NIGEL FARAGE’S decision to contest the general election in person will have the effect of dragging a dreary election campaign further to the right in terms of discourse.
The Reform Party’s owner has reappointed himself as its leader with a commitment to serve for the next five years. Farage has also shunted aside the party’s candidate in Clacton to give himself his best shot at ending a lengthy run of parliamentary election defeats.
Britain’s most famous national-populist has set himself ambitious targets. First, he aims to get more than the 4 million votes his predecessor party, Ukip, won at the 2015 general election, during its successful campaign to force the Tories into conceding a referendum on membership of the European Union.
That equated to 13 per cent of the poll. Prior to Farage’s U-turn on sitting this election out — bizarrely, for a British nationalist, on the grounds that the US election was more significant — it has been polling around 11 per cent, so that goal seems attainable.
Farage’s direct involvement will certainly enhance Reform’s media impact. He was right to underline in his press conference that in 2015 Ukip prospered by securing as many ex-Labour votes as it did from the Tories.
However, Ukip was a single-purpose party, and that purpose, Brexit, commanded significant support among Labour voters in working-class communities in particular. So far, Reform, as a full-spectrum hard-right party, has not had comparable success and has very largely cannibalised the Conservative vote alone.
That leads to Farage’s second ambition, which is to replace the Tories as the effective opposition to the anticipated Starmer government. At one level, that is unlikely. It is extremely hard to see Reform winning more seats than even Rishi Sunak’s divided and depleted Conservatives.
But if it makes the impact it hopes, even if that is handing more Tory seats to Labour by splitting the right-wing vote, it will set the terms of the debate for a realignment of the right.
Farage’s agenda — scaremongering against migrants, cutting taxes, “zero-tolerance” policing and a war on that all-purpose opponent “the woke” — already commands significant Conservative support from the party’s Suella Braverman-Liz Truss wing.
He will look to unite with them in one form or another — perhaps splitting the Tory Party or even folding Reform into it if satisfactory terms can be negotiated — with the product of this hideous union being an authoritarian and racist populism of the sort presently prospering elsewhere in Europe.
The ground for such a development is being well-rolled in this election campaign. Sunak is going all-out to appease Reform voters with policies like bringing back national service.
And Keir Starmer is in no way being left behind. He has written in the Sun, of all places, committing to bringing down migrant numbers, and has talked up war hysteria with pledges of fealty to Nato and Trident nuclear weapons.
That facilitates Farage’s final aim — leading the largest party in the parliament to be elected in five years’ time if the electoral schedule runs normally. That may seem far-fetched braggadocio. But people’s anger is growing and the main alternative to national-populism in capitalist politics — liberal centrism — is on the back foot.
A Starmer government offers so little in the way of solutions that a hard-right Tory-Reform lash-up could present itself as the only alternative to social decay.
The labour movement and the left must form a bulwark against Farage. It could start by exposing the phoney nature of his “solutions” in the present electoral campaign.
But that must be followed by a serious struggle against a Starmer government which may be just the anteroom to extreme reaction.
