At last week’s Spectator parliamentarian of the year awards, Nigel Farage took the stage in front of a large chunk of the Westminster establishment, including journalists in need of a story. Honoured with a seat next to the magazine’s new proprietor, he was there to receive the newcomer of the year trophy and deliver a pithy speech written to spread fear through his audience. And so it proved. “We are about to witness a political revolution the likes of which we have not seen since Labour after the first world war,” he said. “Politics is about to change in the most astonishing way. Newcomers will win the next election. Thank you very much.” Although booze and seasonal merriment were in plentiful supply, his words were reportedly greeted by a brief outbreak of complete silence.
And then came an equally sobering opinion poll. A somewhat obscure outfit called FindOutNow gave the Tories the lead on a mere 26% – but the big headline was about Farage’s party, Reform UK, rising to second place on 24%, one point higher than Labour. In response, you could feel the government’s anxiety levels spiking – whereupon Farage made yet another appearance on BBC One’s Question Time and capped a week of mouthwatering promotion.
Developments in the real world show that Reform’s latest growth spurt should be taken very seriously indeed. The party says it now has about 100,000 members. It boasts of a rising appeal among young men: Farage cites his million TikTok followers, and the fact that half of them are under 25. In Wales, it fancies its chances of becoming the main opposition to Labour. Scotland, where there has long been a rather deluded assumption that hard-right politics will never find any space, has recently seen a run of council byelections in which the party won creditable vote-shares: 18% in one contest in Glasgow, and 26% in the Brexit-supporting port of Fraserburgh.
Meanwhile, Reform’s profile on its English home turf continues to skyrocket. The UK Independence party’s members tended to be too consumed by Brexit ideology to be interested in the small change of grassroots campaigning. Now, although Farage still specialises in broad-sweep rhetoric, his footsoldiers are dutifully learning the argot of potholes and dog mess. In July, Reform came second in 98 parliamentary constituencies, the vast majority of which are held by Labour MPs. In such near-miss seats as Amber Valley (in Derbyshire), Barnsley South and Easington in County Durham, they are now plotting its careful, somewhat boring path to victory.
While party members look ahead to next May’s local elections, the national picture gives Reform boost after boost. Its latest uptick was undoubtedly triggered by news of net migration reaching a record 900,000. Rachel Reeves’s misfiring budget has also helped. At the same time, as I wrote last week, Keir Starmer and his comrades continue to speak the cold language of transactional politics, constantly fixating on figures and statistics. There is almost no “we” or “us” in what they offer, and Faragism is filling the void. But most of all, Reform is prospering because too many people are in the same political and economic rut where they have been marooned for decades.
Back in 2016, my former Guardian colleague Gary Younge pointed out that in lots of places, the choice presented by the Brexit referendum had been simple: a vote in favour of the status quo, or the chance to put your cross in a box that might as well have been labelled “fuck it”. Eight years on, far too many people’s political choices still seem to boil down to the same binary. The “levelling up” drive that began with Theresa May amounted to almost nothing. The new government has made a few moves in the right direction: witness the recent announcement that the funding of councils by Whitehall will finally be tilted in favour of more deprived areas of the country. There again, that is not an offer of success, but merely continued survival. People expect much more, and they are completely right to do so.
There is one huge issue I have always encountered while reporting from so many of the places now leaning Reform’s way: coastal towns, the parts of outer-east London that blur into Essex, the pancake-flat Fens beyond, and the old coalfields of the East Midlands, South Yorkshire and the south Welsh valleys. On a huge number of occasions, once conversations have got through immigration and the threadbare state of local public services, people have concentrated on one inescapable subject: housing, and how its scarcity compares with a past of relative plenty, which is exactly the kind of contrast that Reform trades on.
Four decades ago, many of Reform UK’s older supporters had their lives transformed by Margaret Thatcher’s policy of encouraging people to buy their council houses at huge discounts; now, their daughters, sons and grandchildren live with the dire housing crisis that policy caused. If you understand at least some of the rising ire about immigration as fear of even more competition for scarce resources, housing is right at its heart: in my experience, no other issue comes near its impact on everyday life.
In among the mess of numbers and statistics scattered through Starmer’s recent “plan for change” speech was the government’s oft-repeated aim of overseeing the building of 1.5m new homes (which even Labour councils have condemned as “wholly unrealistic”). As usual, how many of these will be rented from councils and housing associations remains lamentably unclear: there is talk of about 30,000 a year being constructed, but that is scarcely more than a third of what is reckoned to be needed. The government, it seems, is largely sticking to New Labour-ish visions of swing voters in commuter towns who have the means to join the property-owning democracy. But post-Brexit politics has a new and very different element: a large part of the threat from Reform centres on areas of post-industrial Britain where people’s needs are much more urgent.
There is a way that could conceivably be addressed, and it would fit the Treasury’s insistence that large-scale public spending has to fit the definition of investment. Set aside large plots of land for mixed developments based around large amounts of social housing with lifelong tenure. Announce start-dates for building, and roll out apprenticeships and further education courses that will bring a lot of the work involved to local people. Badge the whole thing up as the final arrival of what some people called levelling up; frame it as a return to tradition and brand it with union jacks, if necessary. And as you sell the idea, try to update the kind of plain-spoken, communitarian words once spoken by that great Labour god Aneurin Bevan: “We shall persist in the building of new permanent houses until every family in the country has a good, separate, modern home.”
By modern standards, that might sound impossibly ambitious. But as Farage well knows, the same was once true of the vast, unwieldy, confounding project that he successfully sold to the country, before Brexit collided with reality, and he washed his hands of it. If Labour wants to even begin to see him off, this is surely how it should start.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
