Undoubtedly, Reform will do very well on Thursday. Not least thanks to the heaps of media coverage they receive. But it's worth remembering that the last time this clutch of seats were up, it was at the height of Boris Johnson's powers. And by coincidence, a Labour-held parliamentary seat is also in the mix. It's not terribly likely that they will hold on to Runcorn, though the result will probably hinge more on Labour's support having places to go and staying at home rather than turning en masse to Reform. If Farage adds another MP to the parliamentary roster, how his campaign has dug into the Tories and united the right wing anti-Labour vote behind them will have done much of the heavy lifting. If that happens, Tory/Reform talk will graduate from whispers to audible grumbles.
Ah yes, the Tories. Let's talk about them. The 2021 locals marked the Tories at their greatest extent. After pausing council elections the year previously thanks to Covid, the bloody baptism of Keir Starmer's first election test reflected more the public opinion adjustment following the 2019 election and the consolidation of goodwill the Tories (undeservedly) reaped for handling the pandemic than popular perceptions of/discontent with Labour's leader. But because Starmer's sunk new wells of antipathy and the character of the switchers from Labour to the Tories, Kemi Badenoch's crew are disproportionately exposed to Reform. Despite what Number 10 and the media would have us believe, it is the Conservatives who stand to have their local government base eviscerated. But one shouldn't just look to the right. The Liberal Democrats are well poised to gouge pounds of flesh out of the Tory rump, seeing as Badenoch and pretty much all the party have decided centre-leaning soft conservatives aren't worth bothering with.
Will this be the story come Friday morning? The Tories will do worse than Labour, but Badenoch and her putative successor will take Reform victories as a message that they need to get even more right wing. Despite what will be big losses to the Lib Dems in former heartland seats. And for Labour, if Runcorn goes and a smattering of council seats elsewhere, identical conclusions will be drawn. In other words, for both of the declining main parties, the evidence of the polls are not an occasion for thinking, reflecting, and reconsidering their political strategies. No, the preconceived narratives have already been written and the numbers will be made to fit them.
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4 comments:
The young? Farage?!
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
in the uk press, no they do not
Young people liked Corbyn, doubt The Times was talking him up on that basis
And here we are.
What "the young" think of Toad is still an open question, since few of them will have voted yesterday.
But it looks like everyone who did turned up to vote for Reform, or against Reform, or against Labour, or against the Tories.
Lib Dems and Greens did pretty well but just don't have the Putin-level backing, nor the fawning obsession of the media class, to make themselves felt on a national scale.
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