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Posts Tagged ‘reform’

Nigel Farage is a malign influence on British politics but he’s also Labour’s greatest electoral asset. He splits the Tory vote, drags them too far right and unites the left

28/12/2024, 09:03:00 PM

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.

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Nigel Farage and Reform were the Cleggmania of the 2024 campaign

06/07/2024, 09:11:57 PM

by Atul Hatwal

Earthquake? What earthquake. Nigel Farage might be talking up the result Reform secured but the facts tell a different story.

In 2015, Nigel Farage’s Ukip secured 3.9 million votes, 13% of the total and 1 MP. In 2024, Nigel Farage’s Reform won 4.1 million votes, 14% of the total and 5 MPs.

Yes, 2024 was an improvement over 2015 for Farage and his party’s vote was better distributed but remember who they, and all of the other parties, were running against: a tired, divided government in its 14^th year that had presided over a parliamentary session where, for the first time, the country was worse off at the end compared to the start. Nothing works, public services are on their knees and even Nigel Farage has said that this version of Brexit has been a disaster.

The real question to be asked is why didn’t they do much better?

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Wes Streeting is right. If Labour is going to save the NHS there needs to be a serious debate about its future

07/01/2023, 10:27:51 PM

by David Talbot

The NHS is so central to British politics that a vague promise to provide it with more funding, festooned across the side of a bus, helped to sway a referendum of vital national importance. Such was the potency of the claim, which spoke to voters’ deepest passions, and indeed fears, about the NHS, that whilst voters believed Brexit would be bad for the economy, they had believed the Leave campaign’s claim of more funds for the health system in a post-Brexit Britain.

The pledge was indisputably incorrect, and horrid – but ultimately effective – politics. Little or no precious national debate was directed towards just what the funding ought to be directed towards, nor whether more long-lasting reform was required beyond the perennial resources argument.

That may be, of course, because ‘the NHS’ and ‘crisis’ has become the white noise of British politics. As an editorial in the BMJ pointedly stated: “The current media frenzy over the latest NHS crisis prompts speculation on how the NHS might end.” The caveat, however, is the editorial was written in 1999.

The Shadow Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, has lamented that the NHS is not “the envy of the world” and that “it is a service, not a shrine”. He has been lambasted from the predictable bastions of conservatism, the far left and the BMA. It did, though, signal a welcome, and long overdue, injection of realism from the Labour Party into the NHS debate.

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Britain needs to be at the heart of a reformed European Union

07/11/2013, 05:10:55 PM

by Callum Anderson

“Geography has made us neighbours. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners, and necessity has made us allies. Those whom God has so joined together, let no man put asunder.”

That was president Kennedy addressing the Canadian parliament in 1961. However, to me, those words also hold particular resonance with Britain’s relationship with the European Union. As is well known, the prime minister has already made a commitment to giving the British people a referendum on British membership of the EU in 2017. The argument is set to be intense: I’d like to set out why Britain must retain its EU membership.

If Britain wants to be prosperous in the 21st century, it must engage not only with countries such as China, India and Brazil, but also with EU members. But what has the EU achieved during Britain’s membership? It has continued to maintain the peace, helped to bring down the Berlin wall and the iron curtain, and welcomed new states from across Central and Eastern Europe into the EU family. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of Britain’s take advantage of our EU membership every year.

According to Eurostat, the EU’s independent statistics office, 711,151 UK citizens lived in other EU countries in 2011, whilst the British Council has stated that 9,095 UK students participated in the ERASMUS programme, the exchange programme allowing young Britons to study in other EU countries not only free of tuition, but with the help of a grant from the EU. Moreover, without the EU, British workers wouldn’t have a range of protections that they take for granted including, but not limited to: a maximum number of working hours, guaranteed breaks and protection against being forced to work long hours.

Britain and the EU are, like it or not, bound together economically. Now, there are many who say: “If only Britain left the EU, it could simply join the European Free Trade Area, thus maintaining the current economic ties, whilst freeing itself to seek free trade deals with other countries – most notably the Commonwealth countries, the United States and China.” Sounds good, right? Well, if anything ever sounded too good to be true, then this is it.

First, it is important to note that a little over half of the UK’s trade is done with the EU; it just makes no sense to leave an economic trading bloc which we are so dependent on. Were we to just leave (almost certainly in controversial circumstances), than whilst it is unlikely that we would be economically cut off, it would be too dangerous to assume that countries such as France and Germany would allow British businesses to enjoy the same advantages of market access, as it does now.

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If Labour wants to save the NHS it must change it

16/02/2012, 07:30:58 AM

by Peter Watt

Almost everybody agrees that the NHS bill is dangerous. Except, probably, the health secretary Andrew Lansley. Patients groups, trade unions and most of the royal colleges are seemingly all united in their condemnation. And opinion polls indicate a sceptical public. The legislation is so dangerous that the end of the NHS is apparently nigh if you listen to the most hysterical opponents of the legislation.

And increasing numbers of Tory MPs allegedly think that the bill is bad for their political health. If the economy is Labour’s weakness, then they know that the NHS is theirs. Much of the public may not yet have caught up with the reforms, but they fear that they will soon.

Up until now the government has successfully blamed all of the country’s ills on the last Labour government. It has been easy, and on the whole very successful. But they know that between now and the election, every winter crisis, unclean ward or staff shortage is an opportunity for Labour to blame them and their NHS legislation. And that risks their seats and may just put the outcome of the next election, which up until now they were feeling optimistic about, in some doubt. (more…)

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The government is spinning crime rates rather than tackling them

14/07/2011, 05:58:51 PM

by Matt Cavanagh

Earlier today the Home Office published the annual crime figures for England and Wales. The Spectator blog informs us that ministers are trying ‘to spin the figures as a vindication of their nascent reform programme’. This is foolish: their only big reform, elected Police and crime commissioners, will not come in until next spring at the earliest. The other policies ministers are fond of citing, like online crime maps, local beat meetings, and a reduction in top-down targets, are all broadly welcome but are incremental developments of initiatives begun under Labour.

Meanwhile, the only major changes in today’s BCS figures which the statisticians judge to be statistically significant are a 9% fall in vandalism – this is the extent of the good news – and a 14% rise in burglary, a 38% rise in assault with minor injury, and a worrying 35% rise in domestic violence. The raw BCS figures also show a 6% rise in all violence, and a 1% rise in overall crime, but neither is judged to be statistically significant.

It is too early to say whether these increases are blips; or a sign that the long downward trend in crime since 1995 has flattened out; or the start of a belated surge in crime associated with the state of the economy. The second is the preferred hypothesis of Home Office statisticians; the third has some grounding in past experience, in that burglary and domestic violence are particularly prone to rising in tough economic times.

At the start of the downturn in early 2009, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats reacted to a much smaller increase in burglary by, first, accusing Labour of complacency, and second, predicting a ‘recession crime wave’. They were wrong on both counts: far from being complacent, ministers had already been working with the police to try to pre-empt a rise in acquisitive crime; and the increase in burglary turned out to be a blip, in marked contrast to the pattern in the last recession in the early 1990s – as I set out on this site two weeks ago.

I hope these latest increases will also be a blip. But it would be more reassuring, as well as more consistent, if Tory and Lib Dem ministers showed the same concern as they evinced in 2009 in reaction to today’s figures, and rather less complacency. The real test of their reforms – and of the impact of their cuts – will come in the equivalent figures in 2012 and 2013.

Matt Cavanagh was a special adviser on crime and justice under the last Labour government.

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If reform means breaking the link then we will lose

18/11/2010, 03:59:42 PM

by Tom Watson

One of the most difficult meetings I have taken part in was when I defied Gordon Brown at a sub-committee of the NEC. He had been convinced of the need to impose a candidate in Nottingham East by outgoing general secretary of the Labour party, Ray Collins. The general election had been called and there was little time to organise a last minute selection of members.

Collins was worried about the amount of time that would be diverted from campaigning in key seats. On balance, he was probably right, but I felt very strongly that members should ultimately decide who their Parliamentary candidate should be, even if it was at a quickly convened meeting. The vote was won by one, after Dianne Hayter, in a last minute shift and out of deference to Gordon, conceded on her avowed opposition to impositions. I voted against him. You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife.

Up until the Nottingham decision the last candidate to be imposed by the leadership of the party was a general secretary of a powerful trade union, Alan Johnson. I thought of that moment today when I read Alan’s comments in the Times newspaper. Alan wants to introduce full one-member-one-vote rules for electing our leader like the ones we have for selecting our MPs.

“It can be one member four votes and that’s wrong”, says Alan. He may be right about that. The current system of an electoral college allows multiple votes in different sections all having an unequal value, with a trade union levy payer vote having the least value and an MPs vote having the most value. One MPs vote was worth hundreds of trade unionist votes in the leadership election. Many people think that unfair. (more…)

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