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Times
05-07-2025
- Politics
- Times
Yes we can! A master of political slogans reveals his secrets
There can't be many people working in politics with a CV like Chris Bruni-Lowe's. One morning in late 2018 the pollster and strategist took an unexpected phone call from his old friend Nigel Farage. Together the two men had taken Ukip from nutty obscurity to nearly four million votes in a general election and the EU referendum victory it had always dreamt of. Now, with parliament deadlocked and Ukip back beyond the fringe, a restless Farage was planning his most audacious heist on British democracy yet: the Brexit Party. Now he needed a slogan. To Bruni-Lowe, a shaven-headed thirtysomething from south London, Farage was insistent: he wanted to promise a 'political revolution'. Saying no to Farage is never easy. But Bruni-Lowe did just that. 'I pointed out to him that the politically explosive connotations of the term made it a risky choice,' he writes in Eight Words That Changed the World, a fascinating and timely history of election slogans – some of them his. Instead he settled on a gentler line with a deliberate double meaning: 'Change politics for good.' Farage won the European elections of 2019, Theresa May was ousted as prime minister, then Boris Johnson got Brexit done. 'We had succeeded,' Bruni-Lowe reflects, 'in choosing the right word for the right candidate at the right time.' A couple of pages after this story Bruni-Lowe recounts another of his professional triumphs. 'I was advising Milojko Spajic, a former finance minister in Montenegro … He had resigned from the government six months earlier to found a new political party called Europe Now! and he wanted my help to win the presidential election in March 2023.' Pardon me? What now? Europe when? We thought you were the Farage guy. But no: here is Bruni-Lowe, settling on the slogan 'It's time' to help another upstart party 'overturn some deeply entrenched attitudes' and win an election on a pro-EU platform. It worked. Just how does he do it? In an age of volatile electorates and unpredictable polls, this stuff is more important than it has ever been. At their best, slogans capture the zeitgeist and express in not even a sentence the essence of a politician's mandate. Just ask Keir Starmer. 'Change', one of Bruni-Lowe's eight words, spoke to the anti-Tory mood of 2024, but is proving rather difficult to substantiate in office. Few people know all of this better than the author, a gun for hire whose work has taken him to almost every democracy in the world. There is a little bit of memoir in this pacey, breezily written history of a much misunderstood political art — I almost wanted more — but it is short on baccy-stained anecdotes about Farage. Instead, this short book's great strength is in its breadth and depth. Those eight words are people, change, democracy, strong, together, new, time and better, with a chapter for each — and two bonus choices, great and future, as our introduction and epilogue. Some are invariably more effective, ambiguous and elastic than others, but it of course depends where you are. As the Liberal Democrats have learnt from a century of banging on about proportional representation, lecturing UK voters about 'democracy' is likely to put them to sleep. In embattled states like Taiwan and Ukraine, however, it means something real. Parties that look knackered, meanwhile, can be reinvigorated by the judicious use of a single word. Old rogues like Recep Erdogan in Turkey and Viktor Orban in Hungary have both used the word 'time' to present themselves afresh to exhausted electorates. Political journalists like me are constantly discovering that there's really nothing new in our line of work — and that is also the lesson here. Not least the word 'new', which turns out to belong to rather more people than Tony Blair. Vladimir Putin, Erdogan and the Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko all used it to win the elections that would, in time, turn them into very old-school strongmen. The best slogans are a repository for millions of diffuse — and very different — hopes and dreams. • The 9 best politics books of the past year to read next Take Barack Obama. 'Yes we can' was his clarion call to a restive America in 2008. Even I, the sort of tragic political nerd who watches old Michael Cockerell documentaries on holiday, didn't know that Alex Salmond had used the same slogan for the SNP in the general election of 1997. As Bruni-Lowe notes, drily and wryly: 'It is plain to see that Alex Salmond and Barack Obama had different qualities.' It wasn't so much the slogan that mattered, but the time and place in which voters were reading it. 'The words can work,' he writes, 'but only if they're used by the right person at the right time.' See also: Winston Churchill. Almost absurdly, given how intimately he was then known by the British public, Churchill told voters that it was 'time for a change' in 1951. Despite knowing him only too well — just as they knew Farage by 2019 — they happened to agree. But when the Republicans ran Thomas Dewey against Franklin D Roosevelt with the same slogan in 1944, Americans laughed him out of the room. Yes, Roosevelt was running for an unprecedented and controversial fourth term — but the business end of the Second World War was not, it turned out, the ideal time for a change. Perhaps my favourite one of all is the frankly deranged slogan employed by the Japanese Social Democrats in 2021: 'Change is fun!' That may be the implicit logic of every 'change' line, but in this case the voters did not agree. They won one seat. As South Africa prepared for its first multiracial elections in 1994, Nelson Mandela — not a man we imagine as a ruthless electioneer — learnt a similar lesson. He told his American strategists, Stan Greenberg and Frank Greer, that he had come up with the ideal slogan for the African National Congress: 'Now is the time.' They duly polled it and found it resonated only with hardcore activists from the ANC. Mandela, 75 but ever conscientious, did not much like that. 'He really wanted to unite the country,' Greer, one of many gnarled veterans to speak on the record, tells Bruni-Lowe. 'I've never been a candidate,' Mandela would say. 'I want to learn how to be a candidate.' That resulted in a slogan befitting of a father of the rainbow nation: 'A better life for all.' • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List As Bruni-Lowe rightly concludes, the election slogan has never been more important. With everything up for grabs in British politics, his comrades in the polling fraternity should study his book. I bet Farage will. And if that scares you, read to the very end. The author's parting shot should terrify well-meaning liberals even more than the prospect of a Reform government. The reader we should worry about isn't an unscrupulous politician but ChatGPT. The future, Bruni-Lowe warns, is a world of 'hyper-targeted slogans', written by AI, mashing his eight words together in different orders for each individual voter and smashing our national conversation into tens of millions of pieces. That's certainly new. It will be a change too. And it's about time politics caught up with technology. But is it democracy? Eight Words That Changed the World: A Modern History of the Election Slogan by Chris Bruni-Lowe (Biteback £20 pp272). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
Telegraph
28-06-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
A year after gambling on Starmer, Britain is gripped by buyer's remorse
Sir Keir Starmer's personal polling ratings are so awful that some Labour backbenchers are beginning to question whether he can survive until the next election. His first year in office – which he'll mark next week with a major climbdown on welfare reform – has been catastrophic. Of the prime ministers since Thatcher, only Gordon Brown had a worse net approval rating at the same stage in his premiership. On current polling, Labour is heading for a single term and a devastating defeat. It is only the split on the Right – with Right-leaning voters currently torn between Reform and the Tories – that is keeping Starmer even vaguely in contention with Nigel Farage's Reform, which comfortably tops the polls today. Those who work in politics have become blasé about the rise of Reform, as if their standing on 34 points in the polls is a normal, predictable state of affairs. It is not. British voters have clung to mainstream parties for as long as anyone can remember – yet now they are genuinely considering political revolution. And this is happening as a result of the perceived failure of conventional politicians, currently represented by Starmer. Plummeting support A comprehensive poll by public policy research agency Public First for The Telegraph reveals the scale of the Prime Minister's problems. Currently, 53 per cent of voters have a very unfavourable view of him, while just 26 per cent view him favourably. On the eve of the last election, Public First had Starmer with an approval rating of plus 1 per cent. The drop is dramatic. A year ago, 47 per cent of voters said – when asked directly – that they liked Starmer, while 47 per cent said they did not. Now, 62 per cent say they do not like him, and just 33 per cent say they do. A year ago, 32 per cent of voters agreed with the statement 'I do not like the Labour Party or Keir Starmer'; a year on, that figure has risen to 44 per cent. Crucially, a year ago voters regarded him as a good leader by a margin of 40 per cent to 29. Today, 48 per cent consider him a bad leader, with only 25 per cent still backing him. And by 53 per cent to 23, they believe he has performed poorly as Prime Minister. Jumpy backbenchers will have picked up on at least some of these sentiments on the doorstep. Behind the briefing by Labour MPs against Morgan McSweeney, Starmer's chief of staff, is likely a deeper antipathy towards the Prime Minister himself. The new polling was conducted even before it emerged this week that Starmer was preparing to cave in to Labour rebels and allow existing disability claimants to keep their benefits – a move likely to make him appear even weaker in the eyes of many voters. The survey shows that, given a choice of leading contenders, people believe Farage would make the best leader – ahead of Starmer, Kemi Badenoch and Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader. These are the dreadful fundamentals Starmer should be most concerned about. Starmer's undoing Things started to go wrong for Keir Starmer almost immediately. Just weeks into his premiership, in the late summer of 2024, he was already in serious trouble with voters. Although he was dealt a difficult hand, he made a series of decisions that so alienated him from the public, those that voted for him may never return. It's rare for individual events to have a measurable impact on public opinion – most come and go without voters noticing. But these incidents cut through – partly because Starmer was new in office and people were watching closely, but also because they genuinely mattered to people. Tracking polls at the time show that Starmer's favourability ratings dropped with each new crisis. The riots in July 2024, which followed the murder of three young girls in Southport, posed an early challenge that Starmer initially failed to meet. Months on, vitriolic commentary still swirls around the perception of a two-tier justice system in the aftermath of the unrest. Lucy Connolly was sentenced to two years in prison for an offensive tweet, while critics point out that others – including those convicted of possessing disturbing sexual imagery of children – receive what amounts to a slap on the wrist. At the time, however, public anger focused mainly on how long it took to quell the violence; under Starmer, the state appeared to have no grip on law and order. English voters, in particular, have little tolerance for disorder – they want it stamped out swiftly. The newly elected Cameron government flailed in the early stages of the 2011 riots, but cracked down more quickly, and their handling was ultimately seen as a net positive. Starmer took longer to restore order – and paid the price. Far more serious damage to Starmer's reputation was done by his and Chancellor Rachel Reeves's decision, around the same time, to announce extensive cuts to winter fuel payments for pensioners. In a speech on July 29, Reeves blamed the move on a supposed £22 billion 'black hole' left by the previous government – but this never washed with the public. Given Labour's apparent generosity in pay negotiations with public sector workers, it felt to many as though the party always had enough money to reward its core voters – just not pensioners. This decision had a greater impact on public opinion than the riots. So catastrophic were his first weeks in power that Starmer's approval rating dropped dramatically during this period. On YouGov's favourability tracker, he fell from a net score of zero – with as many people viewing him favourably as unfavourably (a perfectly respectable rating for a politician these days) – to minus nine in just a couple of weeks. Things got worse still. In September, the Government was engulfed in a crisis over the early release of prisoners. The Ministry of Justice admitted that some of those let out had committed very serious crimes – not what the public had been led to believe. Starmer's standing took a further hit when one released inmate infamously thanked him for the 'privilege' of his early exit, before being collected by friends in a luxury car. A major set-piece speech on the NHS that same month did little to revive his fortunes. It might have seemed that Starmer had stopped the slide in early autumn, with his international investment summit on October 14 giving a brief impression that he had a growth plan. However, any goodwill evaporated by the time of the Autumn Statement on October 30. The scale of new tax rises shocked businesses already struggling with weak growth, and the media fallout deeply unsettled voters weary from years of economic hardship. Then, in January 2025, Keir Starmer found himself in an extraordinary clash with the world's richest man, Elon Musk, over the Government's alleged failure to take the fallout from grooming gangs seriously enough. The affair has since descended into farce, with Starmer and senior colleagues agreeing to a new investigation – after previously dismissing calls for one as politically motivated. Starmer enjoyed a decent run at the end of winter, announcing on February 25 that defence spending would increase to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027, while taking a more assertive and constructive role on the world stage. On February 28, during his first visit to the White House, he seemed to learn from Volodymyr Zelensky's disastrous Oval Office appearance the day before, pulling off a relative diplomatic triumph by emerging from his meeting with Donald Trump unscathed – and leaving the president pleased with a formal invitation for a state visit to Britain. But the cumulative damage from Starmer's earlier mistakes may mean it's already over for the Prime Minister – just a year into his first term. Things have reached that serious a point. Expectations Before the election, voters said they would give Starmer's new government time. Many blamed the Conservatives for the country's predicament, as reflected in the collapse of the party's electoral vote. After 14 years in power, Britain seemed to be in a terrible state, and people acknowledged it would take time to set things right. But even though my own polling showed people were prepared to be patient, I always doubted it would play out this way; voters are rarely patient about anything. They are especially intolerant of bad decisions that suggest either incompetence or, worse, the wrong values. In his first few months, Starmer appeared to show both. One reason voters grew so quickly enraged was that Starmer and his senior team – perhaps inadvertently – massively inflated expectations about what could be achieved. Labour politicians believed they were being cautious by repeatedly stressing the terrible legacy they'd inherited. But their relentless criticism of Tory incompetence – blamed on extremism and stupidity – implied a promise of rapid progress, simply because, by their account, Labour did not share those same flaws. Labour politicians seem genuinely shocked that the economy and wider society did not immediately respond to their touch. Voters themselves aren't shocked, but they are surprised that Labour appears 'just the same' – and have responded with a mix of exasperation and outright hostility. Failure to deliver For politicians, popularity is primarily driven by voters' judgment of their ability to deliver policy change. Tory failure on policy – on the NHS, immigration and the cost of living – explains the scale of their defeat in 2024. Labour policy failure explains the speed and scale of their fall. When asked in the Public First poll which pledges Starmer had made progress on, by far the most popular answer was 'none of the above,' chosen by over 39 per cent of voters. Only small minorities believed he had made progress on any of the other promises drawn from Labour's 2024 election manifesto. Only 24 per cent said he had made progress on cutting NHS waiting times – the only area where any reasonably positive change is believed to have occurred. Given that NHS failures were a key factor damaging the Tories before the last election, with voters desperate for quicker treatment, Labour must urgently improve these figures. Elsewhere, on issues of similar importance, only 8 per cent said Starmer had made progress in restoring order to the asylum system, and just 12 per cent believed he had improved border security. Labour made a big deal of their ambition to change the country for the better – this was central to their manifesto, and Starmer and his front bench made it the defining theme of their election campaign. Yet only 10 per cent believe they have made progress in changing the country for the better; 11 per cent think they have begun to restore hope; and 14 per cent feel they have started to end the chaos within Government. Carping during the pandemic The public's dim view of Starmer dates back to his first months as Labour leader, following his election on April 4 2020, during the first Covid lockdown. Starmer was unusually unpopular in his first year as Labour leader; voters reacted poorly to him almost immediately. To be fair, he became leader at the worst possible time for the opposition. The pandemic was a period when voters first demanded total loyalty to the government during a national crisis, then quickly shifted to demanding concrete alternative ideas to get us out of the mess we seemed trapped in. They wanted new plans to improve track and trace, Covid testing and vaccine distribution. While in some ways unreasonable, this was the expectation voters held. From the earliest days through to the end of the pandemic – and until quite recently – voters in focus groups repeatedly criticised him for 'carping from the sidelines' and offering nothing constructive. As the pandemic faded but chaos under the Tories continued, Starmer had one clear advantage: voters saw him as a low-drama politician. While the Tories delivered years of turmoil under Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, Starmer quietly kept his own show running. Under his leadership, Labour stopped saying 'mad' things, and the eccentricities of the Corbyn years disappeared. This is a big achievement, and it's to Starmer's massive credit that he pulled it off. But the scale of his success is lost on most voters. Most people have no idea – how could they? – about the challenge of running a bureaucracy like the Labour Party, with ideological enemies everywhere and rivals waiting to steal your job. All they really knew was that he was low-drama. Even as Starmer built a formidable poll lead, he lagged badly in focus groups, with sceptical voters raising persistent doubts about his character. Things began to shift in late 2023. By spring 2024, focus groups finally mirrored the polls, and the popularity Labour and Starmer enjoyed in the surveys became a reality. People started saying he 'looked' like a leader, contrasting his calm demeanour with the headless chickens who had run the Conservative Party. But the shift in most voters' attitudes was driven by the head, not the heart, and was therefore never truly 'real.' They never fully came to respect Starmer. Instead, they calculated that backing him was the best way to remove the Tories without placing the country in peril with a high-risk alternative – and that was most voters' priority by the election. People still said they knew little about him; they simply hoped he would be better than the Conservative option. People simply didn't know who he was. In the Public First poll on Starmer conducted on the eve of the general election, nearly twice as many respondents incorrectly believed he was under 60 (when he is over 60). By a similar margin, many said he had never had to worry about money, despite his family struggling financially when he was a child. Other questions about who Starmer cares most about – whether young or old, business leaders or workers – also produced large numbers of 'don't know' responses. If Starmer's lack of clear definition helped him just before the election, what was once a weakness early in his leadership has now returned as a weakness in his premiership. Being low-drama compared to the Tories was briefly an asset, but now it once again makes him seem unsure of what to do. Policy delivery matters most but, for prime ministers, there is always more to it than this. Prime ministers are leaders – and voters demand dynamic leadership. Starmer has never been able to convince the public he can provide this, which casts doubt on his ability to turn his reputation around. Farage in the driving seat Someone of Starmer's character – low-key, moderate and decent – is unlikely to 'communicate' his way out of trouble, especially with the threat from Reform looming. Great communicators can pin the blame on others or make the prospect of change seem worse than the status quo. But it's unlikely Starmer can convince people himself that change would be worse. Instead, Starmer's strategy – which remains his best bet – is to quietly keep the show on the road and try to make tangible gains in a few key areas, which he can point to on the eve of the next election. Those key areas are the NHS, migration, and growth. On the NHS, he must at least show that more GPs are being recruited and that a medical cavalry is gathering on the horizon; it would also help if pharmacies were further empowered to provide basic treatments, speeding up care. On migration, the unfortunate reality is that he has no choice but to close hotels and begin swiftly removing significant numbers of failed asylum claimants, hopefully stemming the flow of boats. And on growth, he needs to at least offer small businesses hope by cutting taxes and easing their regulatory burden. There's little chance he'll be able to show the country has 'changed' by the next election – and perhaps even less chance by the time he faces a challenge from a Labour rival. All he can hope for is to convince people the country is heading in the right direction, and to claim: 'It's working, don't let others ruin it.' If he can make small amounts of measurable progress, it will put him in a strong position. That's because the unvarnished style that makes Reform politicians appealing to the public will likely lead their senior figures to say and do damaging things during this Parliament. Meanwhile, it's reasonable to expect the Tories will soon plunge back into civil war – a challenge to Badenoch is on the cards. In this context, Starmer could once again appear the least-worst option. Regardless, we know enough about Starmer to be sure he will never fully be master of his own destiny. It won't just be Labour backbenchers pushing him around between now and the election. He will never dictate the terms of political debate in this country – that role will belong to Farage for the duration of this Parliament. Starmer will succeed only if others fail. In this climate, with his opponents occupying the volatile edges of the political spectrum, that's not necessarily a terrible place to be.
The Independent
26-06-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Nigel Farage could easily become the UK's next PM – and it's not because Reform voters are stupid
There are plenty of things that my hometown – Boston, in Lincolnshire – is famous for. Sausages, for one, and the copious veg grown on its vast swathes of fertile land; those Jakemans throat sweets always by the tills in Boots. It's famous for its landmarks – like St Botolph's Church, or 'the Stump', as it's known locally – and for the Puritanism running through its roots: the story of the Pilgrim Fathers, who sailed the Mayflower to the market town's US namesake. Twenty years ago, when I was at school, it was Boston's teen pregnancies, its status as the town with the highest murder rate per capita, and its problem with obesity that attracted national headlines and became part of its precarious history. More recently, it has made its name as a place brimming with racism, division, exhaustion, and frustration. It is also right at the centre of England's radical political revolution. That's quite a lot for a small town with a population of 45,000 people to pack in. Since delivering the highest leave vote in the EU referendum (75 per cent), the flatlands of Lincolnshire have become a barometer of the country's discontent. What's unfolding here isn't just local grumbling or electoral churn (well, maybe a bit). It's symptomatic of a much deeper fracture: one that speaks to lost faith in traditional parties, mounting pressure on public services, and a community caught between economic insecurity and cultural upheaval. In this windswept corner of eastern England, there's widespread certainty that Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, could be the next prime minister, as a much-dissected Ipsos poll suggested this week. In fact, if you have any doubt about that, you simply haven't been listening to the inhabitants of places like Boston – and neither have those in Westminster. The message has been loud and clear for almost a year now. In the days following the general election, I wrote about Farage's unnerving presence and the threat posed by his newly formed party: despite winning just five seats, the infant Reform received more than 4 million votes. That's 600,000 more than the Liberal Democrats, who took 71 seats in total. Only our first-past-the-post system prevented Reform from being the third-biggest party in the UK after it won almost 15 per cent of the vote. On winning the Clacton by-election, Farage finally entered parliament, having secured 46.2 per cent of the vote. Since then, Reform's visibility, along with its popularity, has surged in the polls. Back in March, a monthly tracker poll run by City AM showed Reform at 27 per cent, the party having overtaken both Labour (24 per cent) and the Conservatives (23 per cent) for the first time. By May, Reform had accrued 677 council seats, winning outright control of key county councils including Lancashire, Nottingham, Derbyshire, and, of course, Lincolnshire. The party also overturned a longstanding Labour seat in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election. 'If you look at our parliament, and you see Labour with a massive majority, it looks very stable,' says journalist Fraser Nelson, who travelled the UK asking 'Will Nigel Farage be our next PM?' for a special Dispatches report airing tonight (Thursday 26 June) on Channel 4. 'But if you look at the country as a whole, it's basically on the brink of a political revolution,' he says. 'That's how it feels.' Nelson was first drawn to the subject after spending a week in Blackpool trying to understand its problems. He found a town at the tail end of societal breakdown, where education rates are terrifyingly low and poverty is high. 'You meet non-verbal kids who can't speak, but who point at an iPad if they want to do something,' he explains. 'You find out ... that a third of the kids leave school without any GCSEs at all – these things were kind of mind-blowing. And then Blackpool turns out to be the place with a Reform pub opening – the only place in Britain. That's fascinating: it is representing hope to these people.' Fraser Nelson, the privately educated former editor of The Spectator – a magazine known for its right-wing views – might seem an unlikely candidate to be a voice for the deprived and disenfranchised. Though his programme may centre on Farage, it's really 'an examination of the forces behind support for his party', he explains. But why would the inhabitants of a town like Blackpool put their trust in the Reform leader, who attended Dulwich College, and his deputy Richard Tice, the 'ordinary' multimillionaire property developer who won the Boston and Skegness seat last year? Boris Johnson, too – not known for his humble beginnings – was hugely popular among voters in these constituencies. It'll come as no surprise, then, that age and education have displaced class as the main dividing line in politics, according to data published this week by the National Centre for Social Research – a result, apparently, of trust in mainstream politicians being at an all-time low. It's clear that a privileged background is no obstacle to being embraced by these communities, even if a professed interest in the poor might be less about nobly improving their lot and more about spotting an opportunity. But it's not just about trust. The likes of Farage and Tice 'speak our language', locals in Boston say, in a way that other politicians are simply unable – or unwilling – to do. It works. In a town like this – where more than a quarter of children grow up in poverty; where crime is rife and police funding is low; where the local rural hospital is at breaking point, and teachers in schools are having to become first responders in their communities – residents feel ignored, patronised, and consistently disregarded. They are angry. Since Brexit, it's been easy for those on the outside to dismiss their concerns as bigoted or plain stupid – many pointing to the fact that Leave voters are a lot worse off than they might have been had Britain stayed in the European Union. It's undeniable that there are factions who simply want 'freedom of speech' to mean that harmful views go unchallenged; similarly, Reform's call to arms – 'common-sense politics' – is often packed with un-costed promises and intellectually lazy (yet effective) attempts to rationalise social regression. But it's clear that it is – and always has been – dangerous to shut down those conversations and concerns altogether by labelling them as nothing more than idiocy. We only have to look across the pond at US president Donald Trump's strange appeal to non-white voters – a phenomenon very much present over here, too, as Nelson found – to see why. If the Labour Party wants to retain power, and if the rest of the country wants to keep Farage in his place, now is not the time for ill-thought-out assumptions about voters. 'It seems like [Labour and the Conservative Party] are psychologically incompetent in [refusing to believe] that these voters mean what they say,' says Nelson. 'Farage is now some sort of Ghost of Christmas Future figure to terrify Starmer... He's saying, if you fail these communities, this is what's going to happen. And if you look at all the indicators – the social ladder is now more of a quagmire – they're all set for failure.' Reform is gaining strength because the mainstream parties refuse to properly engage with voters in these towns, or to offer bold and imaginative solutions to problems that have persisted for decades More accurately, these communities, including my hometown, have already been failed by successive governments, over and over and over again. In 20 years, nothing has been accomplished by voting blue or red. Farage is telling towns like Boston that there is another way – and now, the so-called 'wild card' doesn't seem so much of a risk. It's also not insignificant that Farage is making a narrative landgrab to the left either. He recently claimed that he would implement a £250,000 'Robin Hood' fee for non-doms, exempting them from tax and giving the money directly to Britain's poorest. Reform's position on the nationalisation of gas and water utilities is evolving – and increasingly pivoting away from the Thatcherite model that favours private ownership. It was Reform, not Labour, that pledged to scrap the Tories' two-child benefit cap. On the surface, these policies appear unexpectedly liberal. Certainly, they were intended to appeal to the Labour heartlands – and crucially, such announcements have been designed to win hearts and minds, even if Farage has been hazy on the detail. 'This is a really important part of it,' explains Nelson. 'Obviously, the Reform policies are very popular... But only one in five voters in our poll thought that Reform could actually do this without higher taxes or spending cuts, like they say. And, during my interview with him, Farage also pretty much admits that all of his pledges are 'aspirations'. Right now, as far as I'm concerned, they have zero policies that would actually work. He's not saying he will do this. He's saying he would like to do this.' Clearly, it's not a shock that Farage could be being disingenuous, but it is a wake-up call. What the Reform leader's strategy – both on the right, and in his phantom expansion to the left – is successfully doing is creating the political weather, further destabilising Labour as much as it is the Tories. And it's time that Westminster smartened up, too. The people of Boston – or Blackpool, or any other Reform-leaning town – don't necessarily believe that Farage is going to transform their lives. But – and here is the important detail – they don't believe that anyone else will, either. Reform's promises, and Farage's 'aspirations', might be paper-thin when you cut through the noise. But for communities that have weathered decades of political neglect, even aspiration – and, very simply, someone appearing to listen to them and vocalise what they are feeling – represents more than what's previously been on offer. The danger, then, isn't just that Farage could rise up via grievance politics. It's that Labour and the Conservatives still don't seem to understand how, or why, this might happen. Starmer might be delivering detailed policy reviews, but he is losing at politics and optics where they really matter. He is failing to capture the narrative in a language that people can hear, because he and Rachel Reeves are still talking more to Westminster than too the Dog and Duck. And it is a sign of of the Prime Minister's own lack of confidence that there has been a muting of the one person who could reach into these communities: Angela Rayner. Meanwhile, Reform is gaining strength because the mainstream parties refuse to properly engage with voters in these towns, or to offer bold and imaginative solutions to problems that have persisted for decades. Farage barely needs to try, given the litany of own goals. Residents in places like Boston are tired of empty promises, but they aren't stupid – as Nelson found, they're used to finding hope in unusual places. They know Reform is a gamble, but what Farage is selling them is the dream of taking a risk in a world that feels as if it will never change if they don't.
Japan Times
30-05-2025
- Business
- Japan Times
Can the 'rice man,' Koizumi, save the day?
Could rice prices in Japan drop to less than half their current level? Many foreign observers of Japan's foreign and security policies, both within and outside the country, may overlook the significance of what seems like a purely domestic issue. But the ongoing rice crisis — and how the government handles it — could spell serious trouble for political forces that have long relied on and benefited from policies keeping rice prices artificially high without triggering sharp declines. For them, this is not only a price revolution but rather a political revolution in the making.
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The establishment is already plotting the destruction of a Reform government
The local elections proved that vast numbers of English voters are considering political revolution over politics as usual. But we will only know if they will stand by Reform when the full weight of the political establishment fights back. Much of the establishment mobilised against Brexit, and these same organisations view Reform with greater horror. Quite soon, the establishment will send signals it is moving into direct confrontation with Reform. The public will then realise that a Reform government will lead to political combat on a scale that dwarfs post-Brexit fighting. The big question is whether voters will stomach another decade of political stasis and societal division. Talking about 'the establishment' can make you sound like an ancient pub bore or a modern bedroom conspiracy theorist. Maybe it is the wrong word, but I refer to those groups which define modern politics: the main political parties; the BBC; the universities; the judiciary and legal profession; the civil service; the country's biggest businesses; and the monarchy. Reform can expect hostility from each of them. The hostility of mainstream parties is to be expected. It has made no difference to date because of their collective poor performance in government. Failed politicians struggle to persuade anyone of anything. Hostility from the BBC and universities can similarly be expected but will also likely have little impact. Amongst those considering a Reform vote, the BBC has long ceased to have relevance and many doubt its political independence. Universities, for this group of voters, are even less relevant. Other parts of the establishment are potentially much more problematic for Reform. In short order, we should expect senior civil servants to reveal they are 'wargaming' a Reform victory, with the impact on the economy and national security in mind. The implication being that a major shock to Britain's prosperity and standing in the world will follow a Reform win. We will surely also hear from junior civil servants in the most obviously exposed government departments – the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office – suggesting they will not implement Reform policies. Incidentally, outside of the establishment, the same dynamic is likely in the NHS over time. Senior leaders will express concern about their ability to run the NHS with lower levels of immigration. Junior NHS staff will talk about the development of a climate of fear in Britain and will imply strikes. The judiciary and legal profession would once have retained a dignified silence, but there is no prospect of that. KCs regularly campaign online using the most intemperate language. Extraordinarily, even some judges make their political views on such matters known. Collectively, the judiciary and legal profession will warn that Reform plans are illegal, unworkable and immoral. Much nearer the time, if it looks like a Farage government is possible, senior business leaders will warn about the impact of a restriction of visas on growth, and others will suggest investment will flee Britain. As with the civil service, they will talk about the prospect of a re-run of a Truss government. And, on the eve of an election, if Reform look set for power, it is easy to imagine the King suggesting everyone should vote with tolerance in mind. This will be seen as a rebuke to Farage; even a raised eyebrow from the King can splash news for days. In a climate of political failure, Nigel Farage can easily brush aside attacks from Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch. He has done this effectively to date. But it will be much more difficult to brush off warnings that his economic plans are worrying the Treasury and the markets; or that his immigration plans will lead to strikes that will cost people their place in the queue for NHS care; or that his proposed changes to human rights laws will see courts grind to a halt; or that his entire programme is generally un-British. All Reform can do is to stay ruthlessly focused on policies they know carry overwhelming public support – and to junk those policies which do it for a small number of activists but leave the public cold. At its most basic, that means talking about border control and not net zero. You have to doubt Reform will survive such an onslaught, but the public is in a revolutionary mood. James Frayne is a political consultant Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
