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Who can stop Nigel Farage? Which voters would actually dig out their ID and schlep down to the polling booth to fight him?
Over the past year, these two questions have come to shape British politics. From Runcorn and Helsby to Caerphilly and Aberdeen South, via countless flimsy leaflets claiming “Only X can win here”, parties have jostled for the part of his majesty’s opposition to Reform. Those battles have given us Hannah Spencer and Andy Burnham; they have bulldozed Labour in Wales and forced Keir Starmer out of No 10.
Those questions hang over Britain even now, in what is easily Farage’s summer horribilis. He faces a shiny new prime minister and fronts a team that keeps scrapping with itself, while ahead looms a parliamentary investigation into whether he should have declared a £5m gift from a generous crypto billionaire from the other side of the world. Look at these turquoise clowns, chortle the Westminster commentators. Check out that Burnham bounce, marvel analysts.
And despite it all, Farage’s side are almost neck and neck in the polls with Burnham’s. Constituency-level analysis suggests that, were an election called tomorrow, Reform would leap from eight to somewhere between 100 and 200 seats. Among those Labour MPs swept out by a turquoise tide could easily be the party chair, Bridget Phillipson, the chancellor, John Healey, and the justice secretary, who is in charge of the prisoner release programme, Alex Norris.
A hard-right organisation that exerts a mysterious yet reliable pull on former members of the British National party may have a lower electoral ceiling than many feared; but its floor remains high enough to help deny Burnham an outright majority. A party that wants Trump-style deportation squads on British streets, to curb further the right to protest and to slash social security might still lead the next government, or at least become the official opposition.
Anyone worried by that prospect needs to understand who those anti-Farage voters are and what could get them off their sofas at an election. That’s why I was glad to have an exclusive look at the first-ever study of the anti-Reform electorate. Published today by the anti-racism charity Hope Not Hate, it is based on a large survey by Focaldata of nearly 9,000 Britons. These are people who, if a snap election were called tomorrow, could be persuaded to go out and put their “x” against an opponent to Reform. They are some of the most important voters in the country and they are probably not who you think.
If I say “anti-Reform army”, who do you see? Perhaps a bunch of leftwingers who live in cities, haver between Zack Polanski and Andy Burnham and ask their baristas for exotic milks. That’s half of them, and, the study shows, they skew young, minority ethnic and graduate. But the other half aren’t on the left at all. The joint-largest group in the Farage resistance is what Hope Not Hate describe as “rightwing on cultural issues and very rightwing on economics”. Think driveways, tidy lawns, a fondness for Ludwig. Their worry isn’t that the turquoise troops will be conservative – it’s that they won’t be conservative enough, instead bringing chaos. One other key demographic fact in the fight against Farage: women just don’t like what he stands for. That weak spot has been known to analysts for years and it’s partly why in Makerfield the Reform candidate’s saloon-bar sexism helped torpedo his chances.
Perhaps you too have spotted the curious omission in this little list of black marks against Farage’s name. To any question in Britain today, Reform reliably provides one answer: it’s the immigrants’ fault. Housing? Immigrants. Welfare? Immigrants. Oh, and small boats. Yet many who dislike Reform don’t object to its anti-migrant rhetoric. Those comfortable rightwingers I’ve just mentioned were vital in denying GB News regular Matt Goodwin a victory in Gorton and Denton earlier this year, according to one local campaigner who spent weeks doorknocking there – but not for the reasons lefties might think. “Racism doesn’t offend them; they just think it’s vulgar.”
In that one-liner lies a grave fault in mainstream politics and media: they have made racism more socially acceptable than at any point in the past 40-odd years. Keir Starmer and his flags, Yvette Cooper and the British bunting she says she used for home decor, Shabana Mahmood telling“white liberal hecklers” to “fuck right off”: look on your works, ye mighty, and despair.
I draw two big conclusions from this important study. The first is that what works against Reform in one seat will almost certainly not work in others. At the time of the Caerphilly showdown, Cardiff University’s Dr Jac Larner was regularly rung up by the London-based media: what lessons should they learn from Plaid Cymru’s success? He doesn’t think there are many. “Plaid can provide an alternative political identity for voters: progressive, working class – and Welsh. In Scotland, the SNP can still do that.” But in England, the nationalist politicians wear red corduroys and are bankrolled by foreign billionaires while bleating on about remigration for brown and black people.
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Here’s the other conclusion: opponents of Reform share with its supporters an utter abhorrence of Westminster. By two to one, the pollsters find, they are deeply unhappy with mainstream politicians and media. Writing about Hope Not Hate’s analysis last year into Reform voters, I noted that very few of them were unreachable by other parties – it’s just that most politicians didn’t bother to reach out. In the case of Starmer’s Labour it was a patronising pat on the head, and next to no attempt to tackle urgent problems such as the cost of living.
Farage returns to our screens next week, as the Reform party conference kicks off. One imagines there will be the mandatory triumphalism and speeches promising that tomorrow belongs to them. It isn’t true, of course. Voters might back Farage or Burnham, but they are mainly lending their support, not committing it. The kind of compromises that the new prime minister has begun making this week on council housebuilding and needless dithering on nationalising Thames Water will arouse little ire now. The people who will mind are those leftwingers who helped get Burnham into parliament, and for now they may be mollified by a couple of token gestures. But if Labour’s strategy is essentially to do what Starmer did, but with better comms and more social-media dopamine, it will get the same result as he did: a disaster, not just for Labour, but for the rest of us.
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Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
