of pipe-smoking middle-of-the-road Kenneths. So expect a further fall in the party’s standing in the polls.
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So what do the polls say? This week’s supports the premiss that the far right are in trouble. The regular YouGov poll for The Times shows Reform’s support dropping to 24% (down by three points in a week), and Labour, Conservatives and Greens all within seven points of them. The left bloc together have 49%, the right have 42.
According to YouGov, the Greens are slightly in the lead (22%) among voters under 65, ahead of Reform (21) and Labour (20). The poll shows the extent to which tactical voting is likely to be employed. ‘Anybody but Reform’ sums it up.
It could mean in some cases unfancied Labour or Tories being squeezed into single figures in order to accommodate a tactical vote for another party. If repeated across the country, this degree of tactical voting would make a Reform majority all but impossible.
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So let us look at how people are actually voting. There were four council by elections this week – hardly sufficient to draw conclusions, but they also point in the direction of Reform’s problems. Three were Labour-held seats, and they lost them all: to the Greens, Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru. Reform stood in all three, and came sixth, third and second.
The fourth was the only election in East Anglia: in Kirkley in Lowestoft. Here, the Greens beat Reform is a straight two-way fight, by 480 to 324. The population is mostly low-income, white British, and the area is considered somewhat deprived. Prime Reform territory, then. Only it turns out, not at all.
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Reform are used to getting a free ride, with the BBC in particular providing apotropaic qualities. The BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg might just as easily be called Sunday with Nigel Farage. Meanwhile both Labour and Tories have both been squeamish about perhaps upsetting the odd racist voter somewhere.
But suddenly that has changed. For differing reasons, both Labour and Tories have accepted the game’s up, and they have to fight back. And from the right there are those two new and precocious rivals, each keen to attract the extremist vote.
We have already seen that Reform feel they have no option but to move away from the extremes. But the Tories too, measuring themselves against Reform and cherishing the distance, will also have to shift over rather more towards the centre ground. That pressure will be enhanced by the launch of the centre-right Prosper group, which will be aiming to influence Conservative Party members back towards the paths of righteousness.
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But at least, without the poisonous influence of those MPs who have jumped ship to Reform, Kemi Badenoch (NW Essex) has been persuaded that her party’s guns should now be trained on the new kids on the block. The Tories are attacking Reform on their economic policies, not competing with them on immigration. But they will still be aiming at the same sector of the electorate as Reform, which parties on the centre left have found difficult to influence. More splintering of the electorate, then, and tactical voting on the right.
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You will notice however, dear reader, that – however barmy or inhumane – all the political ideas are coming from the right. But is Labour’s lack of ideas deliberate? The party under Morgan McSweeney’s baleful control eschewed ideas as being dangerous and ingenuous: have no ideas, and there are no targets for the opposition to aim at. But until somebody presents some ideas that catch on, the Overton window will remain stuck on immigration.
Like Orestes pursued by the Furies, Labour will never be forgiven for deliberately ignoring the two pressing issues of the day, which the voters appear to be gagging for somebody to take up. We refer to proportional representation and of course Europe. We learn that 83% of young voters want to join the EU, and anyway so many 2016’s Leave voters are now deceased that Remain would win a new vote. What are Labour waiting for?
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For all that Labour supporters complain of their party and its leader not getting a fair deal in the media, the extent of the split within the party is rarely explained. But a poll of members this week by Survation for Labour List shows the problem. It is a popularity poll, and Andy Burnham received an overall score of +39. But comparing it to the party’s vote for deputy leader recently, we find his approval was +73 among those who voted for Lucy Powell (arguably the ‘independent’ candidate); whereas it was -18 for backers of Bridget Phillipson, (a member of the cabinet and clearly Keir Starmer’s choice).
Andy Burnham’s bid to be a candidate at Gorton and Denton was seen as a challenge to Keir Starmer, of course, and was rebuffed by party managers. That audacity marks him out as representing a challenge to the rigorous control exerted by Keir Starmer. So, there exists a difference of 91 points between the two camps. My dears, does this look a teensy bit like a split to you?
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So to the Gorton and Denton by election. Every bookie is giving the result to the Greens, on very short odds, but that doesn’t mean inside knowledge: just where the punters are hoping to make a few quid. Meanwhile, Electoral Calculus reckons it will be a shoo-in for Reform.
Pecksniff does not claim to have the skinny, though of the two then certainly the Greens seem the more plausible, for two reasons. First, the party has been smothering the constituency with workers ever since the election announcement, and Reform don’t have anything like the same organisation. A party’s ‘ground game’ is crucial in getting out the vote. (Labour’s here has always had a formidable reputation, so they shouldn’t be dismissed.)
But if rumours are true that Green organisers are moving their workers from their strong Muslim support and the young professionals in Gorton into supposedly Reform-leaning Denton, that might be significant. Party managers always want to cover their own vote first; then when they have tied it up, they become more aggressive and go hunting elsewhere. This tactic is far beyond propaganda: this is the very business of winning or losing. So if the Greens really are moving their forces into Denton, that would suggest their own vote looks good and they are parking their tanks on Reform’s lawn. But dear reader, we remain in the hands of caprice.
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Meanwhile, Reform carry on in the same old way, demonstrating how they are close to bankrupting and causing chaos in councils across the country. On Southend Council, the party’s councillors refuse to take part in training, presumably on the grounds that they know it all. Council leader Councillor Daniel Cowan says he believes Reform councillors believe it is “beneath them”.
At the same time, on Suffolk County Council, the leader of the Reform group, Councillor Christopher Hudson, has demanded redundancies among staff. But when asked, Cllr Hudson admitted he did not know how many redundancies would be required, or how much money would be saved. He also wants a ‘get back to work drive’, to chase up the skivers on sickness absence, though he has no idea how much that would save either.
He also wants a freeze on staff pay and claims the departing chief executive should not be replaced.
According to Councillor Andrew Stringer, leader of the county council’s main opposition group of Greens, Liberal Democrats and Independent councillors: “It looked like it was written by a spoiled child.”
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“Allegations of a shocking breach of party rules,” is the latest and hardly surprising outburst from Your Party. The allegation is from somebody called the Platform for a Democratic Party. Then there is the Grassroots Left, Jeremy Corbyn’s bit which is The Many. Zarah Sultana’s bit – god knows what that’s called – the Socialist Party who, with parts of the TUC, are complaining about expulsions; and all we are waiting for now is Uncle Tom Cobley and his anarcho-syndicalist faction to turn up and we can all slope off to the pub.
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This week’s intelligencers were Karl Whiteman, Malcolm Lynn, David Patey, Celina Błędowska, Stace Richards, Liz Crosbie. Helen Forte and James Porter.
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