‘Even tactical voting will not help Labour survive a Tory-Reform pact’, Independent, 3 December 2025.

Posted on March 26, 2026 by tpbale

As the English philosopher RG Collingwood didn’t quite say, “the only clue to what a man can do is what a man has done”.

Given that Nigel Farage denied he would do any kind of deal with Boris Johnson’s Conservatives – until, that is, he did one in 2019, standing down Brexit Party candidates in Tory-held seats – nobody should put too much faith in his attempt to pour cold water on reports that he has told donors to expect some kind of pact or merger between Reform UK and the Conservatives at the next general election.

Doubtless the story has brought some desperately-needed solace to Labour politicians and strategists. That a number of former Conservative MPs most people have never heard of have defected to Farage’s outfit (whether out of genuine conviction or because they believe it now offers them a surer route back to the Commons than Kemi Badenoch can) has already enabled his opponents to suggest that Reform UK doesn’t quite present the clean break with the past and the failed establishment that its leader is always banging on about. The idea that Farage actually has a secret plan to team up with the Tories to get into government provides even more grist to their mill.

Likewise, Liberal Democrats hoping to hold on to the swathe of southern English constituencies that they took off the Tories in 2024 will be more than happy to tell voters in their largely (though not entirely) Remain-voting, graduate-heavy seats that their opponents are getting together with the man who brought you Brexit, and now wants to finish the job by deporting a whole lot more people than have already departed our shores due to the blindingly obvious damage it’s done to the UK economy.

The Greens, too, will be pleased. After all, Zack Polanski, who, however “progressive” he might paint himself, is pound-for-pound just as much of a populist as Farage, will clearly jump at the chance to point to a Tory-Reform pact or merger as proof positive of a plot by wicked one-percenters to do down the virtuous 99 per cent.

But progressives shouldn’t start celebrating too early. If the Conservatives and Reform UK can come to some kind of formal arrangement, it could mean curtains rather than Christmas-come-early for this country’s centre-left.

That’s because mounting evidence suggests that, for all the fragmentation of the British party system brought about by the advent of five-party politics (eight, if we count Plaid, the SNP, and – stop laughing at the back! – Your Party), what we’re actually seeing is a sorting of the electorate into two distinct blocs, with most votes flowing not between them but between the parties within each bloc: the Conservatives and Reform in one, and all the rest in the other.

Right now, it looks as if plenty of Conservative and Reform supporters might well be prepared to trade votes if it means locking a Labour or Labour-led government out of power. A pact (or, perhaps better still, a full-blown merger that would negate the need for complex negotiations around which party gets a crack at which seat) would do a more reliable job than informal tactical voting to prevent the splits on the right that help cost it dear last year – especially, as looks likely, the left can’t find a way to respond in kind.

A pact or merger also helps Reform overcome one of the biggest doubts that people have about voting for it – namely its sheer inexperience. Nigel Farage as prime minister and Robert Jenrick as chancellor? Be afraid – be very afraid.

Originally published at https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/nigel-farage-electoral-pact-reform-tories-starmer-labour-b2877302.html

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‘A Reform UK government isn’t inevitable’, Interview with LSE’s Joanna Bale (no relation!), 18 September 2025.

Posted on March 26, 2026 by tpbale

With Reform’s recent success in local elections and a parliamentary by-election, do you think we’re witnessing a temporary populist surge or the beginning of a longer-term realignment in British politics?

I’m rather cautious about the idea of a realignment or, “The realignment,” as people used to say after the 2019 election, because I think, often, election results can be rather more contingent than people imagine. So, for example, there was a lot said about Boris Johnson creating this new, impregnable voter coalition in 2019. And come 2024, the Conservatives crashed to their worst defeat ever.

Having said that, obviously I think it’s been true for some time that voters have been falling out of love with the two main parties and looking for an alternative, and not finding it in the traditional third party, the Liberal Democrats. And generally speaking, not finding it in the Greens either, although in Scotland, finding it in the SNP. So there is room in the system for an anti-establishment party, just as there is in many European countries. I think we are seeing a big shift, but I wouldn’t want to say that that makes a Reform UK government under Nigel Farage as prime minister inevitable in the way that, perhaps, some people are saying because they would very much like it to happen.

Do you think a Reform government is a distinct possibility though?

I think given how volatile British politics has been over the last few years, and given how unanchored most people are from one party or another, given that we have a very unstable geopolitical situation, given that it’s going to be very difficult to “stop the boats”, given that there will be arguments, because of the cost of living, about moves to a green transition, and given there are so many older people who feel uncomfortable with the kind of cultural changes we’ve seen, yeah, “never say never”.

I think one problem for Reform, funnily enough though, is Nigel Farage, in the sense that he’s both their biggest asset and their biggest liability. He is, to use that cliché, quite a marmite politician. So there are a whole bunch of people who absolutely love him, but there are a lot of people who absolutely despise the man and wouldn’t trust him an inch, let alone to run the government.

And I think that’s probably what Labour, and to some extent the Conservatives, are relying on. By ’28, ’29, people will be faced not with telling opinion pollsters which party they prefer, but actually with a choice between a bunch of people who at least have run governments before, and even if they haven’t done it brilliantly, probably know what they’re doing, and a guy who so far has only got four parliamentary colleagues, none of whom have ever had any kind of executive experience in government. And when it comes to that crunch, I’m not sure people will necessarily vote for the more radical option. But who knows?

If Reform did get into government, what do you think would happen? What does that mean for the future?

I think if Reform UK do get into government, all bets are off. You will have a party that has no experience of running the country, which has a parliamentary contingent with no experience of what it means to be a legislator. I would’ve thought it will be a recipe for chaos. But many people look at how the Conservative Party’s run things for the last 14 years, how the Labour Party has run things for the last year, and think, “Really, could they do any worse?” I would guess actually they could do a lot worse, but some people are prepared to take that chance.

What would it take to reverse or at least blunt the influence of Reform in the UK? Is it a question of policy, leadership or social change?

I think to blunt Reform UK’s performance in the short to medium term, we are probably talking about Nigel Farage falling under the proverbial bus. It’s difficult to see how they could replace him, and I think that would make a big difference. Otherwise, I think all the Government can do is focus on trying to make a tangible improvement to people’s standard of living and to public services, and hope that that is enough, in the end, to persuade people not to take a chance on something more radical.

If there’s one thing you wish the public better understood about the rise of the radical right in Britain, what would it be?

I think the one take-home message would be that there is a symbiotic relationship between the Conservative Party on the one hand, and Nigel Farage’s vehicles on the other. And that you can’t really understand the rise of UKIP, you can’t really understand the rise of the Brexit Party and Reform UK, without understanding the Conservative Party and vice versa. You can’t really understand what’s happened to the Conservative Party without understanding Nigel Farage and the appeal of populism.

Do you think the radical right is shaping our future or the future of politics?

I think certainly it’s going to play a big part in British politics over the next few years, and I would argue that it’s actually been playing a big part really since 2010. This is only the latest development, the culmination as some would see it, of a long-term trend.

Originally published at https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/a-reform-uk-government-isnt-inevitable/ See (and hear) the podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ohn-mlxfff0

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The memoirs of a whip in love with his leaders’, Political Quarterly, 30 June 2025.

Posted on March 26, 2026 by tpbale

Ungovernable: The Political Diaries of a Chief Whip, by Simon Hart. Macmillan. 368 pp. £25.00

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any book purporting to be a revelatory insider account of contemporary British politics must be in want of a serialisation in the Times, The Telegraph or The Mail—not least because getting one may well net the author more money than they stand to make from sales of the book itself. Admittedly, some people will be persuaded to actually buy that book on the strength of the ‘juicy bits’ they get to hear about in advance of its publication. But there is a downside: unless the reader of said book somehow exists in a self-imposed media-free bubble, then much of its supposedly revelatory content will already be incredibly familiar.

So it is with Simon Hart’s account of his time as Secretary of State for Wales in Boris Johnson’s government and Chief Whip in Rishi Sunak’s. One’s jaw might perhaps have dropped on hearing for the first time about an MP trapped in a Bayswater brothel, or a special adviser getting up to no good at an orgy. But when it’s the umpteenth time, not so much—especially when (both in those two cases and when it comes to Tory MPs’ endless attempts to secure themselves a knighthood or a peerage) no names are named.

None of this to say that the book—particularly when names are actually named—doesn’t have its merits. One of these, for anyone who follows politics, and in particular the politics of the late (but unlamented) Conservative government, lies in its capacity to confirm that all-too-many of those who served in the latter really were every bit as awful as they seemed from the outside looking in.

Some of those whom Hart skewers are now long gone, and maybe best forgotten—Matt Hancock and Nadine Dorries, to name but two. But some are still sitting on the green benches at Westminster, including the party’s current leader, Kemi Badenoch. Whether it really was her to whom Rishi Sunak was referring when he confessed, during his February 2023 reshuffle, ‘Let’s all agree about one thing, she is fucking useless but we can’t get rid of her’, we shall never know. But Hart does confirm what has surely become increasingly obvious to voters who didn’t know much about Badenoch before she won the leadership—namely (as he writes in February 2024 after she’d ‘popped in for a chat about trans stuff’) that she ‘lives in a permanent state of outrage.’

Still, the current Leader of the Opposition escapes very lightly compared to the former Home Secretary Suella Braverman—‘a glove puppet for the 1950s wing of the Party’ who, rather than responding positively to Rishi Sunak’s understandable (but ultimately badly mistaken) attempt to unite a chronically divided party around his leadership by appointing her to his Cabinet, spent much of her time undermining him, only to fly into an unseemly rage after he finally summoned up the courage to sack her.

Hart, it seems, had Braverman’s number right from the start. Yet in a number of other cases, he (rather admirably in some ways) allows us to see how staggeringly naïve he could be. That he believed that all-round bluff Northerner and red wall icon Lee Anderson’s assurances that he wasn’t off to join Reform UK just before he went and did so is one example. But the best—unsurprisingly given so many of his colleagues also fell under that supreme chancer’s spell—comes in his dealings with Boris Johnson, whom he continues to see as some sort of loveable rogue right until (and indeed after) the end.

Fortunately, and somewhat paradoxically, that doesn’t prevent Hart from making some acute observations about the nature of the parliamentary party’s relationship with Johnson: ‘the mutual respect,’ he writes in January 2022 after the UK had finally left the EU, ‘has always been somewhat transactional and hence skin-deep … BoJo was only elected for one reason (to deliver Brexit) and if that no longer applies what is the point of him?’ He also supplies an anecdote that, in a just one snatch of dialogue, perfectly captures Johnson’s character. It comes on the evening Hart (and others) are trying to persuade him that the game really is finally up:

‘[H]e said, “Just give me till Tuesday.”

“Why?,” I asked, “What’s happening on Tuesday?”

“I don’t know,” said Boris, “but something is bound to crop up.”’

Hart’s account of Johnson begging him to somehow kill off the Privileges Committee investigation is equally damning. And nor, for all his residual admiration for Johnson, does Hart hide the fact that, during the race to succeed him as PM, he ran ‘an uncharacteristically effective “anybody but Rishi” operation’ which handed the leadership (albeit mercifully briefly) to Liz Truss.

Perhaps the most glaring failure of Hart’s supposedly finely-tuned political antennae, however, is his inability to realise quite how damaging Partygate would be. Almost unbelievably for someone whose career rests on reading voters right, he’s convinced, when the revelations first appear in December 2021, that it’s ‘not resonating with the public.’ Indeed, it takes him until the following April to realise that the scandal is ‘producing some anti BoJo reactions with real people not just the media’—and even then he believes that the fall-out on the doorstep ‘can be managed with a conversation.’ Then, when the Gray Report eventually appears, he reckons the press ‘have been made to look a little foolish and hypocritical by blowing it all up out of proportion.’

That said, for the student of legislative and executive politics, Hart’s book provides an engaging insight into both the pastoral-cum-disciplinary-cum-logistical role of the Whips Office and the sometimes bonkers balancing act that is the British Cabinet reshuffle. As such, while not quite in the same league as Tim Renton’s Chief Whip and Gyles Brandreth’s Breaking the Code, his diaries provide a degree of reassurance that not much has changed in that respect—apart from Tory MPs behaving with even more of a sense of entitlement and even less commitment to the party’s collective good then they did back then. The section on how parliamentary selections are managed (‘managed’ being the operative word) when a snap election is called is also well worth reading.

What comes through most strongly in the end, however, is the extent to which grown-up, supposedly worldly-wise operators like Hart can fall hopelessly in love with those they serve, convinced not only that their boss is trouncing their apparently hapless opposite number at every PMQs and in every televised election debate, but also that duty lies, above all else, in preventing them being taken down by their internal rivals.

That so many ministers and chief whips now seem to see themselves as praetorian guards to the prime minister rather than guardians of the collective good of the party will no doubt be grist to the mill of those who argue that British politics is now irredeemably presidentialised. Whether it actually serves the best interests of those political parties, and therefore parliamentary democracy as a whole, is another matter entirely.

Originally published at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-923X.13561

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‘Norman Tebbit carried a torch for a “true-blue” politics now embraced by Nigel Farage’, Independent, 8 July 2025

Posted on July 24, 2025 by tpbale

They say “never meet your heroes” – but meeting your antiheroes can be absolutely fascinating. At least, that was my experience when I met Norman Tebbit. How could it not have been?

Already branded a “semi-house-trained polecat” as an opposition MP, once in government after 1979, his take-no-prisoners, right-wing persona meant that anyone growing up in the Seventies and Eighties in a vaguely left-leaning household couldn’t help but see him as the Thatcherite thug his puppet played in the phenomenally popular satirical show, Spitting Image.

But there was always more to him than that – which quickly became apparent when, in 2017, we met for a chat over a cup of tea in the House of Lords.

It wasn’t that the so-called “Chingford Skinhead” had mellowed in the sense of resiling from many of his characteristic and sometimes notorious beliefs – he might have admitted that he’d been wrong in his opinion of the Ugandan Asians who’d been forced to flee to Britain in the early 1970s. But he was still clearly sceptical about the willingness and ability of migrants to integrate (the origin of his infamous “cricket test”). And he was still very much a Europhobe, and opposed to gay marriage.

But on a personal level, he was nothing like the bike chain-wielding, leather-clad bruiser I thought I’d grown up with.

True, he was still sharp-tongued – a reminder of his considerable talents as a soundbite politician avant la lettre. But what struck me most was his even sharper political intelligence. Here was someone who, throughout his time as a key figure in Margaret Thatcher’s governments, could go studs-up when required, but was also very much a canny strategist.

In retrospect, and even at the time for those willing to see beyond the stereotype, those qualities played a crucial part in some of those governments’ signal achievements – most obviously, trade union reform, privatisation, and a couple of now-legendary electoral victories.

It’s too easily forgotten, especially if we focus on her titanic struggle with Arthur Scargill’s National Union of Mineworkers, that Thatcher’s undermining of trade union power was achieved iteratively rather than via one climactic confrontation. And Tebbit (who, don’t forget, had been an official in the airline pilots’ union) had played a vital part in boiling the frog by steering through the second of a string of employment bills, which over time totally transformed the UK’s previously poisonous industrial relations.

Likewise, the selling off of state-owned concerns to the private sector was not achieved by some sort of big bang, but instead accelerated over time. And once again, Tebbit, promoted to secretary of state for trade and industry, played a vital role, overseeing the first really high-profile privatisation – that of British Telecom – which paved the way for the second; British Gas.

By then, of course, Tebbit and, even more so, his wife, Margaret, had suffered terribly in the IRA’s Brighton bomb attack, and had, as a consequence, been switched from the executive to the electoral front line, becoming chair of the Conservative Party in the long run-up to the 1987 contest.

Already no stranger to media appearances (indeed, during the 1983 election, he’d appeared in more broadcast news items than any Tory apart from Thatcher herself), Tebbit not only helped front the 1987 campaign but helped mastermind it, brilliantly integrating the advertising expertise of Saatchi & Saatchi and the political instincts of his boss and his colleagues – even if one them did famously panic about how things were going.

Afterwards, in semi-(house-trained) retirement on the backbenches and in the Lords, Tebbit, like Thatcher, was admittedly a thorn in the side of his successors, particularly on Europe. But the Tories, and admirers of the brand of “Essex-man”, no-nonsense Conservatism which he embodied, and which, sadly for them now, seems to have passed to Nigel Farage, owe him a huge debt of gratitude.

Originally published at https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/norman-tebbit-death-thatcher-nigel-farage-conservatives-b2784672.html

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‘Why we need to halt “hard right” in its tracks’, The Loop, 10 July 2025.

Posted on July 24, 2025 by tpbale

Whatever passes for the centre right these days is in serious danger of being displaced or even replaced by the far right – most often by politicians whose questionable commitment to the checks and balances that characterise liberal democracy and whose tendency to counterpose ‘the people’ to ‘the elite’ qualifies them as ‘populist radical’ rather than ‘extreme’ right.

This is happening in three main ways. Sometimes, a far-right party of either variant surpasses its centre-right rival electorally. We’ve already seen this happen in France and Italy and it may one day happen in Germany. Other times, the takeover occurs from within – think what MAGA has done to the Republicans in the US. Occasionally, a centre-right party tries so hard to fight off a far-right contender by adopting its rhetoric and policies that it all but becomes one itself. Arguably this is what’s happening to the UK Conservative Party. Indeed, one might even argue that, in the UK, all three things are happening at once.

Who’s to blame?

In part, normalisation of far-right ideas is down to supposedly centrist politicians hoping to counter the threat on their right flank by talking and acting tough on immigration, sounding more sceptical about rapid progress towards net zero, and walking back previously liberal stances on transgender issues. But the mainstream media also contributes – as anyone following politics in the UK for a few years may have noticed.

Large parts of the British media treat policies put forward by far-right politicians that are not merely fringe but patently unworkable as options worth discussing and even supporting. A recent example is Reform UK leader Nigel Farage talking about reopening coal mines or, equally absurdly, funding massive tax cuts simply by ‘scrapping’ net zero and DEI programmes.

More insidiously, there is a growing tendency in the British media – especially The Times and The Economist and, even (in its radio coverage) the BBC – to label such parties not as far right (or, at the very least, populist radical right) but as ‘hard right.’

Excuses, excuses

‘Hard right’ is a neologism that, unless I’m missing something, has little or no currency whatsoever among academic experts. Those experts like to call things exactly what they are – namely (following Cas Mudde) far right (the umbrella term) or one of its two variants: extreme right or (populist) radical right.

In their defence, journalists will talk about language evolving to cover new phenomena. This argument, however, seems to ignore the fact that both the extreme and populist radical-right variants of the far right have been around for decades. If this is the case, then why is it only recently that the new term has crept into media output?

Journalists have even suggested that ‘populist radical right’ is just too complex a term for their readers to understand. Why use three words when two will do? This is understandable in a headline, perhaps, but in an 800-word report or op-ed? I don’t think so.

In reality, ‘hard right’ is less an evolution than a euphemism, effectively sanitising and normalising what it purports to describe. And the recent increase in its use doesn’t seem to correlate with any deradicalisation among the parties that journalists are referring to. Instead, it correlates with growth in those parties’ electoral support and their proximity to or entry into government. This all suggests that what’s driving journalists’ use of ‘hard right’ is their fear of losing access to precious sources were they to call it what it actually is. Or, given that Reform UK (successfully) threatened the BBC with legal action if it were to label the party ‘far right’, maybe journalists fear an even worse fate than that.

Which is to be master? Time to make a stand

Ultimately, of course, I can only hazard a guess as to whether journalists’ fears of loss of access, or else media intimidation by the parties themselves, are in fact the cause. Nor can I be sure that other countries are experiencing something similar, although I would be very interested to find out. But I do know that those of us involved in studying such parties – and who, I assume, value precision – should push back against this terminological slippage.

Pushing back can have an impact. And it does matter. After all, as this piece of dialogue from Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass reminds us, language is no trivial matter:

‘“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, which is to be master – that’s all.”

Originally published at https://theloop.ecpr.eu/why-we-need-to-halt-hard-right-in-its-tracks/

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‘Why are Tories suddenly in favour of proportional representation?’, The Independent, 25 June 2025.

Posted on June 27, 2025 by tpbale

here’s an increasing disconnect between those who want to run the country and the rest of us who merely live in it – and it seems to be making us more likely to call for a change to the way we choose them in the first place.

Back in 1986, when the British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA) first asked people whether they trusted governments “to place the needs of the nation above the interests of their party”, only 12 per cent of people said “almost never”, compared to 40 per cent who replied “just about always” or “most of the time”.

Yet, its latest report, published this morning, turns all that on its head.

Now it’s those saying “just about always” or “most of the time” who account for 12 per cent, while those who say “almost never” make up an eye-watering 46 per cent of respondents.

But as our trust in government has declined, our support for changing the electoral system so as “to allow smaller political parties to get a fairer share of MPs” has risen.

Back in 1986, for instance, just 32 per cent of us favoured change, with 60 per cent of us saying we wanted to keep the system as it is. Fast forward to today, and we see another near-complete reversal, with only 36 per cent happy with the status quo, while 60 per cent want change.

Cynics, of course, will point to what we might call the “You only sing when you’re losing” effect: as the BSA’s report shows, our views partly depend on whether the party we favour did well or badly out of the system last time around.

Given that they got just four seats in the Commons – instead of the 41 that their share of the vote might have earned them in a perfectly proportional (PR) system – it will come as no surprise that 90 per cent of Green Party voters want to see a change.

Contrast that with Lib Dem voters. Their party’s tally of 72 seats wasn’t off the 79 seats it would have been entitled to under pure PR. Cue the proportion of Lib Dems wanting change falling from 71 per cent in 2023 to just 56 per cent now.

Likewise, before last year’s landslide, some 60 per cent of Labour supporters favoured change – and that’s now fallen to 55 per cent.

Predictably enough, Conservative supporters have travelled in the opposite direction. In 2023, only 24 per cent wanted to change the voting system to make it fairer. But, after a general election that saw the Tories bag only 121 seats instead of the 154 that pure PR would have given them, that proportion has now more than doubled to 52 per cent.

Still, that pales in comparison to Reform supporters – some 78 per cent of whom say they want a change (hardly surprising, given Farage and co ended up with just 5 seats at Westminster rather than the 93 they might have expected from pure PR).

All of which means that, for the first time ever, a clear majority of the country’s right-wing voters seem open to change. Meanwhile, a majority of voters as a whole seem more relaxed about the obvious corollary of such a shift: just over half of us now say we’d prefer a coalition to a single-party government.

Put that together with the possibility that Labour, if it’s as unpopular in four years’ time as it is now, could reach for PR as a last-gasp way of “saving the furniture”, and the end of first-past-the-post (FPTP) might – just might – come sooner than we all think.

Whether that would help restore our trust in government, who knows? But it’s got to be worth a try.

Originally published at https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/proportional-representation-pr-fptp-electoral-reform-b2775772.html

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‘London isn’t a Labour city any more — the three key questions that new polling raises’, The Standard, 24 June 2025.

Posted on June 27, 2025 by tpbale

“London is a Labour city” was always something of an exaggeration but it’s even more misleading today than it has been for quite a while. Polling just released by the Mile End Institute (MEI) at Queen Mary University of London suggests that the capital’s falling out of love with Labour. We can guess why its former supporters have gone AWOL but whether they can be tempted back or replaced is another matter.

It’s still the case that Labour is doing better among London’s voters than it is across the country as a whole. Labour support is averaging a paltry 23 per cent nationally compared to 32 per cent in the capital. Sadly, however, the 11-point drop in the party’s support since the general election is exactly the same in London as it is across Britain, suggesting that Labour is no more insulated against disillusion in the capital than anywhere else.

And the similarities don’t end there, although they aren’t exact: for instance, very nearly three-quarters of Londoners who voted Labour in 2024 are currently sticking with the party, meaning they are (at least according to the very latest polling) considerably more loyal than their counterparts across Britain as a whole, only just over half of whom are showing the same kind of loyalty.

On the other hand, the quarter of Labour voters who have deserted the party seem just as prone in London as they are elsewhere to plump for a panoply of other parties.

What does seem clear from MEI’s polling is that it’s what’s happening – or maybe not happening – in Westminster and Whitehall, as opposed to City Hall, that’s the biggest problem for London’s voters: indeed the 39 per cent saying that the UK government is doing a good job delivering on its general election promises only just outweigh the 37 per cent who say the opposite.

Londoners weren’t asked directly about Keir Starmer but it’s doubtful that they feel more positively about him than voters in the rest of the country, who currently give him a net negative rating of -54. Against that, the -10 rating Londoners give Sadiq Kahn seems positively glowing, and suggests that the mayor may be helping Labour to keep more of its voters in the capital than the country as a whole.

All this raises three key questions. What is it that Labour has done to disappoint so many of its former supporters? Can it win them over again? And, if it can’t, is there any chance that it might be able instead to persuade those who didn’t vote Labour in 2024 to give the party a try in 2029?

The strategy pursued by Starmer and Reeves – symbolised by their commitment to welfare reform and constraining the spending of supposedly non-essential government departments – is built around the idea of demonstrating to a doubtful public that Labour are the proverbial “grown-ups in the room”. “Fantasy economics”, be it associated with Nigel Farage’s bonkers Britannia Card for non-doms or predictable protests against benefit cuts by the party’s own MPs, is rejected in favour of fiscal orthodoxy, even if that means making life harder for some of those for whom life is already a struggle.

At the same time, Starmer and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper are clearly desperate to show Labour’s no soft touch when it comes to immigration. Add to that a relatively generous settlement for Wes Streeting at Health, and, the argument goes, you have a recipe for re-election.

The problem is that, apart from the latter, none of that is what many of those who elected Labour in 2024 expected or wanted from a government promising “Change”.

Instead, they feel they’re just getting more of the same, along with a side order of “island of strangers”. As a result, unless there’s both a policy- and a vibe-shift sometime soon, then they may well be gone for good. And no amount of half-strength populism and “Iron Chancellor” chat will see former Reform and Tory voters flocking to replace them.

Originally published at https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/london-labour-support-fall-voters-reform-poll-b1234656.html

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‘Starmer’s immigrant rhetoric and politics of migration’, Anadolu, 23 May 2025.

Posted on June 3, 2025 by tpbale

The decision last week by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to announce a headline-grabbing tightening of the UK’s immigration regime – and some of the tough talk in which he couched that announcement – is not simply a knee-jerk reaction to the stunning successes achieved at recent local elections by Nigel Farage’s populist radical right party, Reform UK. 

It is also an attempt – albeit not necessarily a sensible economic or political move – to clean up another mess Labour inherited from the Conservatives’ largely wasted 2010–2024 government.

When, in 2016, British voters decided that the country should leave the EU, many did so because they were promised it would allow the UK to “take back control” of its borders. They assumed, not unreasonably, that the end of free movement for EU citizens would mean a significant reduction in immigration – something they had long demanded, especially in the wake of a huge and utterly unanticipated influx of people from Poland and other eastern European countries that joined the bloc in 2004. As it turned out, however, the very same Conservative politician who had done so much to help “Get Brexit Done” – Boris Johnson – then did the very opposite of what most voters wanted from it.  

​ ​​​​​​No migration vs. labor market shortages

Worried that the end of free movement would lead to labor market shortages in a country that has traditionally relied on migrants to do the jobs that Brits cannot or will not do, his government introduced a remarkably liberal immigration regime. The result? Firstly, a massive increase, rather than a decrease, in the number of people coming (perfectly legally) to study and work in the UK – the only difference being that, instead of coming from Europe, they were coming mainly from South Asia and Africa.

Secondly, and hardly surprisingly, anger on the part of Brits who had been sold a lie – anger that was rapidly compounded by growing concern (whipped up by populist politicians like Farage and the influential right-wing print media) about the growing number of people from other developing countries coming across the Channel from France in small boats in order to claim asylum – at huge cost to the taxpayer.

In a vain attempt to assuage that anger and concern, the Conservatives had belatedly introduced stricter criteria for those hoping to obtain visas to live and work in the UK, as well as passing legislation to declare asylum seekers arriving via unauthorized routes “illegals” and promising to deport them to Rwanda in west Africa – a fate that would supposedly deter people from coming and so “Stop the Boats.” Despite the millions of pounds spent on the Rwanda scheme, no deportation flights ever took off and it was abandoned by the incoming Labour government. Instead, it declared that it would seek to “Smash the Gangs” responsible for trafficking people across the Channel. That approach, which involves greater cooperation with French and other European governments, will take time to work – if it works at all. ​​​​​​   

British public thinks legal migration is also high

In the meantime, the Starmer government is still left with a level of legal migration that, according to the public (and much to the confected horror of the country’s right-wing politicians and news outlets), is still far too high.

So the measures were announced last week: restricting skilled work visas to graduate jobs, ending easier entry for people working in social care, upping English language requirements, reducing the time overseas students are allowed to work freely in the UK after graduation, and insisting that migrants will need to spend 10, not five, years before they can apply for citizenship.

Hence, too, Starmer’s harsh rhetoric – his claim that what he called the Conservatives’ “failed experiment in open borders” – was a “squalid chapter” in the nation’s history that had caused “incalculable” damage and risked making us “an island of strangers.”

All this was economic, historical, and sociological nonsense, according to most experts. And it sparked moral and political outrage from the country’s cultural liberal voters. Equally predictably, however, its cultural conservatives dismissed the hardline language as nothing more than a transparent attempt to disguise the fact that the measures themselves didn’t go far enough in bringing down legal migration and also would have zero impact on illegal entry.

Even if the critics are wrong and the measures do bring about a significant reduction, who knows whether any drop will serve to reassure those voters who are especially angry about immigration or simply raise the salience of the issue – much to the delight of Farage and co. It also risks further alienating the government’s more progressive supporters, many of whom are already upset by its proposed cuts to welfare.

The biggest risk of all, however, is that Starmer simply ends up joining a long list of British prime ministers who, on immigration (as on much else), have overpromised but underdelivered.

Originally published at https://www.aa.com.tr/en/opinion/opinion-starmers-immigrant-rhetoric-and-politics-of-migration/3577413

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‘Starmer’s winter fuel allowance “U-turn” sets him on a tricky path with backbenchers and voters’, The Conversation, 22 May 2025.

Posted on June 3, 2025 by tpbale

The U-turn is a long and, depending on your point of view, honourable or dishonourable tradition in British politics. Now Keir Starmer has been accused of following this tradition after heavily hinting the UK government is reconsidering last year’s decision to deny the winter fuel allowance to millions of pensioners.

As a reminder, the winter fuel payment is a lump sum of £200 or £300 paid to pensioner households to help pay heating bills. Last year, the government restricted eligibility to those who qualify for pension credit or other income-related benefits, in order to save £1.4 billion.

This was followed by months of pressure from Labour MPs that has intensified since the local elections. Starmer seemed to confirm at prime minister’s questions on May 21 that the government would change the threshold (by how much remains unclear), allowing more pensioners to qualify for the payment.

One view is that this is a belated but ultimately sensible recognition, in the wake of Labour’s drubbing at the local elections, that the policy was hurting the party badly. On the other hand, in giving in to pressure to ditch it, the government may be setting a dangerous precedent. Capitulate on this and Labour’s anxious backbenchers would soon be demanding Starmer and Rachel Reeves go back on their intention to cut billions from the welfare budget.

Both takes are essentially correct. Polling evidence points to the removal of the allowance being one of the most unpopular measures announced by the government since it came to power in 2024. Regardless of the £22 billion “black hole” in the public finances, taking a universal benefit away from a bunch of people who are regarded by most voters as uniquely deserving was bound to be as politically toxic as it was (arguably) financially rational.

The only question now is quite how far Starmer’s rethink on the payment to pensioners will go. He has said the government will look at changing the income threshold that determines eligibility, but has not said by how much.

One has to ask whether a change along those lines would actually constitute a U-turn at all. By definition, a U-turn is a 180-degree reversal of a previous commitment. In this particular case, that would mean restoring the allowance to everyone in receipt of a state pension, irrespective of their income or wealth.

This is not merely semantic nitpicking, a pointy-headed demand for terminological exactitude. It’s a deeply political question.

Will a complicated (and costly) mitigation of the policy be sufficient – symbolically and substantively – to cut through to a disappointed electorate? And will Starmer be able to convince the public that this is a government holding its hand up, admitting it got it wrong, and determined now to do the right thing?

How to U-turn

Successful U-turns have tended to be big and bold. The best example, perhaps, is John Major’s announcement after he took over from Margaret Thatcher in 1990 that he was scrapping the poll tax. “Scrapping” is the operative word: unlike Thatcher, he didn’t try to preserve the principle of a per person charge by getting the Treasury to subsidise individuals’ bills. Instead, he returned to financing local government via a charge to households rather than every adult within them.

And as for the parliamentary precedents, history teaches us that once a government’s MPs realise they can prevent it from doing something they’re convinced will harm their chances of re-election, they will try to do exactly that – however much the policy makes long-term sense for the nation as a whole. Just look at how “Nimby” (not in my back yard) Tory backbenchers continually scuppered the last government’s attempts to get more houses built in those parts of the country that needed them most.

That’s not to say that Starmer and Reeves won’t now get their way on welfare cuts (or “welfare reform” as they like to frame the issue). Labour has a massive majority, and its MPs aren’t (yet) as habituated to rebellion as their Conservative counterparts became over the course of their party’s 14 years in power.

What’s more, we are still four years from a general election, and the media narrative around “benefit cheats” means voters are far more inclined to support cuts to welfare than, say, the NHS.

Whether, then, Starmer’s U-turn (if, indeed, we should really be calling it that) works – whether electorally or in terms of his ability to force his backbenchers to accept measures they don’t like – remains to be seen.

Unfortunately for him, he faces something of a paradox. In order to convince the public, he should probably go the whole hog; but doing so may well render his life at Westminster rather trickier than he would like it to be.

No surprise there, perhaps. After all, “Politics,” the economist JK Galbraith once suggested to US President John F. Kennedy, “is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable”.

Originally published at https://theconversation.com/starmers-winter-fuel-allowance-u-turn-sets-him-on-a-tricky-path-with-backbenchers-and-voters-257360

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‘Nigel Farage has the crowd, but not the plan – and the clock is ticking’, LBC, 3 May 2025.

Posted on June 3, 2025 by tpbale

Nigel Farage doesn’t have a reputation for doing policy.  He’s more of a ‘vibes’ politician – all about the headlines rather than the small print. 

And when it looks like the small print might get him into trouble he simply denies knowing anything about it.  

Back in 2014, for example, when challenged in an interview about some of the battier ideas that had appeared in UKIP’s manifesto at the 2010 election, he said he’d not read it.

That’s going to have to change if he’s serious about driving his latest vehicle, Reform UK, through the gates of Downing Street. Being the toast of the town, as he is after his party’s stunning performance at elections this week, is great. But there’s a downside. From now on, its policy offer is going to come under a lot more scrutiny.

For a while, at least, Farage, like struggling Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, might be able to get away with hanging a big ‘Currently Under Construction’ sign over his platform. And he and his backers can also point to the setting up of a new think tank, Resolute 1850, reportedly linked to the party, as an indication that, as well as ‘professionalizing’, they are finally taking policy seriously.

But if that is the case, then it could have quite a job on its hands if it’s to resolve what some see as the fundamental inconsistency between, on the one hand, Reform’s essentially Thatcherite enthusiasm for a shrinking the state and cutting public spending and, on the other, the evident desire of many of its target voters for a state that saves and protect us when things go wrong.

It’s all very well, for example, to demand, as Farage did, that the government nationalise British Steel, but – as Thatcher (whose forced departure was what prompted him to leave the Conservative Party for UKIP all those years ago) would have told him and as he and his colleagues still believe  – government ought to be getting out of the way, not stepping in and interfering with the free market.

Farage is also playing with fire when he says we need to look again at how we deliver and fund healthcare.  A pledge to keep the NHS free at the point of use but somehow financed in a different way is going to have to be coherently and convincingly worked through if it’s not to fall to pieces under the pressure of a general election.

Right now, then, Farage seems to be seen by many of his jubilant supporters as the messiah. But on policy he’s always been more of a naughty boy. That needs to change – and perhaps more quickly than he’d like.

Originally published at https://www.lbc.co.uk/opinion/views/nigel-farage-has-the-crowd-but-not-the-plan-and-the-clock-is-ticking/

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