Reform: The roar of the paper tiger

Thinking further on yesterday’s post, I’m inclined to believe the better Reform does, the greater the harm to the cause of the right (and Reform’s future prospects). Having failed to properly vet candidates, Reform’s success is likely to be an unlucky dip. There are two disastrous scenarios for Reform.

The first is that Farage wins Clacton, along with a handful of non-entities who are quickly demolished by Westminster and media smears, leaving Farage out on his own. It cements Reform’s reputation as a cult of personality, unable to develop any parallel talent.

An even worse scenario is if Reform, by an accident of numbers, scores a few wins but Farage somehow loses Clacton. Which I wouldn’t rule out. Farage will focus his efforts on the centre of Clacton and neglect the wider constituency. It’s not a slam dunk if he does. In that scenario, Reform’s MPs will be inexperienced, low calibre and leaderless, and may even get ideas of their own. The party is soon discredited.

As it happens, though, I don’t think either of these scenarios are likely because I don’t think Reform will make a big breakthrough. It’s clear the party was not anticipating the return of Farage, and has allowed party infrastructure to atrophy. It should have done the work to maintain the regional infrastructure built up by Ukip, but instead, it has mostly dissipated.

Consequently, many of Reform’s candidates (probably most) are just paper candidates who have neither the activist base or the resources to mount an effective ground game. The party is banking on the return of Farage being enough to reignite the Ukip insurgency flame, but I don’t think it is.

Take Filton and Bradley Stoke, for example. In 2015, Ukip made an impressive showing, with over seven thousand votes. This didn’t happen by accident. Ben Walker (now Ukip chairman) built up an effective local branch, hosting well attended public meetings, concentrating campaigning on the massive Bradley Stoke housing estate.

To say that Ukip’s successes in 2015 (or indeed Brexit) were solely the Farage factor, is a great insult to the army of dedicated and loyal Ukip campaigners. This time around, though, the so-called “purple people’s army” no longer exists. Ukip’s success in 2015 was the high water mark of an intensive decades long movement-building exercise which the leadership of Reform has taken for granted.

If I’m wrong, then we’ll have seen a radical shift in politics where local activity no longer has any influence on the outcome of elections. That sounds highly implausible to me. Boomers still care if the local candidate lives in their constituency and bothers to make a leaflet drop. They think it matters. And it does.

We should also consider the fact that pollsters and the media have overpriced the popularity of Farage. Farage is not a universally loved leader, even in his own party. He’s just a figurehead who is merely tolerated by many. It’s true the party needs Farage, but Farage also needs the party. But the party is a shadow of its former incarnation, and many of its key organisers have either retired from politics or simply shuffled loose of the mortal coil.

One example is Bradford South. I was the first candidate to stand in the constituency for Ukip, but it was Jason Smith who established a proper branch and grew it to score an impressive nine thousand votes in 2015. That local branch no longer exists and Reform has no equivalent. The local Reform candidate has no online profile and is based in Baildon, on the opposite side of the city, at least a forty minute drive away. Voters notice this sort of thing.

I would even go as far as saying the absence of a ground game is why Reform flopped in the Blackpool South by-election. This should have been fertile territory for Reform, but ten thousand Tory voters stayed at home and Reform came in third with little over three thousand votes. In a general election with a higher turnout, Reform can crush the Tory candidate but the seat still goes to Labour.

The latest MRP polling makes a lot of assumptions but it doesn’t account for the lack of party infrastructure, the fact that Reform was caught off guard, and the fact that fragmentation on the left neutralises the effect of Reform on the Tories. All the polling companies give “others” zero seats, but it’s highly likely the new sectarianism in Muslim areas will deliver seats for independent candidates, and perhaps even some surprise wins for Galloway’s Worker’s party.

Though the right wing of Twitter is absolutely convinced that Reform is set to become the new opposition in parliament, the fundamentals simply aren’t in place to support that view. Their narrative is largely based on an outlier internet poll conducted by YouGov, but most other polls are more realistic. In any case, polling of 21% for the Tories means scores of seats. Similar polling for Reform, in a FPTP system, could just as easily result in no seats at all. It’s perhaps unfair, but them’s the breaks!