by Atul Hatwal

Nigel Farage is a grifter and political huckster. He infects politics with prejudice and, as his conduct over summer demonstrated, cares not a jot about the real consequences of his posturing. But he is also the man who could help cement a new voter coalition for Labour that sustains the party in power over multiple general elections.

Three interlinked factors make Nigel Farage a unique electoral gift to Labour: Britain’s First Past The Post (FPTP) electoral system, the idiocy he engenders within the Conservative party leadership and his toxic – for the majority of voters – personal brand.

Britain’s FPTP voting system has ensured that the choice at constituency level has usually been one of two parties for as long as Britons have gone to the polls. The identity of the two parties might vary in different parts of the country – for example, in Scotland, the SNP are normally one of the two, in parts of England, the Lib Dems are in the mix – but it is mainly Tory versus Labour.

FPTP’s iron law of two means that if one of the duopoly somehow has its vote divided by a new entrant, then the other party tends to win big. In the 1980s, the SDP detached a section of Labour’s support and helped the Tories register triple digit majorities. In 2024, Reform was the Tories’ version of the SDP.

Currently there is a mania sweeping the Conservative party that Reform could replace them in the top two. To an extent, anything is possible, yet this scenario is extraordinarily improbable. The last time a party was replaced was when Labour supplanted the Liberals 100 years ago, but it took an utterly unprecedented level of self-harm from the Liberals to hand Labour their position.

The Liberal party split into two, each faction led by a former leader who had been prime minister with unbounded personal acrimony poisoning any chance of rapid rapprochement.  Both versions of the Liberals wilfully acceded to being junior partners for different governments, first with the Tories in 1918 for Lloyd George’s National Liberals and then with Labour in 1924 for Asquith’s Liberals. It was a near unique set of circumstances where each faction legitimised Tories and Labour as the senior party and very publicly obviated the point of voting Liberal to potential supporters of any hue, whether from the left or the right.

This is the level of upheaval required to be replaced as one of the main two parties under FPTP. Now, ask yourself, is anything vaguely comparable likely in the next few years – are the Tories going to split in two? Are the factions going to support Labour and Reform? Kemi Badenoch might be a dreadful leader but she’s not going to preside over that. Probably.

Rather than the Tories being replaced nationally, much more feasible is that Reform win handfuls of seats at the next election, establishing footholds in groups of constituencies where they are competitive with the Conservatives. This future, where the split on the right is perpetuated is one where versions of the 2024 election are rerun again and again with Labour taking seats that would have previously been lost, because the vote on the right is split.

It is a future made more likely by the madness that engulfs Conservative leaders when dealing with Nigel Farage. The choice for Tory members at the leadership election might have been between Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick, but in terms of attitude to Reform the options were Farager or Faragerer, with the same underlying basic pitch: ‘Nigel was right, the Conservative government was wrong and as a senior Cabinet Minister in that government I failed to make a difference’ It is baffling that anyone would seriously mount this type argument, entreating right-wing ex-Conservatives to switch back to proven failures, while the impact on more centrist ex-Conservatives who moved to Labour or the Lib Dems (17% of their 2019 voters), voters who recoiled from the bouts of performative right-wing grandstanding of recent Tory governments, seems to have been entirely ignored.

Whatever the contorted rationale at work for senior Conservatives, the result is that they are a party headed further to the right, vacating more of the middle ground, retreating from the affluent, educated bedrock of support in swathes of England which once anchored seemingly endless Tory rule. At the last election, just 1 in 10 of the Conservatives 2019 voters switched to Labour, if the Tories move further to the right then the potential for Labour to increase the level of switching becomes much greater.

Assuming there is some level of delivery against Labour’s commitments in the government (obviously it would be a very different situation if the government totally missed all of its targets), the propensity for more direct movement to Labour from the Conservatives in specific seats, as well as from the Lib Dems and Greens, will be greatly increased by the third factor: Nigel Farage himself.

His strength is his appeal to voters on the right but to voters in the centre and particularly those on the left, he is a deeply divisive figure. In the most recent Ipsos December survey, 14% of 2024 Conservative voters said they would prefer Keir Starmer as PM to Farage – this at a time when Labour and its leader are polling at historic lows. For Lib Dem voters 46% would prefer Starmer as PM compared to 9% favouring Farage. What this reaffirms is that there are large numbers of voters that are allergic to Farage and in the next election his reputation will likely be weaponised to squeeze votes wherever Reform are challenging.

Think about Jeremy Corbyn and how he was deployed as a highly effective wedge issue in 2019. Or how David Cameron’s Conservatives used Alex Salmond in 2015 with the poster featuring Ed Miliband in Salmond’s pocket. In France, the manner in which the spectre of the National Front has been used to drive voters into reluctantly backing the mainstream alternative at successive Presidential elections, applies the same template. A version of this is what will happen with Farage.

Reform was second in 89 Labour seats.  In all but two of these seats (Amber Valley and Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes), the vote for parties with some level of progressive definition – Labour, Lib Dem, Green, SNP or Plaid – was greater than the combined Conservative and Reform total. Under normal circumstances this sort of crude Left vs Right comparison wouldn’t be hugely helpful, most elections have shown that votes aren’t very easily interchanged between parties. But where there is a point of polarisation, a party or figure that voters really want to stop, voter switching to achieve a tactical objective becomes much more likely. The spectacular efficiency of the Lib Dems in 2024, with 72 MPs on 11.8% of the vote, is testament to this.

The seat in England where the total votes of parties on the right and left are almost exactly equal (there is a gap of 38 votes) is Kim Leadbetter’s, Spen Valley and it provides an example of what could be possible.

She has a majority of 6,188 over Reform, 16,076 to 9,888, but with the Conservatives on 9,859, there’s clear potential for Reform to take the seat if they could collapse the Tory vote.

However, there are a combined 3,709 Lib Dem and Green votes that could be squeezed with a stop Farage message, along with some Conservative votes, potentially in the region of 1000, if the December Ipsos poll is correct. There’s no scenario where all of these votes swing behind Labour, but equally its unlikely that every single Conservative vote switches to Reform. It will undoubtedly be a close race but one where Kim Leadbetter has a good chance, especially given her personal profile, if she can consolidate a coalition that brings together Labour voters and attracts Lib Dems, Greens and some Conservatives. Fear of Farage will inevitably be an important message in achieving this.

Out of the 89 Labour seats where Reform was second, 71 had a total progressive vote of 5,000 or more over the Reform and the Conservatives total and in each of these seats Labour has a current majority of 6,000 or more. As with Spen Valley,  there is a clear voter coalition spanning the centre right to the left that can help hold these seats for Labour and Nigel Farage will be central to the local Labour campaigns.

There’s no reason the Farage effect would just be confined to seats where Reform is second. There are a further 38 Labour seats where the Conservatives are second, but Reform is less than 2,000 behind the Tory total. In 29 of these seats the overall vote for progressive parties outnumbers the combined Conservative and Reform total.

And there are twelve Conservative seats, 10% of their parliamentary party, where Labour is currently second with the overall progressive vote higher than the Conservative and Reform total, where squeezing Lib Dem and Green votes could tip the seat to Labour.

The empirical evidence shows that there is ongoing dealignment and fragmentation in British politics but that doesn’t mean that a broad and sustainable Labour voter coalition is impossible. The key is to find issues, or individuals, that sufficiently motivate target voters.

In 2024, Nigel Farage split the right-wing vote and enabled a huge Labour parliamentary majority. At the next election, he could go one step further: Farage’s toxicity to voters across the centre right, centre left and left could help make the difference for Labour in dozens of seats by moving thousands of anti-Farage voters in each constituency, from Greens, Lib Dems, whatevers, into Keir Starmer’s column. Theoretically a more centrist, self-confident Conservative party could disrupt this, but, well, just look at them.

Atul Hatwal is editor of Labour Uncut

Tags: Atul Hatwal, Keir Starmer, Kemi Badenoch, Nigel Farage, reform

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