In July’s election in the UK, Labour grabbed an insane number of seats in Parliament, but thanks to Britain’s electoral system, in which the candidate with a plurality of votes wins, the left-wing party won some of its seats with as little as a third of the vote. Shortly after the election, the Spectator’s Fraser Nelson referred to Labour’s win as a “Potemkin landslide.”
“So never will you have seen a bigger disconnect between the number of votes, 34% of the number of seats, looking at 60, 65% at the moment,” Nelson said on a podcast the day after the election. “Never will you have seen a Prime Minister come in with such a low popular mandate.”
Even if Labour’s big win only looked good on paper, the unequivocal losers were the Tories (Conservatives). After 14 years in charge of the government, the Tories lost embarrassingly. Nigel Farage’s upstart Reform UK, a truly conservative alternative, picked up a handful of seats in this summer’s elections, but what has happened since has marked Reform as a potential force in British politics.
Just weeks after more than 2 million Brits signed a petition calling for another election, polling shows the three major parties neck and neck and neck. On Monday, a poll of voters in a potential general election showed Labour with 27% of the vote, while the Conservatives have 22%. But the big news is that Reform clocked in with 24%.
“YouGov’s first Westminster voting intention poll since the July election revealed that, while support for Starmer’s army has dropped nine points since polling day, Nigel Farage’s Reform has seen support rise by ten points,” the Spectator’s Steerpike explains.
Related: The Weird Similarities — and Differences — Between the U.S. and UK Elections
On the Spectator’s Coffee House Shots podcast on Monday, Scarlett Maguire of polling firm J.L. Partners weighed in on the polling results.
“I'm not surprised,” she said. “And I think that's partly because it's actually, basically, pretty much where the polling averages are anyway and have been certainly since the new year.”
Maguire added that “it's been a terrible start for Labour. Really, really, shockingly bad in terms of public opinion. No matter what metric you look at, whether you look at voting attention, whether you look at leaders, approval ratings, government's approval ratings, handling of certain issues, it's been incredibly bad.”
Maguire also pointed out who should be most concerned about these numbers.
“However, these latest results I think would make me more worried to be in the Conservative Party necessarily than in in the Labour Party because this is a fight that the Conservative Party cannot afford to concede now to Reform,” she said.
While these polling results could allow Reform to position itself as the genuine alternative to Labour, there’s also scuttlebutt about a unity ticket agreement between Reform and the Tories.
“But I think what potentially worries [the Conservatives] most is this idea that if Reform keep doing very well and the Tories vote stays about where it is, goes up a little bit, potentially, as long as it doesn't completely collapse, you're going to have more and more talk about a Reform-Tory electoral pact,” said Katy Balls on the podcast.
“I think some Tories might start pushing for one fairly soon,” she added. “You might see some things, but I can't imagine either side thinking it's electorally beneficial right now to say, ‘Yes, there is a pact.’ I mean, Reform are running against the Tories, and the Tories are saying, ‘We are not reform.’”
No matter how much encouragement or discouragement each party takes from this polling, the next few weeks and months could be chaotic for UK politics. If Reform can turn its upstart efforts into a legitimate conservative movement, things could get especially exciting.
“With Britain edging closer to economic crisis and more voters agreeing with Farage, Mr. S wonders how much further Reform might climb,” Steerpike writes (referring to himself in the third person, as is his custom). “Watch this space.”
I’ll be keeping an eye on Reform and these developments in British politics. Pop some popcorn — or some “banged grains,” as a few Brits call it (weird).
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