Less than a year since the last election, the contours of the next one are beginning to take shape. At least, that’s what Nigel Farage would like you to think.
The Reform press conference on Tuesday, perfectly timed to achieve maximum coverage over a quiet and rainy recess, has set out how Farage wants to play to the next four years.
Step one in “the biggest revolution this country has seen” since the death of the Liberal Party, according to the Reform leader, was returning to front-line politics to build a “beachhead” in parliament. Step two was winning enough councils and mayoralties in the local elections earlier this month to prove the party can govern. These were represented onstage by more than a dozen Reform figures, all looking serious and professional in smart suits – or in the case of new MP Sarah Pochin who spoke first, a dress of eye-popping turquoise.
Step three will be the messaging of the next general election: the Tories are finished, Labour has failed, and Reform is a viable alternative for central government.
If that all seems a bit far-fetched (after all, the SDP was the party of the future once – and who among us remembers the fate of the Independent Group/ChangeUK?), Farage had an answer as to why Westminster should take seriously the notion that he could be the next prime minister. “Something extraordinary is happening,” he insisted, pointing to all the ways the Tories and Labour have “pretty much merged” (on net zero, immigration policy and tax levels) and that voters “want something different”.
That “something different” was laid out in the press conference. Under the overarching banner of “family, community and country”, the policy programme included familiar policies from both the left and the right: as well as lowering taxes to levels that would make Conservatives go weak at the knees (Farage wants to raise the income tax threshold to £20,000) and tax breaks for married couples, he punched the Labour bruise by promising to restore the winter fuel allowance for all pensioners and scrap the two-child benefit cap. Essentially, all things either the Conservatives or Labour really want(ed) to do, were they not constrained by the reality of the public finances.
That reality is the sticking point. Raising the tax threshold to £20,000 is estimated to cost between £50bn and £80bn all on its own. Reform claims to have found a cool £225bn down the back of the Treasury sofa by scrapping net zero and insists it could save more still by cutting funding to quangos. Good luck, as they say, with that.
But how successful will Reform’s opponents be at pointing this out? Shadow chancellor Mel Stride has been out and about, calling Farage’s plans “fantasy economics”, while Labour has gone for “fantasy promises”. Farage’s answer to this charge was that all parties fudge the figures in their manifestos, suggesting Reform’s creative accounting was par for the course. Against the general backdrop of disillusionment with the political establishment, the narrative will be that Reform are no worse than the other parties – and that official estimates should be viewed sceptically anyway.
One attack line might get through. “Trussonomics on steroids” was how the Liberal Democrats responded to Tuesday’s proposals. Truss remains toxic for the Tories, still derided on doorsteps for “crashing the economy”. The question is whether this sentiment could be transposed to a Truss-like economic platform of another party. Expect Labour to join the Lib Dems and throw everything it has at the Truss comparison – and to stoke rumours that the former PM could defect to Reform (regardless of how likely this really is).
The other method of attack will be over competence, or what I am branding the “Hamilton line”, from the Broadway musical, in which President Washington tells a frustrated Hamilton, “Ah, winning was easy, young man – governing’s harder.” Ten Reform councils are in the process of figuring that out. An early casualty of Reform’s “war on waste” (Andrea Jenkyns ran her campaign to be mayor of Greater Lincolnshire on the promise of a Musk-esque “Lincolnshire Doge”) was the Flood and Water Management Scrutiny Committee in Lincolnshire – one of the areas most vulnerable to flooding in the UK. How residents will feel about that next winter remains to be seen. Jenkyns also vowed to save money by scrapping diversity and inclusion officers employed by the Lincolnshire Council, but savings will be limited as the council doesn’t employ any.
What the council does spend money on is adult and child social care, which accounts for two-thirds of council budgets on average. When I asked Farage what Reform’s plan was for councils facing spiralling social care costs, he didn’t have an answer beyond that Reform were considering the issue. Which is unsurprising – social care has for decades been one of the biggest, thorniest, most expensive policy challenges faced by politicians of every party. If an easy, cheap, “common sense” answer existed, it would have already been tried. Expect questions about Reform’s ability to govern and the workability of some of its seemingly easy fixes to come under the microscope now it has a taste of power.
Finally, there’s the issue of personalities. On the same day Farage gave his speech, YouGov released a poll showing that, despite Labour’s woes, Keir Starmer still beats the Reform leader on the question of who Britons think would be the best prime minister by 44 per cent to 29. Astoundingly, Kemi Badenoch also beats Farage (albeit only by four points).
The more Reform position themselves as the de facto opposition and a potential government in waiting – smart, serious, suits and all – the more vulnerable they are to voters who would rather see anyone else in Downing Street.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[See also: Meet Britain’s Joe Rogan]
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