The Guardian view on Farage's cynical pitch: Labour must be bolder to see off the threat

The Guardian

7 days ago

Last July, concluding his election victory speech after winning in Clacton, Nigel Farage announced that after inflicting grievous damage on the Conservative party that night, Reform UK would now 'be coming for Labour'. Since then, on issues such as the nationalisation of Britain's beleaguered steel industry, Mr Farage has carefully positioned his party as sympathetic to working-class concerns and fears. His heavily-trailed speech on Tuesday, in Westminster, was the most direct attempt yet to present himself as a new spokesperson for Labour's traditional blue-collar voters.
The most talented and cynical political opportunist of his generation, Mr Farage knows where the openings lie. Labour has tied itself in unedifying knots over its deeply unpopular cuts to the winter fuel allowance, and agonised over reversing the Tories' two-child benefit cap. Mr Farage simply marched his party into the vacant political space where a centre-left party should be. Even if the government belatedly U-turns on both issues, Reform will be able to claim to have blazed the trail.
Understandably, Labour figures have ground their teeth at airy promises of largesse to the less well-off, and pointed to the Reform leader's track record. There was no serious effort on Tuesday to make any of the sums add up by addressing the fiscal implications of a huge tax overhaul. There are also, of course, compelling grounds to doubt that Mr Farage's conversion to egalitarian politics is wholly sincere. Since entering politics as a privately educated former stockbroker, he has been a Thatcherite advocate of low tax, low regulation and privatising the NHS. More Jacob Rees-Mogg than Aneurin Bevan, in short.
But cries of cosplay, and allegations of 'unserious' politics, will not suffice. Before partygate, the Eton-educated Boris Johnson did not do too badly by indulging in both. Mr Farage will not expect Sir Keir Starmer to take up his invitation to pay a joint visit to a working men's club. But he does spy a working-class route to power.
As is increasingly clear, Reform's leader views a form of rightwing communitarianism as the means to weld together the kind of shire and town coalition that won the Brexit referendum. This means performatively pivoting to the left on some economic issues, in the hope of attracting less well-off Labour voters into his authoritarian anti-immigrant project. It is the same kind of political realignment that Marine Le Pen has pursued, with some success, in France.
As Reform continues to score significant polling leads, eclipsing the moribund Tories, Labour badly needs a progressive strategy that can adequately respond. At the next election, it will need the support of the blue-collar voters Mr Farage hopes to seduce, as well as public sector professionals and liberal graduates in university towns and cities. Yet for now an unattractive combination of economic timidity, cuts and courting the anti-migrant vote has seen it simultaneously lose support to Mr Farage, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens.
There is another way. Policies such as the public ownership of utilities, and the introduction of wealth taxes in an ever more unequal society, enjoy broad support both among blue-collar voters and in Labour's urban strongholds. That suggests a broader groundswell of support for a more expansive social democratic approach – one that can deliver a more collectivist and equal society without embracing the xenophobia and extreme social conservatism that defines Mr Farage and his movement.
Last week, Sir Keir told his party's MPs to view Reform as their 'main rivals for power'. A different, nastier Britain may await, if Mr Farage's attempt to park his tanks on Labour's working-class lawns is not taken by the party as a final warning.