2025-05-03 00:16:32

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The humiliation of the Labour and Conservative parties in Thursday’s elections has been on the cards for years. You can defy the wishes of the British people for only so long before being forced to pay a terrible price. We are slow to anger. But when anger kicks in, we quickly reach boiling point. As the two parties which have dominated British politics for so long have now found out to their cost. They can’t say they weren’t warned. Their days as the country’s two most powerful political forces could be numbered, even if their leading apologists (now peppering the airwaves with their pathetic excuses for defeat) don’t yet seem to realise it. They’ve not listened so far. Maybe they’ll listen now. But maybe it’s too late. The British people have made it clear for years they’ve had their fill of mass migration. Other than weasel words of understanding, trying to fool us that they cared, Labour and the Conservatives did nothing about it. Even after the country voted for Brexit – a clear demonstration of a rising frustration at the scale of the problem – our two biggest parties sat on their hands. Worse than that: net migration reached record levels post-Brexit. The British people have made it equally clear they’ve had enough of the political elite’s virtue-signalling obsession with the drive to achieve Net Zero carbon emissions. A middle-class, metropolitan mission financed by the fuel bills of working-class households, which are now among the highest on the planet. A policy hitherto sustained by a Labour-Tory bipartisan consensus, in which the views of the mere mortals stumping up the cash to pay for it were airily dismissed. In some ways it is a new Brexit, primed to explode. There is so much anger with our two biggest parties on so many other fronts, too. Entrenched anger with the Conservatives for 14 wasted years, which left behind no Tory legacy of note but managed to boost the Left-wing drift it inherited from Labour. Simmering anger with a Labour Party which promised to mend ‘Broken Britain’ only to make things worse. Growing frustration that the higher the tax take, the worse our public services become, turning us into a ‘pay more for less’ nation. Fury at a political class which facilitates hundreds of thousands of fresh arrivals to our country each year yet cannot even build enough homes for those already here. Increased fear as so many of our public spaces become marred by unchecked yobbery and unpunished criminality because the Plod is too busy policing our social media accounts like some deranged Twitter Sweeney. All culminating in a general despair that nothing works in our country any more, leaving those playing by the rules –doing the right thing, raising their families as best they can, paying their taxes, striving to get on – with an all-pervading sense of unfairness. In last July’s General Election voters rightly vented this anger and frustration on the Tories, who went down in flames. But what a difference almost a year makes. On Thursday they took it out not just on the Conservatives but on Labour, too, a party which has managed, in record time, the well-nigh impossible feat of becoming almost as unpopular as the Tories. A pox on both your houses, said the people, and in Nigel Farage’s Reform Party they have the perfect depository for their disillusionment. When the popularity of a government descends so precipitately, in the normal scheme of things it is the official opposition which tends to benefit. But almost everything people are coming to despise about Labour – unaffordable fuel bills, stagnant living standards, uncontrolled immigration, rising taxes, failing public services, economic incompetence – were also dismal features of the recent Conservative government. So, understandably, folks are in no mood to switch back to them, which is why the Tories could be condemned to the political wilderness for far longer than they realise. Voters have long memories, especially in matters which hit their wallets. Which is where Reform comes in. It is able to hoover up votes from disillusioned Labour and Tory voters alike because it has a clean skin: it can’t be blamed for what makes people angry for the simple reason it’s never been in power. And when you’re angry, you don’t vote for something so much as against what makes you angry. Hence Labour and the Tories on the ropes, Reform on the rise. But Reform is more than a protest vote, which is why it is especially dangerous to the mainstream parties. On all the issues which particularly offend voters, Reform already speaks for them. Less Net Zero nonsense, fewer migrants, a return to more robust policing, no to metropolitan woke, yes to provincial common sense –Reform is already deploying the language of the disillusioned, which is why it poses such a formidable challenge to the established order. Just how formidable has yet to be grasped by the political elite now under threat. But it is significant that, as Labour and Conservative partisans made their zombie-like progress through the broadcast studios yesterday, mouthing meaningless mantras as they went, they all said they had to do better on the issues Reform has been talking about (but not listened to) for ages. In other words, Farage and his party are already setting the political agenda – yet another indication that the two-party system which has dominated politics in England (it died long ago in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) is facing its biggest challenge since Labour started replacing the Liberals as the main alternative to the Tories a century ago. More serious, even, than when a Social Democratic alliance of moderate Labour rebels and centrists came close to replacing a Labour Party in the grip of the Left and militant unions in the 1980s. True, more Tory than Labour blood was shed on Thursday. But that was because more Tory seats were up for grabs, giving Reform (but not Labour) rich pickings. The Liberal Democrats picked over the Tory carcass, too, as the party was devoured in a Reform-Lib Dem pincer movement. But Labour suffered the bloodiest nose of the night by losing one of its safest seats, Runcorn and Helsby, to Reform in a by-election. Durham County Council, ruling an area often regarded as the spiritual home of Labour, also fell to Reform; and even where Labour held on to its strongholds, such as North Tyneside and Doncaster, it was by the narrowest of majorities and with a slump in its share of the vote. For the Tories it was a drubbing every bit as severe as the one it suffered in last year’s General Election, showing it has managed zero rehabilitation in the eyes of voters since then, with no prospect of an upturn in the foreseeable future. But the precipitous fall in Labour support, so soon after a landslide victory, is equally significant and underlines how Reform is just as big a threat to Labour as the Tories – perhaps more so. Labour Party managers certainly think so. Talk to them and they affect disdain for the Conservatives. Reform is what they want to speak about. But they have no clear idea how to handle it, bar crossing their fingers that Reform and the Tories don’t merge (that, and lying about Reform wanting to dismantle the NHS). A disunited Right, they think, is Labour’s best chance of re-election. But that is not something they can control. Growing calls for a merger are boosting that agenda in Tory circles. This week I spoke to several mainstream Conservatives, not at all Reform-leaning Tories, who are reluctantly coming round to the prospect. But they can’t control that process either and, as Reform becomes increasingly emboldened, it is beginning to think it doesn’t need a merger – that it’s on track to replace the Tories as the main force on the Right anyway. Thursday showed that Reform’s buoyant poll ratings translate into real votes. If anything, it performs better at the ballot box than in the polls. Reform has recently been polling in the mid-20s, either slightly in the lead or nip and tuck with Labour. The Tories now regularly languish in third place. It is perfectly possible that, with Thursday’s momentum, Reform’s share of the vote will start to nudge up towards 30 per cent. At which point a ton of seats would start to fall its way. The mirror image of Reform heading for 30 per cent would be the Tories relegated to a vote share in the late teens – teetering on the brink of irrelevance. What need then would Reform have of mergers? A hostile take-over of a Tory Party facing extinction would be far more likely. That would appeal to Farage much more than a merger. Unity on the Right by conquest: Farage’s dream, Labour’s nightmare. The significance of that 30 per cent benchmark for Reform cannot be overstated. It will be the key metric in polling in the months ahead. In a General Election, 30 per cent wouldn’t give Reform a House of Commons majority. It wouldn’t give Farage the keys to 10 Downing Street. But it would make Reform the largest party and Farage the kingmaker. Nobody else could form a government without his approval. That’s if anybody could form a government at all. Our first-past-the-post voting system produces clear results when only two parties are vying for power. But, catching up with the rest of the UK, England is now a five-party system. A General Election with Reform winning, say, 30 per cent of the vote, Labour 25 per cent, the Conservatives 20 per cent, the Lib Dems 15 per cent, with the Greens and others on 10 per cent, could produce a distribution of seats so haphazard as to make the country ungovernable. But let me come back to that crucial 30 per cent benchmark. If that becomes a familiar feature of polls in the months ahead, then Reform’s absorption of the Conservatives (with some Home Counties Tories escaping to the Lib Dems), by force or agreement, would result in a broadly united Right rising well above a 30 per cent vote share. Reform could then be on track to become the largest party in the Commons. Even an overall majority could not be ruled out. Such musings would have seemed fantastical only a few months ago. But if the two-party system is about to split asunder under the weight of its own inadequacies then all manner of hitherto outlandish prospects become possible. Reform, of course, is still a long way from power or even being a powerbroker; and even further, in its current state, from being fit for power. But it goes with the grain of enough of the British people to make it the insurgent, defining political force of our time. Now it urgently needs to upgrade the quality of its top activists and the coherence and credibility of its policies. As for the dinosaurs, it’s hard to see things getting better for them. Labour has got off to such a lacklustre start it might never recover. The economy is still reeling from Rachel Reeves’s disastrous first Budget and about to be hit by recessionary winds blowing across the Atlantic thanks to Donald Trump’s tariff tsunami. Stagflation – too little growth, too much inflation – looks like being our lot for this year into next. All Labour eyes are currently on Reform. But if the economy tanks, Keir Starmer could also face a threat from the Left, currently a wide-open gap in the political marketplace. Nor is it easy to divine any better news for the Conservatives. Thursday confirmed they remain widely despised. Kemi Badenoch is fighting the good fight but, so far, the country simply doesn’t want to listen to her. After this latest electoral debacle, rumblings about her leadership will emerge. Inevitable, perhaps, but yet another change of leader would only confirm the Tories are past their sell-by date. As for Reform, much of the media will continue to dismiss it as a one-man band unfit for government. Farage has always been underestimated by much of the mainstream media and is still regularly treated with contempt by establishment broadcasters. And it’s true. Reform, as currently constituted, is a one-man band. But, as Farage knows better than most, Donald Trump was also once a one-man band. And now the Republican Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of his MAGA movement. British politics is currently so febrile only a fool would rule out something equally dramatic happening here.