The best way to defeat Reform UK? Expose their gaping policy holes

The National

a day ago

Starmer's humiliation last week over his bill to cut £5 billion from disability benefits represents a potent sign of Labour's stark decline since July 2024. The Government won the vote – after making substantial concessions to stave off a rebellion from its own MPs – yet lost the argument.
There is undoubtedly more of the same on the way for Starmer.
Then there is the NHS, enduring the worst crisis in its history. Labour's 3% funding increase compares poorly with the 3.6% real-terms average since 1948. And it is not enough to end the misery endured every day by the millions of people on waiting lists.
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Starmer's solution to the crisis, announced last week, is to build 200 'neighbourhood health centres' in England staffed by thousands more GPs, district nurses, social care workers, pharmacists and mental health specialists, with each centre operating 12 hours a day, six days a week. His 10-year plan promises: 'The majority of outpatient appointments will eventually happen there, away from hospitals.'
But as the Royal College of Nursing, the British Medical Association and a host of other professional organisations have pointed out, this is pie in the sky without the necessary funding. And 3% simply won't cut it.
Starmer's emphasis on 'community care' rather than hospital interventions is all very well, but it cannot be delivered without resources. The plain fact is that Starmer is continuing with the chronic underfunding successive governments have presided over these past 30 years.
The NHS capital budget, for example, was frozen in last month's spending review. As the Financial Times concluded: 'NHS finances are as precarious today as they were before the Covid-19 pandemic.'
While the Westminster commentariat focused on the parliamentary rebellion, voters must remember only that Labour again attacked those it was supposed to represent.
Their assault on the support given to disabled people was an affront to progressive values by the same leader who cut foreign aid in order to double expenditure on armaments.
Those decisions reveal Starmer's core values. It is little wonder that he has plunged to levels of unpopularity pollsters have never seen before in a prime minister.
There is now a fierce debate taking place within the Labour Party (and the SNP) over how best to counter the marked rise in support for Reform. Labour's chief strategist Morgan McSweeney favours attacking them from the right, arguing Britain is 'broken' and prefers pandering to Farage on issues such as immigration, defence and law and order.
On the other hand, Labour MPs in places such as London, facing an electoral squeeze from the Greens and Liberal Democrats, argue that more socially progressive measures are necessary, including increased spending on public housing and social care.
Speaking of the latter, in my column in the Scottish Socialist Voice this week, I insisted the SNP owe the people of Scotland an apology for their abject failure to address the social care crisis here.
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In October 2021, then-first minister Nicola Sturgeon promised 'a national care service on a par with the NHS', and vowed it would be 'the greatest achievement of the devolution era'. In the end, the SNP government delivered no improvement whatsoever.
Much has been written and said recently asking whether Nigel Farage will be the next prime minister. A Dispatches documentary on Channel 4 last week, hosted by the right-wing commentator Fraser Nelson, was the latest in the genre. Inevitably, Nelson rather ducks the question, although he did conclude that Farage's sums don't add up.
THE point surely is that it is the miserable failure of those parties of the 'extreme centre' – in government for decades – that has provided Farage with the opportunity to claim Britain is broken and needs Reform.
As things stand, Farage doesn't have to do anything except criticise Starmer. And given the dog's dinner the Prime Minister is making of things, Farage's task for the moment is a dawdle.
The intrinsic instability of Reform, a party infiltrated by the extreme right and made up overwhelmingly of former Tory members, sees it rely most heavily on former Labour voters.
Trying to straddle that divide forces Farage to call, at one and the same time, for tax cuts for the rich and public spending increases, nationalisation of Scunthorpe steelworks and opposition to disability benefit attacks.
Reform's poll lead is likely to wither when those organic contradictions break out into the open. That may take a while and meanwhile Starmer remains their biggest recruiting sergeant.
The best way to defeat Reform UK in my opinion is to expose the gaping holes in its politics and its claimed 'anti-establishment' credentials.
The Scottish Socialist Party is active in countering Farage's views with our own slogan, 'Say yes to reforms, no to Reform UK'. We are convinced independence offers Scotland an 'escape hatch' both from 'broken Britain' and from Farage's malign influence ahead of next year's Holyrood elections.
Colin Fox is Scottish Socialist Party national co-spokesperson. He sat on the YES Scotland Advisory Board 2012-14 and represented the Lothians as an MSP from 2003-07