Latest news with #Reform-lite
New Statesman
25-05-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Will the net migration figures save Labour at the polls?
Photo by Tolga Akmen/EPA Unsustainable net migration figure falls to… unsustainable net migration figure. That's how voting Briton will feel about the latest numbers, published on 22 May by the Office for National Statistics. Net migration has halved from 860,000 in the year ending December 2023 to 431,000 in the year ending December 2024, the ONS estimates (though we should allow for a rather large error margin here). The general view, even among the left-leaning, is that Britain has been operating with an inflow of immigrants over and above what is palatable for far too long now. Not one year this century has the median Brit bravely stated: I am happy with these numbers. That's just the mood music. So, will these new numbers help the government as it flounders in the polls? The direction of travel is positive, both when it comes to making good on their manifesto promises and holding off Nigel Farage. But there is a catch. Publishing the numbers draws attention to the net, and serves to remind voters that it is still too high, no matter the positive directional trend. This in turn gives Reform's rhetoric a mental airing. One week of press coverage at the start of June in 2016 about then-high migration numbers was enough to shift the polls from Remain to Leave. Voters care, and are not particularly interested in the nuance. The truth about immigration is that Labour has already lost the argument on net numbers. So what can the party do? It needs to reorient the argument on their terms, rather than aping Nigel Farage in a kind of Reform-lite manner. If they turn to the country and say 'this is happening because we have been too reliant on overseas labour, and we have neglected homegrown workers, so we plan to re-equip and re-empower the domestic workforce' Labour can wrest the conversation away from Reform. Instead, the government has so far been dancing to the Faragista tune on immigration. This only elevates him further. [See more: America's broken commonwealth] Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Related
Scotsman
06-05-2025
- Politics
- Scotsman
How Tories can defeat Reform and save UK from catastrophe – if they change to this leader
Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Imagine, for a moment, you are Kemi Badenoch, charged with restoring the fortunes of the Conservatives – supposedly the world's oldest and most successful political party – following the greatest defeat in their history. What would you do? Comparing the last two UK general election results suggests a possible answer. In 2019, the Conservatives received nearly 14 million votes; last year, they won about 6.8 million. In contrast, the Brexit party's 644,000 votes six years ago soared to 4.1 million for its Reform UK incarnation. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad So it's easy to suppose that if Tories can win over Reform's voters with a 'Reform-lite' pitch – and hang onto their existing supporters – they could easily surpass Labour's 2024 total of 9.7 million and be back in business. Nigel Farage, seen visiting a tattoo parlour while campaigning in Cambridgeshire ahead of the recent local elections, has made clear he wants to destroy the Conservative party (Picture: Joe Giddens) | PA Oblivion beckons Unfortunately for Badenoch, politics is rarely that simple and the results of the English local elections should be seen as a flashing red warning signal that their current strategy to see off Reform is not working and, what's more, charging blindly on will only lead to one place: oblivion. Judging by Badenoch's blink count during her interview with the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday, she may be starting to see that light, even if she can't quite admit it, publicly or to herself. READ MORE: Why true Scottish Conservatives should avoid Nigel Farage like the plague Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Clearly, opposition to large-scale immigration is a powerful political force that some politicians fear, but others regard as an opportunity. In government, the Tories' rhetoric suggested they were tough on immigration, but the numbers rose to record levels. This explains why Reform, a party with few resources, has become such a large political force so quickly – the Conservatives effectively campaigned against their own policy and for Reform's. Millions responded by supporting the party they thought would deliver what had been promised, for years, by Theresa 'hostile environment' May, Boris 'fly them to Rwanda' Johnson and Rishi 'stop the boats' Sunak. The trouble for the Tories is that those voters, quite understandably, no longer trust them to deliver, based on the evidence. Labour risks falling into a similar trap, of talking tough on immigration, while letting in large numbers of people. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Stop agreeing with Reform But if copying Reform is not the way to save the Conservatives, what is? Again, the answer is simple: stop agreeing with them and start disagreeing, with considerable vigour. The first fights should focus on their more obvious shortcomings – the dubious qualities of some of the recently elected councillors, their questionable attitude towards the NHS, and their lack of seriousness about the economy. However, ultimately, defeating Reform will require a pitched battle on the field of their choosing: immigration. Doing that would necessarily require the Tories to have a different leader and, fortunately, they have just such a person waiting in the wings. James Cleverly has spoken in pragmatic terms about immigration and privately concluded the Rwanda scheme was 'bats***', according to reports. With him as leader, a case could be made for 'sensible' immigration policies coupled with strong border controls, while pointing out that Reform's ridiculous talk of 'net zero' migration would have a devastating economic effect. It's what the Conservatives should have done all along but, following Brexit, they found themselves enthralled by the voting-winning power of anti-immigration rhetoric. This stance would receive considerable support from the business community and present Reform voters, actual and potential, with a stark choice: trust Brexit's biggest fans and risk making hard times worse because of a vague antipathy towards migrants or choose the duller but safer and more experienced Tories. Keir Starmer's presence in 10 Downing Street suggests charisma is not the political asset it's cracked up to be. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad What are the Conservatives for? Voters who don't like immigration need to be repeatedly confronted by an uncomfortable truth: it has become vitally important to their own livelihoods. It wouldn't work with all of them, but many would have second thoughts – if a serious effort is made to persuade them. On Sunday, former Conservative Education Secretary Justine Greening told Kuenssberg: 'This version of the Conservative party, which we have seen over the last decade, which has tried to out-Reform Reform, is finished and it will need to reinvent itself.' And she added: 'There are some really practical questions facing the Conservative party and I think more fundamentally the question of what is the point of the Conservative party now. If we can't find an answer to that, I think we shouldn't assume things won't continue to get worse.' The Tories' major selling point should be what it has, at least until recently, always been: a strong economy. And, like it or not, a strong economy requires migrants. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad In the first three months of last year, 21 per cent of the UK's workforce were born overseas – so more than a fifth of the people whose taxes paid for public services, the defence of this country, the state pension and so on were migrants. Most come to the UK to work for a few years, then leave. If this flow of workers dries up, the consequences for the economy would be catastrophic. Demise of liberal democracy? Liberal Conservatives need to reclaim their party. If they cannot, they have two options: join people like former Tory Jamie Green MSP and defect to the Liberal Democrats or abandon their values and stay quiet in the naïve hope that all this will somehow pass. In the US, Donald Trump has basically turned the Republicans into his own personality cult. If Nigel Farage succeeds in turning Reform into the main right-wing party, with the Conservatives reduced to nodding dogs in a junior, supporting role, the result could be the demise of liberal democracy itself.
The Guardian
05-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Let's be clear: this Conservative party is dead. Those who killed it should own up so we can move on
It takes real effort to kill a political party that has been around for nearly 200 years and is the most successful in Britain's history. But at the very least, this version of the Conservative party is dead. To quote the famous Monty Python dead parrot sketch, it has ceased to be. It is an ex-party. In last week's local elections, of the 16 councils it was defending, the Conservative party lost control of every one of them. It won just one of the six mayoralty contests. The BBC's projected national vote share for the Conservative party was just 15%. It's another record low for a party that has spent the last several years achieving record-low vote shares in national elections. This is a pathetic performance for a party often described as the natural party of government. And it was all so predictable. I've lost count of the articles I've written for the Guardian warning that the party's 'Reform-lite' strategy of trying to out-Reform Reform would lead to failure and electoral disaster. Back in July 2024 I described it as an existential moment that required change. 'Do or die,' as I put it. The party chose not to change – with fatal electoral consequences. Unlike in the past, it's not as simple as waiting for the pendulum to swing back towards the Conservative party. There is no pendulum. Arguably, there is no such thing as a core voter any more. Those days of predictable votes in predictable places are gone. In today's Britain, voters act the way they do as consumers. If they vote for a party that fails to deliver on its promises, then they simply choose a different one the next time an election comes around. And why not? Why should political failure be rewarded? Yet this losing version of the Conservative party, with its blinkered, ideological, culture-war preoccupations and entitlement syndrome, has failed to grasp this crucial change. What voters see is a Conservative party with no authentic sense of purpose or mission, and a Labour government that seems not have thought realistically about what its tax and spend agenda would be until after its landslide general election win last July. It's no wonder voters have cast around for alternative political parties. Voters supported a Labour party selling 'change'. Now, in the absence of seeing a sufficiently ambitious plan to deliver change on the ground, many are attracted to a party titled Reform. There are those who would castigate these Reform voters' political choices, but they would be wrong. Instead, we should understand just how fed up millions of people are with the status quo in this country. These voters feel they've heard it all before from the two main parties. Grand promises, rhetoric – but then nothing changes. Is this the end of two-party politics? The Conservative party had better hope so. Otherwise it has an even bigger problem, because for a party with no distinct, authentic purpose any more, our two party politics – driven by a first past the post system – means the Conservatives are squeezed out of contention almost everywhere: in the south and south-west England by a LabourLiberal Democrat or Lib Dem-Reform run-off; in the north by a Labour-Reform run-off; in the wider UK by the presence of independent parties. In a sense it's a healthy challenge for the Conservative party now, as it is for Labour. Both parties need to up their game. But the Labour party at least has the platform of government to show it can deliver. For the Conservatives, the challenge is existential in nature. This version of the Conservative party is finished as a political force in our country. For the first time, even a change of course may now not be enough to improve its fortunes. The party's joyride down its political cul-de-sac has not just been a flash in the pan. It has been a long one – over the best part of a decade. The local election results prove beyond doubt that it has now reached a political dead end. In a very literal sense. Political nature has taken its course. The party has attempted to be a 'mini-me' version of Reform UK, and unsurprisingly Reform voters prefer the real thing. And this strategy's consequential alienation of Conservative-leaning centre-ground voters has seen them head off to either the Lib Dems or Labour, or to the Green party. The party has no winning majority in any age group of voters other than those over 70. This is no basis for a successful electoral strategy for the longer term. Perhaps the Faragian Reform-party bubble, akin to the Johnsonian Conservative-party bubble, will also spectacularly burst when its powerful but simplistic political rhetoric is confronted with the more complex problems of the real world. Perhaps the populist revolution that both parties have fuelled will eat both its political children, not just the one. Yet the driver behind it – inequality of opportunity and the unacceptability of Britain's endemically weak social mobility – will remain. Future policy solutions will still be required. But for now, all that the present generation of Conservative leadership can do is to own up to their abject failure. They should have the humility to admit that their strategy has been catastrophically wrong. It's quite a political epitaph: to have essentially killed the Conservative party. But in creating this version of it, they may well have done just that. Justine Greening was the Conservative MP for Putney from 2005 to 2019
Scotsman
03-05-2025
- Politics
- Scotsman
Labour faces massive wake-up call with Reform now the coming force in British politics
Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... To those jaded souls who insist that voting doesn't matter, the Runcorn and Helsby byelection provides a rejoinder. Sarah Pochin, the Reform UK candidate, won the seat with 38.7 per cent of the vote, a mere six votes ahead of Labour. With a turnout of 46.2 per cent, this means Pochin is now an MP because less than 18 per cent of the electorate backed her. Hardly a ringing endorsement or much of a mandate but, still, her opponents did even worse. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad And Reform's stunning performances in council elections south of the Border show the depths of public anger with the two main UK parties. Labour's difficult return to government has clearly lost them many friends, while the Conservatives risk being torn apart by the unlikely combination of Reform and the Liberal Democrats, with the latter benefiting from moderate Tories in despair over Kemi Badenoch's 'Reform-lite' approach. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage visits The Big Club in Newton Aycliffe, County Durham, after his party won a by-election and took hundreds of council seats (Picture: Owen Humphreys) | PA SNP to benefit from Reform's rise Whole swathes of England, including Kent, Lancashire, Durham and Derbyshire, are about to discover what it's like to be governed by Nigel Farage's party. Albeit this is on a local level, it should open the party up to considerably more scrutiny than it has been experiencing. In Scotland, Reform will be celebrating, but so may the SNP as their re-election next year now looks more likely. Given their momentum, Reform may well take more votes from the Conservatives and Labour, further splitting the unionist vote. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad As Reform increasingly demonstrates it is a serious political force, despite its absence of serious policies on key issues, the UK really could be looking at the end of the two-party system that has dominated for so long, as polls have been suggesting. Thursday's election results represent a massive wake-up call to political leaders and voters alike. The pressure on Labour to start delivering on its promises to revitalise the country is now immense.
Scotsman
01-05-2025
- Politics
- Scotsman
Defected Lib Dem MSP Jamie Green writes to thousands of 'scunnered' Tor voters to follow him
Sign up to our Politics newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Liberal Democrat defected MSP Jamie Greene has written to thousands of former Conservative voters - calling on those left 'politically homeless and scunnered' to abandon Russell Findlay for his new party. Mr Greene quit the Scottish Tories last month before being unveiled by Ed Davey at the Scottish Lib Dems conference in Inverness as having switched to the party. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Jamie Greene (left) with Lib Dems leader Alex Cole-Hamilton | Jane Barlow/PA Wire In his scathing resignation letter to Mr Findlay, Mr Greene accused the Scottish Tories of pursuing a 'Reform-lite agenda that appeals to the worst of our society'. Now, in a letter being sent to voters previously having voted Conservative, seen by The Scotsman, Mr Greene has called on those concerned about Mr Findlay shifting towards a 'Trumpesque' agenda to turn to what he claims is the Scottish Liberal Democrats' 'positive and inclusive' vision instead. His comments come as the Liberal Democrats are expected to take scores of seats from the Conservatives at local elections south of the Border. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The letter states that when he stood for the Tories under Ruth Davidson in 2016, the party was 'decent, welcoming, aspirational and could be trusted with the economy', but he adds that he is 'sad to say that's all gone'. Mr Greene added: 'The party in which I once found a home has been reduced to Reform-lite. Its agenda is Trumpesque in style and substance. It talks about what it stands against, but has little to say about what it stands for. Scottish Conservative leader Russell Findlay | PA 'Most importantly, the broad church it was once shifted further and further to the right, alienating many of its members, voters and in my case its elected representatives.' Mr Greene has warned that he simply 'couldn't go on', insisting that the Lib Dems are 'upbeat and positive'. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad He added: 'They believe in decency and respect in public life. Getting things done for our local communities is their bread and butter. That's what politics is all about, after all. Getting stuff done.' In an appeal to Tory voters who will be put off by any shift to the right, Mr Greene said: 'If you feel like I did, politically homeless and scunnered with the Scottish Conservatives, do something about it. Come and join me in the Scottish Liberal Democrats and you will be made to feel most welcome I assure you. 'The language of far-right division doesn't make peoples' lives better. It won't make Scotland and its communities any better. A positive and inclusive platform does.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Mr Greene's intervention comes amid speculation another Tory MSP could join the LibDems. Read more: Jamie Greene joins Scottish Liberal Democrats after quitting Conservatives The Scottish Sun reported that Lib Dems leader Alex Cole-Hamilton was spotted sharing Indian food and beers with Tory backbencher Maurice Golden, amid rumours he could follow Mr Greene. The meeting came after The Scotsman revealed Mr Golden laid into Mr Findlay's opposition to net zero, accusing his party leader of 'dismantling the Ruth Davidson era in a cheap way to mimic Reform'. Mr Golden has denied he is poised to join the Lib Dems. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad A Scottish Conservatives spokesperson said: 'The man who enthusiastically campaigned and voted for Nicola Sturgeon's gender reforms can send as many letters as he wants. We'll post them for him. 'Not a single pro-UK voter will be persuaded by someone who thinks the SNP are right on so many critical issues
