Nigel Farage’s mayday alert

As the local elections approach, Reform is after Labour’s voters.

Photo by Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images

Mixing his metaphors, during a speech in Darlington on 19 April, Nigel Farage announced that he was “parking our tanks on the lawn of Labour’s Red Wall”. To translate: he is coming for Labour voters and Reform UK is confident of making significant gains in the local elections in England on 1 May; the anti-system party is also hopeful of winning the Runcorn and Helsby by-election, which Farage claims is Labour’s 16th safest seat (it is in fact the 49th), on the same day. More in Common’s April MRP poll is remarkable: its model estimates that if a general election were held today, Labour would lose 153 seats to Reform and no party would have an overall majority. What we are witnessing is the fragmentation of the voting system, with no party capable of commanding popular majority support. Both main parties are competing against rivals to their left and right as well as the SNP in Scotland, which under the leadership of John Swinney and Kate Forbes has re-established a settled lead over Labour in the polls. Most notable in Scotland is the increasing popularity of Reform, which is consistently ahead of the Conservatives.

Support for Reform is rising fastest in poorer areas outside the major cities among voters for whom the governing class is perceived to be irredeemable. When I interviewed Farage, in November 2014, he said something about the sense of mass disaffection among Labour voters that I’ve often reflected on. “Everybody thought that people’s tribal allegiance to Labour was as strong, if not stronger, than the tribal allegiance to the Conservative Party,” Farage said. “What we’re actually finding is they don’t even recognise the tribe. They just don’t. You know… the middle-class person who doesn’t think about politics very much, but is concerned about where school fees are coming from or whatever it may be – that middle-class person still thinks of the political spectrum that the Conservatives are more on their side than the other one. Increasingly what we’re finding is the people that come from the Labour side of the equation don’t think anyone’s on their side.” That sentiment has only hardened in the intervening years, which is why Farage senses an opportunity and has embraced left economic populism through his pragmatic support for reindustrialisation and the nationalisation of strategic assets. The Labour Party of 2014-15 was complacent about the threat from Farageism; the present leadership is not. But there is no agreement inside the cabinet on how most effectively to respond. A mayday alert may be just what is required.

Jonathan Ashworth, who lost his Leicester South seat to a pro-Gaza independent, is stepping down as CEO of Labour Together after one year. Labour Together is the informal network that became a well-funded think tank under Josh Simonds, now Labour MP for Makerfield. In its original iteration Labour Together was in part an offshoot from Blue Labour, which campaigns for a more conservative socialism. Under the leadership of Morgan McSweeney, often working covertly, it led the fightback against the radical Corbynite left and devised a strategy to win back control of the party and then to find a leader who could implement a preconceived plan for power. That leader turned out to be Keir Starmer, who was never part of Labour Together. Many MPs who were part of the network now hold prominent roles in Starmer’s cabinet, including Shabana Mahmood, Steve Reed (interviewed on page 12), Jonathan Reynolds and Lisa Nandy. Others such as Rachel Reeves, Lucy Powell, Bridget Phillipson and Wes Streeting attended Labour Together dinners and meetings. The think tank has lost influence since the general election as the government struggles to develop a coherent politics. Despite being in power, the left does not have a thriving ecosystem of ideological production and lacks transformative ideas; the work of Labour Together is not done.

For one more time, for one last time, Pope Francis addressed the assembled faithful from the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica on Easter Sunday. He was frail and his voice was faltering after his struggles with double pneumonia, and it was moving to observe him dutifully appear after mass before his devoted followers in the square. The Easter blessing was delivered by Archbishop Diego Ravelli, with Francis by his side in a wheelchair. On Easter Monday it was announced the Pope had died. During his 12 years as pontiff, Francis (born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Argentina in 1936; his father was an Italian accountant) attempted to hold together rival factions in the Church through the embrace of ambiguity. He was not an absolutist and sought reconciliation. He gestured at liberal reforms to fundamental moral law that he was unable to deliver. And so, his papacy would be characterised by resentment and division over fealty to doctrine, clerical sexual abuse scandals, the falling numbers of men studying for the priesthood, decentralisation of the faith and conflict between liturgical traditionalists and modernisers. Francis ended up satisfying neither liberals nor conservatives, which might have been the point. What one admired about his irenic approach was his unwavering commitment to the common good, so fundamental to Catholic social thought, and his radical empathy with the poor, the sick, the excluded: “My people are poor, and I am one of them,” he said, and pushed back against those who accused him of having Peronist and Marxist sympathies. But for all his good intentions, he leaves behind a divided, fractious Church with many fundamental doctrinal conflicts unresolved perhaps because, ultimately, they are unresolvable.

This column appears in the 25 April – 1 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman magazine