SMALLER parties may make an outsize impact in the election, with the governing parties converging on many issues at home and abroad.
The Greens will be aiming for a powerful electoral presence, buoyed by their best-ever local election results this month and hoping to pick up the votes of Corbyn supporters alienated by Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour.
The party will stand candidates across the country but is targeting strongly just four, one of whom is Sian Berry, aiming to replace the party’s only MP Caroline Lucas, who is standing down as representative for Brighton Pavilion.
The others are Carla Denyer, who on all evidence stands a good chance of winning Bristol Central from Labour, Adrian Ramsay in Waveney and Ellie Chowns in North Herefordshire.
The Workers Party, headed by Rochdale by-election victor George Galloway, had intended to fight nearly every seat in the anticipated autumn election, but may now focus on standing in around half the Commons constituencies, with its main issue being opposition to British complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
That would still constitute the largest left-of-Labour general election challenge in history. Most eyes would be on Mr Galloway’s own re-election prospects in Rochdale under the different conditions of a general election.
Reform UK will also be fighting to retain its sole parliamentary representative, former Tory deputy chair and GB News presenter Lee Anderson, who defected to the hard-right party earlier this year.
The party’s leader Richard Tice will have to wage the campaign without its best-known figure and, under Reform’s peculiar structure, its owner, Nigel Farage.
He announced today that he would not run as a candidate, and seemed more engaged with assisting Donald Trump in the US presidential contest.
The Tories will be looking to squeeze Reform’s present 12 per cent in the polls, a figure which — on its own — would doom a number of Conservative MPs to defeat.
And a number of significant challenges by independent socialists, ranging from former Labour MPs Claudia Webbe in Leicester and Emma Dent-Coad in Kensington to Andrew Feinstein, who will square up against Keir Stamer in Holborn and St Pancras, will also force unwelcome scrutiny of Labour.
