OPINION polls showing the hard-right Reform party in first place among voting intentions should be taken seriously, if not literally.

It remains improbable in the highest degree that Nigel Farage will be walking into No 10 Downing Street after the next general election.

For one thing, if a week is famously a long time in politics, the four-and-a-half years before that election must be held are more than time enough for a shift in the electoral weather.

And for another, the figures only give Reform a fractional lead over the Tories and Labour, insufficient to win a parliamentary majority under the electoral system. 

Indeed, they may amount to a simple repetition of last July’s outcome, when a divided right-wing vote handed Keir Starmer an inflated majority.

In the event, uncertain in itself, of a pact of some sort between Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage, who are divided politically on little, and such a misbegotten alliance proving victorious, it would likely cast Reform as the junior partner.

But nor are there grounds for complacency. It is true that in recent years both the UK Independence Party (Ukip) and its continuation the Brexit Party surged in the polls only to subsequently relapse to the margins.

Those, however, were different iterations of a single-issue project, whose fortunes rose and fell in line with the salience of British withdrawal from the European Union on the political agenda.

Ukip also suffered from not only playing host to dodgy, violent and deranged characters, which all parties may have a share of, but of fast-tracking them into leading roles.

The Reform challenge is more serious. If its appeal is mainly driven by antipathy to immigration, it poses as an alternative across the whole spectrum of issues.

Farage is careful to balance anti-migrant slogans with “anti-corporate” rhetoric, presenting as the champion of ordinary folk left behind by the elite.

He has even, demagogically, sought to present Reform as a home for disillusioned supporters of Jeremy Corbyn.

The Reform leader-owner knows what he is doing. Labour-held constituencies are the low-hanging fruit for Reform to pluck.

On present polling figures it could win as many as 60, a number which could double in the event of a small further shift in opinion.

The working-class communities where voters are turning in despair to hard-right authoritarian populism have their parallels in almost every country of the developed capitalist world.

This is an advance gifted to the Farageists by Labour over the last quarter-century. New Labour’s embrace of neoliberalism and consequent hands-off approach to economic management saw 100,000 manufacturing jobs lost each year it was in power even before the 2008 crash.

Whole towns saw their base of economic activity destroyed with nothing put in its place. The subsequent hardship was only exacerbated by 14 years of Tory austerity eviscerating welfare and public services.

Starmer’s Labour is set on the same course. Its so-called industrial strategy has amounted to hot air, with the £28 billion Green New Deal junked and fealty to Treasury rules blocking any state-led investment drive.

The same rules are also mandating a return to austerity, given Starmer and Rachel Reeves have ruled out any increases in taxation on the wealthy or big business. Again, welfare will be in the firing line.

This is all designed to hand constituencies to Reform on a plate.  The labour movement must step up to demand an alternative and a break with the conservative consensus urgently.

And it must be clear — if Starmer is the problem, then his departure is the first necessary step towards a solution.