No two politicians could be less alike than Sir Keir Starmer and Nigel Farage. But it looks as though the Prime Minister is transitioning into the Reform party’s rumbustuous leader – or at least stealing his velvet collared clothes.
Consider the evidence.
Over the past few days and weeks, Labour has adopted a raft of the policies advocated by the right-wing insurgents. These include:
- Abolishing NHS England, the bureaucratic quango that runs our failing health service
- Announcing coming swingeing cuts to the ‘corrupt’ benefits system that Reform claims means that money is currently going to cheats and people who are not working.
- Cosying up and toadying to Nigel Farage’s bestie, President Donald Trump, previously demonised by leading Labour figures as a racist and fascist.
- Slashing the budget of International Development Aid by half – causing the resignation of the department’s Minister Anneliese Dodds – and sending the money saved to boost defence spending.
Labour’s dramatic rightward swerve in direction – doubtless prompted by Starmer’s policy guru Morgan McSweeney – is so radical that around half the cabinet’s ministers are reported to have expressed dismay and fears at their last meeting that the coming spending cuts will hit their departments.
But there is one very good reason for Starmer’s change of course: despite this week’s civil war at the top of Reform between Farage and his most prominent MP Rupert Lowe, Reform is taking the lead from Labour in the opinion polls, and it looks as though forecasts that the row will cause Reform’s decline or demise will not be borne out.
All national polls in recent months have shown Reform either breathing down Labour’s neck in second place on around 23/24 per cent, or actually in the lead on around 27 per cent. And the first poll in the coming parliamentary by-election in Runcorn and Helsby – taken right in the midst of the Farage /Lowe spat by Conservative Home website owner Lord Ashcroft – forecasts that Reform will comfortably seize the seat from Labour with a five point margin of 40 per cent to 35 per cent.
The by-election was triggered by the resignation of Labour MP Mike Amesbury after he received a suspended jail sentence for repeatedly punching a constituent during a drunken street brawl. At last July’s general election Amesbury held the Cheshire seat with a majority of 14,696 – although it was Reform rather than the Tories or Lib Dems who were in second place.
Other polls predict that Reform will do well in May’s local government elections, and in the areas where those elections have been cancelled by Angela Rayner they would have done even better and trounced Labour. Nigel Farage is kicking off Reform’s local election campaign on 28 March with a giant rally in Birmingham and already has candidates in place across the country.
Starmer has clearly concluded that the best way to counter Reform’s surge in traditional Labour heartlands in the north and Midlands is to steal their populist policies – even if that means making his ministers uneasy and upsetting left-wingers and Labour’s paymasters in the trade unions.
But the biggest losers in the current political landscape may not be Labour, but the official opposition: Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives.
Since she was elected Tory leader last year, Mrs Badenoch has failed to impress the voters who gave her party such a kicking in the General Election, and the Tories are consistently lagging in third place in the polls. She has not landed many blows on Starmer in their weekly jousts at Prime Minister’s Questions, and if the Tories perform as badly in May’s elections as the polls predict, the murmers about her weak leadership will become a cacophony.
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