Much of the commentary on the local elections has focused thus far on the Tories’ southern discontent. But today, Nigel Farage will turn his guns on the north of England, as he seeks to position his party as the real challenger to Labour across swathes of the so-called Red Wall. Key voters in these northern constituencies broke with Keir Starmer’s party over Brexit, elected Boris Johnson in 2019 but then switched back to Labour in protest at the Tories last July.
Given the government’s subsequent woes, Farage clearly now senses an opening. This afternoon’s speech has been heavily trailed, with a column in the Sunday Express and the splash of today’s Sun. ‘Britain is broken’, screams the headline, citing a poll showing that two thirds of voters in the Red Wall think the country is ‘heading in the wrong direction’. Aides talk excitedly of ‘something you have never seen before’ and how ‘we are going after Labour now.’
The setting for Farage’s speech could not be more appropriate: a working men’s club in Durham, whose council was run by Starmer’s party from 1925 until 2021. The timing works perfectly too, coming a week after the Reform leader declared that British Steel would shortly be nationalised. The Scunthorpe crisis is perhaps the perfect crisis for Reform UK: both the Tories and Labour are culpable in British Steel’s woes, while the role of the Chinese company Jingye neatly fits Farage’s own political economy.
‘Reindustrialisation’ is the new favoured phrase on the leader’s lips: a pitch that chimes well with key demographics. Durham, Doncaster and Nottinghamshire are some of the places where Farage has visited in recent weeks, ahead of 2 May. For Reform, there are encouraging portents that voters in such areas are less-than-enamoured with Starmer’s government so far. On Friday, the party triumphed in the Longdendale council by-election: Labour’s safest ward in Greater Manchester.
Reform’s efforts in the north have been helped by the limited Conservative recovery since 4 July. A number of Tory candidates in that general election have since remarked on how little infrastructure there was at a local level. ‘Much of the grassroots has simply shrivelled and died’, says one Tory PPC who stood in Manchester last time. Others spent no time in their constituencies, but instead were sent to fire-fight in safe seats in the south. ‘Levelling up’ as a Tory project seems to be dead in all but name too: the autumn leadership race featured little reference to the flagship policy in Boris Johnson’s landslide win.
Reform is devoid of the baggage of both the historic Tory brand and the failures of 2019 to 2024. In parliamentary seats like Blyth and Bolton South, the party came second last year. Next time, they hope to go one better. Today’s speech is all about making that a reality, one ward at a time.
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