How much longer are Reform’s critics going to be able to get away with calling it a right-wing party? It is an odd kind of right-wing party that proposes to reinstate welfare benefits that even Labour has decided are too expensive; that pledges to nationalise the steel industry and 50 per cent of utilities; and whose manifesto for the last election budgeted for £141 billion of spending increases over five years, including an extra £17 billion for the NHS.
Nigel Farage’s party is only ‘right-wing’ if you define your political spectrum entirely in terms of attitudes to national borders and on ‘woke’ issues such as critical race theory and trans rights, or if you see climate change and net zero as a left–right issue. If your political spectrum is drawn along economic lines, on the other hand, Reform is now firmly on the centre-left. It is a party that advocates big spending – big spending which almost certainly wouldn’t be balanced by the £50 billion it claims it could save by abolishing quangos and the like.
Reform is being sucked into the vacuum left behind by Labour’s steady migration towards social liberalism and metropolitan centres. The territory of old Labour is a very natural place for it to reside. It was never going to form a government simply by picking off votes from Tory voters aggrieved by their own party’s drift to social liberalism and the multiple failures of the last government across a range of issues. Boris Johnson showed how you can win an election by conquering the Red Wall. That has become Britain’s principal electoral battleground – and Farage’s party is a far more convincing occupier of that ground than the Conservatives.
The Tories can say goodbye to Workington, but otherwise Reform UK’s leftwards drift is good news for them. It opens up a large flank for them on the economically liberal side. They are, once again, the only party in favour of small government and free markets – and also the only party which has a viable plan to cut taxes. Reform may pledge lower taxes, but Richard Tice has started to wobble on this. A promise of £90 billion of tax cuts in the first 100 days of a Reform government has been reduced to a mere intention to move in that direction. This is for good reason: the spending plans advanced in Reform UK’s last manifesto would not have allowed for any tax cuts at all; try to introduce both and we would be back in Liz Truss territory. Tice and Reform UK now seem to appreciate this, which is why the tax cuts are being watered down. They might have got away with fiscal overreach in the 2024 general election campaign; they won’t do so in the next election, when Reform UK will be taken much more seriously as a potential government.
The Conservatives, however, do have the opportunity to put forward a programme which promises lower spending, lower taxes and generally smaller government. That may not be a popular combination just at the moment – the pandemic seems to have shifted attitudes towards the state, with more people continuing to look to government to help them in their lives. But there is a long way to go until 2029. It is looking almost inevitable that the public finances will deteriorate between now and then, possibly provoking a Greek-style crisis. There are far too many left-wing economists, who are influencing the government, who seem to believe governments can carry on borrowing without suffering the consequences – the deficit deniers, if you like. When the crisis comes, the Conservatives – assuming they can keep their heads and not descend into yet another bout of internecine warfare – should be in a good place.
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