RW Johnson: Farage’s first casualty is the British party system

Key topics:Reform UK leads polls as Labour and Tories collapse, Greens rise sharply.Brexit, immigration, and populist anger fuel Reform’s growing support.Old party loyalties erode; UK politics may shift toward multi-party flux..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By RW Johnson.The latest British opinion poll puts Reform UK at 27%, Labour and Conservative both at 17%, and the Greens on 16% and the Liberal Democrats at 15%, with the remaining 8% going to Plaid Cymru, the SNP and other minor parties. This is remarkable in many different respects. The simultaneous collapse of both the historic major parties which have monopolised government for over a century shows that the entire party system is in flux. The rise of a virtually new party – Reform was founded only in 2018 – and of the Greens are clearly both derivative from that fact. The result is that what has always been seen as a “natural” two-party majoritarian system now looks much more like the multi-party systems seen in European countries with PR electoral systems.What has caused this development ? In the first place, the old electoral alignment has become more and more fragile as it aged. By the 1970s electoral analysts attributed the strength of the two main parties principally to the inheritance of party allegiances: voters were born into Labour-voting or Tory-voting families and reproduced their parents’ views and behaviour. For some time this was treated as a sort of natural law but the rise of the SDP in the 1980s together with the Welsh and Scottish nationalists, as well as periodic Liberal revivals, showed that these inherited loyalties were much more fragile and conditional than the class-based loyalties of the older generation. And as yet younger generations succeeded one another, this fragility grew and was reflected in increasing electoral volatility..Read more:.FT: Farage shakes up UK politics as Reform topples Tory and Labour strongholds.Then came the major explosion of Brexit. The vote to leave the EU was explosive not just because it meant changing the nation’s foreign and trading relationships but because it raised fundamental questions of national identity. There was not only a fundamental divide between nativist British and a more cosmopolitan Europeanism but a more generalised protest by those who felt that key decisions affecting their lives were being taken without their consent. This was expressed in the NO campaign’s insistence that Britain must “take back control” over its own destiny. In part that reflected the feeling that more and more decisions were being taken by non-elected EU bureaucrats but it also reflected the fact that nobody had consulted the electorate over the major demographic changes taking place due to large-scale immigration. Brexit split both the major parties. The Tories, who had led Britain into Europe, now became the party of Brexit as the victorious NO campaign took over the party, while Labour, which had been barely luke-warm about joining the EU, had also largely reversed its position so that most of today’s Labour leaders make it clear that they regret that Brexit happened. The net result was to further weaken both the major parties after a long period in which they had in any case been getting steadily weaker as old loyalties faded. The resulting turmoil within both major parties was reflected at leadership level. Labour had saddled themselves with the unlikely figure of Jeremy Corbyn, an ageing left-winger with no government experience who was opposed by most Labour MPs. And the more that voters got to know him, the more they disliked him. He has since been expelled from the Labour party. The Tories ran through a whole series of leaders – Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Kemi Badenoch – none of whom would probably have achieved that position in “normal” times. Both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss ended in disgrace and neither of them now sits in the Commons. Their memory remains an albatross around the party’s neck. Just as over-reach by liberal Democrats – far too much tolerance for a virtually open border, a great deal of wokery, safe spaces and all, a most unAmerican dislike of straightforward meritocracy and an exaggerated support for gender nonsense – tried the patience of ordinary Americans and paved the way for Trump, so in Britain too Reform benefits from the same exasperation. For year after year politicians have promised to reduce immigration and secure the borders: none of them have done so. Similarly, the end of the Cold War produced a “peace dividend” which has seen excessive welfare spending and inadequate defence spending. That game too, is now up. Nimbyism has been allowed to throttle economic growth. The failure by all governments to replace the council housing sold off by Thatcher has resulted in an enormous housing crisis. The sheer aggravation caused by these failures is now powering Reform.Looking back, one of Starmer’s most fatal mistakes came within days of his election victory when he ruled out the Tories’ plan to send illegal migrants off to Rwanda. This wasn’t a particularly nice plan and implementing it would have meant going against the European Court of Human Rights, but it would have worked. Other European countries are beginning to adopt variants of this plan now. Instead Starmer dismissed it out of hand and in its place merely offered nice liberal sentiments. He is now paying the price for that. The Rwanda plan was workable and if he didn’t want it he had to offer a similarly workable plan in its place.One glance at the latest poll figures is enough to convince many people that the door is now open to electoral reform and proportional representation. Actually, this is not so. As Labour showed in 2024, getting 34% of the vote was enough to produce a huge parliamentary majority. That remains the prize. If Reform get 27% of the vote, they can’t win a majority and would need a coalition with the Tories in order to govern. The logic is for them to make a pre-election deal, allowing the Tories a clear run in their most winnable seats and, in return, getting the Tories to stand down for them in seats where Reform is competitive with Labour. But since 27% is close enough to the 34% that produced a large Labour majority, Reform would hope that at subsequent elections they might achieve that. The same logic would suggest a Lab-Lib-Green coalition deal: currently those parties add up to 48%, though Labour might also want to make a deal with Plaid Cymru in Wales.The real problem, one realises, is that while one keeps the first-past-the-post system, parties can hope for a decisive governing majority, but the moment they accept PR they give up hope – forever - of gaining such a majority. For as many European countries and Israel all show, once you have a PR system in place you are effectively locked into it, even though the result is often to empower ridiculously small fragments (like the Ultra Orthodox parties in Israel) to exercise disproportionate sway because they can tip the scales for the larger parties. Similarly, a Lib-Lab-Green coalition in Britain might well find itself utterly dependent on the 2-3% of the vote that Plaid Cymru could muster..Read more:.Reform UK threatens to topple the Tory stronghold: Rosa Prince.Reform’s great weakness, of course, is that it is a populist party with zero governing experience. Moreover, it is heavily supported by what one might term the pre-political public and previous abstainers, who have a very slender knowledge of how politics actually works. Already in local government ruling Reform majorities are running into trouble because they promised to cut a great deal of fat and are now finding that there isn’t any. Similarly, Reform tends to be highly fractious: there is no tradition of party discipline and as populist promises fail some elements within their party retreat to more realistic positions but others don’t. Moreover Reform talks of making swingeing cuts to the civil service, yet in their inexperience they will need to lean more heavily than anyone else on civil service experience and expertise. And we have already seen what a mess populists can make – what were Boris Johnson and Liz Truss if not populists ?Of course, Nigel Farage likes to boast that he is 61 and has had “a lifetime of experience” and is thus perfectly equipped to be a prime minister. The fact that he thinks this a convincing argument is itself a very bad sign. We’ve all met autodidacts who like to boast that they attended “the university of life” as if life really taught one large areas of specialist knowledge. It doesn’t. At best it gives you a light smattering of information, leavened by errors. Donald Trump is a walking example of how dangerous a small amount of knowledge is. Trump thinks that as a businessman he knows about economics yet his views about tariffs are literally centuries out of date and his belief that any country running a trade surplus with America is “ripping off” America is simply laughable.Farage’s Achilles Heel is his Trump-esque apologias for Putin. This goes down very poorly even with Reform’s often very nationalist voters so Farage has latterly tried to take a tougher position. But the issue won’t go away – Farage once said Putin was the politician he most admired and he won’t be allowed to forget that. Equally, he is accused of a slavish admiration for Trump. This is more awkward since Trump would react very badly if Farage were to moderate his enthusiasm for him and in any case Farage quite openly copies many of Trump’s policies, whether it be setting up a Department of Government Efficiency or deporting unwanted immigrants.Reform says that if it becomes a governing party it will draft in large numbers of non-elected reinforcements via the House of Lords. This is a de facto recognition that the party is very short of real talent and experience: indeed, it often appears to be a one-man band. Farage has a considerable talent for public relations and sound bites – his repeated press conferences through the summer when most politicians were on holiday abroad were extremely successful and have left many Labour MPs lamenting that their party leadership has been much less adroit.And that is a key to the present situation. Reform’s success in a long series of polls is unnerving both the two old parties of government. Both Labour and the Tories are having to face the serious prospect of being relegated to third party status and having to cope with a Reform government. This is galling for the Tories for they know that it was their own mistakes in government – Boris Johnson promised to cut immigration and then let in an all-time record number of immigrants – which have created Reform’s opportunity. And they are so used to saying that the Tories are the world’s oldest and most successful political party that it is a bitter pill to realise that their generation of leaders has let that title slip.But it is equally galling for Labour to think that they managed to sweep back to power with a record majority but that all they have done is prepare the ground for a right-wing populist government. Moreover Labour MPs are rattled for they know that it is precisely their working class voters who are seething with indignation about immigration and defecting en masse to Reform. The result, in a nutshell, is that there is a serious prospect that both Kemi Badenoch and Keith Starmer could get dumped by their respective parties. A great deal will depend on the approaching local elections. But in either case such a move would smell of panic and there is no certainty that a change would help. Probably the best case for a change can be made for the Tories for as things stand they are the official Opposition and under sufficiently impressive leadership they could hope to gain support as they attack a wilting Labour government. There is little doubt that Robert Jenrick is the leader-in-waiting and he has an aggressive style which might be competitive with Farage’s appeal.There is no obvious alternative on the Labour side who would clearly do better than Starmer. Indeed, all the potential candidates talk about “returning to basic Labour values”, which basically means appealing only to the shrinking Labour rump while the whole point of any change would be to appeal far beyond that. Such is the Lab-Con quandary. It is extremely difficult for politicians to cope when the whole party system is in flux. There are few reliable fixed points now and the lesson of Farage’s success is that what succeeds best in the present climate is inspired opportunism.