THE BIG READ: Recruiting a Red Wall Rottweiler gives Reform UK a big chance of winning seats.
The challenger party will now be able to concentrate its support in the most fertile ground and potentially squeeze the Tories out of the picture there.
FIRST PAST THE POST is an unforgiving electoral system for smaller and newer parties. Two general elections in the modern era stand out as exemplars of that.
In 1983 the SDP-Liberal alliance garnered 7.8 million votes and just 23 seats. By comparison, Labour won 8.5 million votes and 209 seats. As a youthful SDP supporter not quite old enough to vote back then, the injustice stung me.
Then in 2015 UKIP got 3.9 million votes and just one seat, having come second in more than 120. By comparison, the SNP got 1.5 million votes and 56 seats. This disappointment was still more personal to me as I had been UKIP’s national campaign director. Our 12.6 per cent UK-wide vote share was actually a terrific achievement given that the closeness of the contest between the two main parties provided a classic context for a squeeze on the vote shares of smaller rivals. We fended off the squeeze. But other than in Clacton we just couldn’t get victories over the line.
Yet the SNP’s performance showed that it is possible for smaller parties to prosper under FPTP, so long as their support is geographically concentrated. Confining yourselves to one constituent country of the UK and being the flag-bearer there for a reasonably popular cause is one way of achieving that.
But that is not an option open to a UK-wide insurgent movement, such as UKIP was back in the day and Reform UK seeks to be right now. In UKIP we certainly had our hot spots of support: Lincolnshire, South Essex, much of Kent and the Black Country among them. But in every place apart from Clacton, either the Tories or Labour had just enough incumbent appeal or campaigning muscle to see us off.
Until a couple of days ago, it seemed certain that Reform was on track to suffer a similar fate. Indeed, under its very southern leader Richard Tice and with its classical liberal economic agenda it seemed particularly ill-suited to maximising its support in the most fertile territory. Voters in the places where its forerunner the Brexit Party did best at the 2019 general election, such as Hartlepool and the two Barnsley seats, were hardly champing at the bit for a new dose of Thatcherism.
The arrival of “Red Wall Rottweiler” Lee Anderson as Reform’s first MP changes all this. No wonder Tice was beaming from ear to ear on Monday as he pledged to make Anderson his “Red Wall Champion”.
The priorities stressed by Anderson: immigration control, tougher law and order, fighting back against woke madness in the culture war, standing up to the Islamist menace, improving access to the NHS and addressing the cost of living are themes which will resonate in these former heartlands of heavy industry.
So with the human bulldozer Anderson generating headlines and attack lines, can Reform turn itself into a seat-winning Red Wall party? I think it has a good chance given several favourable factors not available to UKIP a decade ago.
First, the Tories are in a far weaker state than they were in 2015. Back then David Cameron was offering an In/Out EU referendum as a means of containing the UKIP threat. Right now, Rishi Sunak has pivoted to a middle class “Blue Wall” strategy and leads a party averaging just 24 per cent in the polls.
It is widely thought that the party’s 40 Red Wall seats have been written off as certain Labour gains. Yet are the voters who propelled the Tories to victory in the Red Wall five years ago really natural allies of a Labour party still heavily influenced by wokery and metropolitan leftism? Clearly not.
This presents Reform with a huge opportunity. Rather than be squeezed by the big parties, Reform could put a squeeze on the Tories with a message “only we can beat Labour here”. Naturally this depends on its national poll ratings continuing to be buoyant. But as long as it can get over the bump in the road posed by local elections in early May, that should now be eminently possible.
If sitting Tory MPs for Red Wall seats come to think they have no hope of holding on as Conservatives after being cut adrift by Sunak but even a 20 per cent chance of winning under Reform colours then one can expect further defections in the weeks ahead.
Post the recruitment of Anderson, there must now be an even higher chance of Nigel Farage coming back to lead Reform into the general election. The two men have become good mates as fellow presenters on GB News and Farage appreciates that Anderson is one of relatively few current politicians able to cut through to ordinary people. As he commented on social media on Monday: “Lee Anderson moving to Reform is huge. I don’t think Westminster really understands this yet.”
Despite having the same public school background and Thatcherite leanings as Tice, Farage is nonetheless a hugely popular figure in northern and Midland working class communities. Part of this is down to him being a superlative communicator, part due
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