UK politics: A race to the bottom

Looking at this and other polls, there is a marked decline in Reform's performance lately and I think it's going to get worse. They're adept at making noise but we're back to that old adage... the higher the monkey climbs, the more you see of its arse. They keep holding press conferences to announce defections of grifters, opportunists and deadbeats, in settings that more resemble American (commercial) evangelical churches, and people can see that, fundamentally, Reform is not a serious proposition for government.

You can still have all that glitz and glam, but on some level you have to be able to reassure voters that you are capable of forming a government and that you have viable solutions. What we're learning about Reform is that they're just not serious, they don't have answers, and they are not a meaningful departure from the status quo. We'd just end up with another chaotic government that made big promises but doesn't know how to deliver.

As it happens, I have long thought the polls were over-egging Reform, and as we get closer to the election we will see more of this gradual disintegration, especially as Reform activists become ever more disillusioned. It is highly likely that they will do quite well in the local elections, but will seriously underperform on the basis of their performance in local government where they've again made big promises on the basis of flawed assumptions.

That in my view all stems from the same basic lack of an intellectual foundation and thinking details don't matter. Reform believes that so long as they're polling well then there's no problem, which has led to this complacency. As such, they could very well implode before 2029. There's a lesson here for Restore Britain too. You cannot coast as a slop party in this game. To be taken seriously, you have to be serious.

While you can quibble over the source, Mel Stride has published a thread just asking basic questions about Reform’s proposed means of funding tax cuts, and you don’t have to be a Tory sympathiser to acknowledge that Reform’s sums just don’t add up.

This is the danger with Reform. They're making big promises about tax cuts but they have no idea how they'd actually pay for it. You might think this kind of lazy slop in election messaging doesn't matter, and maybe it doesn't, but it matters that they themselves actually believe their own bullshit. It just means another chaotic government that can't deliver on its unrealistic promises.

This, though, is why Restore Britain won’t fare any better. While many will support their hard line messaging on immigration, they’re still going to be assessed for seriousness. Folks at Restore need to understand that just because voters agree with your sentiments, it doesn’t mean they will actually vote for you. You have to pass the sniff test, and if there’s nothing beyond the hard line posturing and the lazy slop posted by the leader on X then voters will draw their own conclusions.

That said, it’s still too early to draw any solid conclusions about the next general election. Some pundits talk about the right losing to a red-green alliance, but the rise of the Greens is largely illusory, I would guess. With the Green Party holding gay bondage discos in broad daylight, it is unlikely they will hold on to the Moslem vote. I’d hazard a guess that we will see more Moslem independents prospering and any green aligned voters with a shred of decency will fold into the Lib Dems.

Either way, the polls seem to be converging in a way that suggests there is almost universal disaffection with all of the political parties, with no party capable of securing a positive mandate in their own right. All of them are gaming the system on the basis of who is the least awful - but even that isn’t a slam dunk assessment. With parties this awful, it’s unsurprising that the likes of Restore think any old slop will do, but Reform’s performance rather suggests a little bit of effort would go a long way.