Back in April I mused that we'd perhaps already seen Peak Reform. Things haven't gone at all well for them since the May local elections: successive by-election flops; Restore eating their lunch; the Farage Finance scandalette; and the Clacton Binface fiasco. Etc. Is anyone listening now to their noisy Ceuta bandwagon as it crashes down the cobbled streets of their target constituencies?
Anyhow, here's a piece supporting - and personalising - the Peak Reform conjecture: it reckons we might have seen Peak Farage lui-même. The GE could be a while yet, and if Farage's moment has come and gone, who else have they got? Which is pretty much the main issue: how do you field 600 credible candidates when you can't muster 6, and when your party leader can't deal with anyone with half a personality?
Meanwhile, the great charlatan at the head of the Green Party is increasingly looking as silly and irrelevant as we know him to be; and YourParty gets ever more a caricature of itself - see some of the closing paragraphs cited below[1]. And Badenoch's persistence, stamina and recent sure-footedness (plus or minus a 'reformed' neo-N) seem to be quietly paying off, albeit from a catastrophically low baseline. I have long held that both Labour and Conservative parties have all the hallmarks of genuinely enduring institutions - at least to an extent that needs to be overlaid on pretty outlandish claims that they are both toast. A large popcorn order is called for, before prices go through the drought-driven roof.
What do we think?
ND
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[1] See this sad little passage from the Chair's minutes of the most recent YourParty 'central executive committee' meeting.
... This isn’t what I want to be writing to you about, but it is unfortunately the case that some members of the CEC took the view that I should be removed as Chair. I don’t agree with them ... What disappoints me is that before these [administrative points] could be considered - before we could get on to the agenda - much of the meeting was lost to points of order seeking to remove me. By the time we finally got going, after a vote to remove me had been defeated, several members had left ...
Stop laughing at the back! She's a kind, nicely-spoken middle-class white lady, only doing her best to advance the Revolution:
Reform had a very good chance to replace the Tories, but blew it. Farage could have gotten ahead of his indiscretions and controlled the narrative, now people are looking at tactically voting for someone who wears a bin.
ReplyDeleteIn a lot of councils, instead of proving themselves, they've decided to be an awkward squad.
Yes, a lot of people were looking for something to skewer Farage with, but he's also supplied them with all the skewers they wanted, and looks upset and surprised when they've made him into a chump kebab.
I'm not convinced it is a terminal decline, but they - and Farage - are running out of time to turn it around.
CH
In terms of the next GE, I am expecting Burnham to come a cropper, and I'm still anticipating a Traffic Light coalition of Lab/Green/LibDem with the SNP doing a referendum deal to keep it upright. Burnham PM, and lots of spending, which will crash into reality inside 24 months and fall apart in a spectacularly vicious manner, followed by a Tory/Reform government, where Reform will get the same coalition kiss of death as the LibDems did.
ReplyDeleteCH
Peak Farrige ?
ReplyDeleteThink you've been supping bigly from that fount of FDS, Hodges & Hayes
According to the Daily Telegraph, Reform is back at the top of the polls, so there may be life in the old dog yet.
ReplyDeleteBut that said, all the weaknesses Nick reffed to are still in place for Farage.
I’ll make a prediction here with regards to Labour: Burnham is toast. He may even end up doing worse than Starmer, if that were possible. He demonstrably had the initiative, that comes with the territory of being a new PM, but has now lost it entirely due to his own poor performance and lack of judgement.
Which leaves the Conservatives. Yes, Kemi continues to impress and shows a (dare I say it) Thatcher-esque ability to work hard and work steadily and be consistent to gain long term results. The test will be her ability to make candidate selection into the mould it needs to be set into. The wets must be banished if she is to turn the party into a more polished, more professional, better led and better organised version of Reform, more or less the same policies but without the kooks and the crazies.
Anon @ 11:40 -
ReplyDeleteWhat? I don't even know who Hodges and Hayes are?
I rely solely on the ample evidence before my own eyes. We know what Farage can do, and it's been impressive. We're rapidly finding out what he can't - and it's a list containing several disqualifying factors.
Why would anyone expect the salesman, however good, also to make the car himself?
A few observations:
ReplyDelete1) We are in the middle of an old fashioned UK hot summer (ironically of the sort 1970s and 80s were renowned for), politics is the furthest thing from most people's minds. Keeping cool, getting a nights sleep, sunbathing and summer holidays are on most people's agendas right now.
2) Burnham has had the easiest of starts - a coronation without having to defenestrate the incumbent, and has been allowed to play politics on easy mode ever since by the the MSM (presumably because they all want him to do well). And has been allowed to troll around for a month promising everyone the earth with very little detail as to how he's going to pay for it. Which is a bit of a problem as paying for everything was a significant problem that Starmer/Reeves had, and it hasn't gone away. Even the few details he has given have on how his promises will be paid for have unravelled - the ID card scheme he cancelled hadn't been budgeted for by the last lot, so there wasn't any spare cash to spend on 'ending homelessness'
3) The election isn't going to be for another 3 years, unless Labour can somehow engineer a poll lead and take a gamble with it. Which is looking less likely, even the current fillip to their polling doesn't look that great, and thats before having to make some of those hard decisions that lie in wait. So Reform/Farage have plenty of time. A lot of political water will have to flow under Westminster Bridge before then.
4) The electorate is very volatile nowadays. The whole 'I voted Tory/Labour all my life and I'm not going to change now!' attitude is gone. If there's a ebb of support from Reform now it can just as easily flow back. Events dear boy, events!
5) All the problems Starmer had (immigration/net zero/government spending (and how to pay for it)/Israel/the bond market/de-industrialisation) have not gone away, and Burnham has not mentioned one of them. All we've been told is that we don't have enough devolution (but don't think of lowering taxes with your new powers), and its all the fault of a politician who died over a decade ago, and last held any power over 35 years ago. Oh and he's going to end an intractable problem of large urban societies, homelessness, a policy which is an obvious hostage to fortune. None of the hard questions have been addressed,, and if/when they are, thats going to p*ss off someone.
Basically our entire society now has the attention span of a goldfish. Any idea of the long view has gone. Farage's poll rating have stalled a bit - he's toast! Burham's have gone up slightly - he's going to be PM for ever! I remember being told that the Boris Wave meant Labour were out of power for a decade. Well look how that worked out.
Reform and Farage's strategy here should be Churchill's - keep buggering on, and hopefully something will turn up. There's no point wavering now. And the message to wavering voters is simple - you can vote for something different, however flawed that might be, or you can vote for more of the same.
With regards to Kemi and the Tory party. I like the cut of her jib. She looks serious, says the right things and of all the contenders vyeing for power, seems the one likely to bugger things up the least.
ReplyDeleteExcept, except.
We've been here before. Call me Dave, the boy Osborne . The Boriswave. The boats.
When they had the chance, it turned out that they talked Tory, but acted Labour.
I for one am never lending them my vote again.
The wets in the Tory party won't like Kemi talking like a sub-rate Thatcher. They'll knife her in the back.
ReplyDelete"With regards to Kemi and the Tory party. I like the cut of her jib. She looks serious, says the right things and of all the contenders vyeing for power, seems the one likely to bugger things up the least.
ReplyDeleteExcept, except.
We've been here before. Call me Dave, the boy Osborne . The Boriswave. The boats.
When they had the chance, it turned out that they talked Tory, but acted Labour."
Spot on. I too like Kemi, but its no good telling us 'But we're vetting all the new candidates to weed out the wannabe Lib Dems' because its the current lot of Tory MPs thats the problem. They're all keeping very quiet, but you can bet your bottom dollar that if Kemi was actually in a position to do all the things she says she wants to do a good half her party would be be working as hard as possible to stop her. If she was prepared to expel all current Tory MPs who are Uniparty adjacent I might consider voting Tory again, but if not, no dice.
At least with Nige its the other way around. He'd probably have to be working hard to stop his bunch of backbenchers from trying to introduce the death penalty for littering (which would be fully deserved IMO, especially for people who throw rubbish out of their vehicles). You know you're not going to get backsliding from them.
@ his bunch of backbenchers
ReplyDeleteBut that's the point. He can't muster a bunch, let alone "biggest single party"! They are all jail-adjacent!!
I must say I'm surprised ND still has faith in the Tories, after Boris and Rishi. What's particularly depressing is that no Tories AFAIK stood up and said "this is wrong".
ReplyDeleteReform seem to have big Boris-boosters like Nadine Dorries which contaminates their brand.
I'm never sure if ND, in the Babel of Croydon, realises the impact of the Boriswave on those of us who live in places chosen inter alia for being as little like Croydon as possible*, and suddenly found their local foodbank donations were being queued for by Africans.
* when I lived in London we would occasionally meet up at Clapham and take the first train South or West, stay on until there were no lights outside then get off at the next station and spend the evening in the local. Bliss !
Personally I would like reform to win. However I think Farage has the same problem as Starmer did in 2024. Both thought that their success (Starmer winning, Farage making reform popular) was because of their talents - when the truth was that their opponents' incompetence was the real secret of their success.
ReplyDeleteThe Tory vote more than halved in 2024 - from 13,966,454 in 2019 to 6,828,925 in 2024. I can't actually think of a greater betrayal of their voters in the last century than the Boriswave and Rishiwave. It wasn't just incompetence, it was active malice while the parliamentary Tory party passively looked on.
DeleteHalf of them (the wets) actively encouraged soft left wing policies. Only if/when they are all purged from the Tory party will their rehabilitation begin.
DeleteBut the "dries" stayed schtum too ...
DeleteAll I wrote was ...
ReplyDeleteI have long held that both Labour and Conservative parties have all the hallmarks of genuinely enduring institutions - at least to an extent that needs to be overlaid on pretty outlandish claims that they are both toast
It's just an observation.. Get your own popcorn, settle down & watch
PS - https://news.williamhill.com/politics/badenoch-overtakes-farage-as-favourite-to-be-next-prime-minister/
The FT points to our zeitgeist 'The exciting boring decade'. We have so much but politics, business, entertainment etc have all flattened out into a bland homogenous 'appropriate' mush. We have almost unlimited access to information but are still going nowhere.
ReplyDeleteOne would need a heart of stone not to laugh about Farage. Who could possibly find a use for Bonehill-Paine. The Greens and Reform and Restore and Liberals are going nowhere. Mere make-a-job positions for otherwise useless people. We are lumbered with the carcasses of Labour and Conservative merely for installed base reasons. All costing money and doing nothing useful.
Seems like a thermodynamic system, all bumping into each other and getting in the way. Farage shouts 'all come over here' while Badenoch shouts the same. None dare admit they have no clue what to do and if they tried they would be prevented from action.
Ah well, Conference Season not too far away and then Christmas and we can re-run the same boring film for 2027.
"I have long held that both Labour and Conservative parties have all the hallmarks of genuinely enduring institutions - at least to an extent that needs to be overlaid on pretty outlandish claims that they are both toast"
ReplyDeleteUntil they aren't. The Liberals were part of the duopoly until suddenly they weren't. Labour was the party of Scotland until it wasn't. Ditto Wales more recently.
I think you are unaware how much traditional Tory voters now despise the Tory party. I have voted Tory all my life, until the last election, and now I detest everything they stand for. Its their utter contempt for their voters over several decades that gets me. They will say whatever is required to convince people to vote for them, then do the exact opposite. Well they've pulled that trick once too often on this voter, and I'd rather vote for Polanski than the current Tory party. At least you'd get what you voted for, unlike the Tories. They'll allow Kemi to lure the voters in with loud claims of 'Look we've changed!' and then if it works they'll cut her off at the knees and it'll be back to Labour-lite, as before.
Lying c*nts the lot of them.