The Reform Party romped their way to a thorough beat down of the uniparty in the recent British council elections. There were more than 1,600 council seats up for election, multiple mayoralties, and a seat for parliament. Reform dominated the narrative around the polls before the election, with the two main party’s representatives panicking that their grip on the state could be loosening. Reform stole 677 council seats, two of the six mayoralties, and the seat for parliament away from the mainstream parties. The United Kingdom’s two-party system may be showing signs of being more fragile than thought.
The Reform Party came to the fore before the last election when the uniparty offered more of the same. The Conservative Party had been in power for over a decade whilst the Labour Party shifted closer to the Conservatives in a strange effort to appear electable after Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of Labour before Keir Starmer, proved untenable. The distinctions between Labour and the Conservatives were few and far between but the fundamental success of the Labour campaign was convincing enough people that they were more competent commanders of the economy than the Conservatives. Whilst this distinction was superficially plausible, libertarians with a grasp of the pitfalls of attempting to centrally command an economy knew that Labour were other side of the same coin on economic matters.
Labour won the election and their reputation unravelled incredibly quickly. Fairytale narratives about a £22 billion black hole in the public finances were shoved down the electorate’s throats so they could justify raising taxes, but the public are beginning to grasp that this narrative was more myth than reality. When you accompany this narrative with announcements of £20 billion in funding for “growth industries”, £22.6 billion in extra National Health Service (NHS) investment, almost a billion pounds per year on carbon capture and others, the public tends to not judge a government to be very trustworthy. Despite not being in power, the people knew how the Conservatives governed, so they may crow that they would have acted differently but the past decade proves otherwise.
This fake switcheroo governance does not bring hope and breeds deep rooted dissatisfaction with the political system. Fertile ground springs to life for alternative political movements, and the Reform Party is managing to mount a true challenge. The main obstacle for small political parties is to bypass the narrative that it is futile to vote for them because they will not get elected. Reform smashed that obstacle in the last election and continues to reinforce that they can get elected at all levels. For many, a protest vote is for a party other than the big two in the knowledge that the protest party likely will not get elected but at least they registered their dissatisfaction. However, when your protest party shows signs of electability, there is a massive shift in voter action. This appears to be what is happening with the Reform Party as they turn from a protest party to a party with potential for real governance.
The Conservative and Labour Parties have only themselves to blame, and it would be a magnificent sight to see them both utterly wrecked at the next election by a party they despise to their very core. Taking a small gallop through history explains why these parties are so hated.
Labour came to power in 1997 after the Conservatives attached an awful stench to their being wherever they appeared; accusations of corruption and sleaze stuck to them like chewed gum, causing their downfall. However, the Labour Party would launch a war against Iraq—riding on the heels of the Americans—that would prove utterly disastrous. Voters would discover it was under false pretences and realized they’d been dragged into the Global War on Terror against their better judgement. The Labour government maintained its reputation by appearing sound on economic matters, claiming delivery of good economic growth but, being as ignorant as politicians are on economic matters, they had no foresight to realize that the economic growth was a rickety house of cards. This house of cards exploded in 2008, unemployment shot up and millions suffered immense setbacks in their long-term financial goals. Labour would lose the next election to the Conservative Party, who would spend the next decade making single digit percentage cuts to the public finances whilst embarking on no effort to slash the chains on the engine of the market to deliver growth. This produced little to no real wage growth, steady but inadequate falls in unemployment, and a visible degrading of societal institutions. High streets became decrepit, homeless populations increased, and hardship shaved down the goodwill of communities.
Reform’s success is a reaction to the persistent incompetence and slow impoverishment of the establishment. Some argue that they are providing a platform for the worst defects of the human condition: racism, discrimination, and xenophobia. According to the establishment, these sins run rife through the very blood that drives the Reform Party. But this is a false attempt to cope with a movement they do not understand. The political elites tend to shield themselves from the real world by spending all their time within their own bubbles, away from the riff raff and amongst other equally delusional people. They just cannot wrap their heads around why so many people would choose to vote for a party that they deem to be managed by racists.
The fact of the matter is that people feel disrespected and dissatisfied with the political class. For most, they have done nothing but abuse their trust, demean them, and question their intelligence. Furthermore, they have had nothing to offer them for over a decade. Without getting into the nitty gritty of economics, they have failed to pursue policies that rejuvenate areas that are like ghost towns, abandoned by their elected governors to rot whilst they busy themselves with completely unimportant topics. When you are experiencing no growth in the progress towards your life goals it simply does not matter what is going on abroad, what a woman is, and how much the global temperature is going to rise. Yet, the political class spends disproportionate amounts of time on these topics whilst millions of people mentally switch off and feel hopeless. The establishment should not be surprised that when a communicative politician stands up, acknowledges the political class’ failings, and offers a message of rejuvenation and prosperity, they receive organic swells of support.
The fact of the matter is that the establishment has failed to offer anything remotely positive for decades and Reform is exploiting it. The political class, like a chameleon, will seek to change its colors to adapt to the surge of Reform but this is merely political opportunism. They are threatened and they are reacting to it; they have not fundamentally changed. Predictably, the parties are already discussing shifting rightwards to quell the support that Reform is receiving and neutralize them. One suspects that the population will not fall for this move since trust has been entirely obliterated, hence Reform’s success. Time will tell.
