Turns Out Reform Isn't Inevitable After All

Reform came second, Labour won comfortably, the Conservatives somehow finished fifth, and the political story everyone expected never quite happened.

Photo by Mangopear creative on Unsplash

Good morning, all.

Yesterday, the 31st of July, marked the three-year anniversary of me starting to shout into the internet.

Now, all of you will have noticed that I have been particularly quiet over the past two weeks, and there are some very good reasons for that, which I’ll discuss properly in a minute. One of them, though, is that I was just desperately tired of politics.

It has been three years since I wrote my first post, shouting “CROTCHGOBLIN!” at Jacob Rees-Mogg under the guise of an irate bear, and while it has been fun, it has also been exhausting.

When Nigel Farage called his by-election to get some scrutiny off himself last month, I reached the point where I thought: okay, great, this is going to be my summer project, and I had approximately twenty articles lined up.

Then, after the fourth one, I decided that I simply couldn’t do it.

It was all just so bloody repetitive. Everything that has happened over the past couple of years has fed into the same bloody thing, over and over again. As I said, I’ll write a separate post about that.

The other reason for my absence is that I turned forty last Saturday, which is awesome, but also represents my first step into what is probably now early midlife. And as part of that, I suppose I’ve done a bit of an audit.

That does not mean, in any way or form, that I am no longer going to be politically active, or that I’m going to stop writing. It is simply a reprioritisation of where things should sit.

Politics is still right up there after work, my husband and possibly my cat. Maybe even D&D.

The point remains, however, that, from time to time, I do need to step away. And stepping away for the past two and a bit weeks has been exceptionally good for my soul.

With all that out of the way though, let’s get on with it, because the biggest political event of the past couple of weeks was not actually Nigel Farage’s hissy fit in the form of a by-election - it was the question of who would replace Andy Burnham, our now prime minister, as Mayor of Greater Manchester.

When all of this kicked off, there were plenty of people absolutely convinced that Reform was going to charge forward like the lion of inevitability, singing Rule, Britannia! at the top of its lungs, waving Union Jacks and St George’s flags everywhere, before storming into power and claiming its first truly significant mayoralty.

Yes, I know Andrea Jenkyns has a mayoralty, but she also doesn’t seem to know very much about what she is doing, so we’ll leave that one aside.

As it turns out though, things did not quite work out that way.

The first thing I need to concede is that the turnout of 25% was dire. That is far too low to give a proper picture of what the wider electorate looks like, and there are a couple of reasons for it.

The first is that this happened right in the middle of the school holidays, when everyone and their mother has bundled Olivia and Harry into the car and headed off anywhere but home for a few weeks of rest.

There simply weren’t that many people around to vote.

The second reason was that much of the political oxygen had been completely sucked out of the race.

That was largely thanks to Nigel Farage, once again, deciding that this was the perfect moment to redirect as much attention as possible towards himself through his by-election in Clacton.

Then, obviously, there was Andy Burnham succeeding Keir Starmer as prime minister and arriving with a raft of policy proposals, which will get their own post in the coming weeks. There are some things I like, some things I don’t, and, as ever, the overall picture is very, very nuanced.

Mostly, though, people just were not that interested.

The media was not particularly interested either. I cannot remember seeing anything like the level of coverage given to the earlier by-election involving Matt Goodwin, when the Greens surged to victory in Gorton and Denton.

The result was an unfocused mayoral contest which, despite being administratively and politically important, never quite managed to force itself into the national conversation.

Now, quite a few people have tried to spin the result in one of two completely opposite directions since the results were announced.

On the one side, you’ve got the Reform is finished crowd, who already have their shovels out, merrily digging the grave. On the other hand, you’ve got the Reform supporters who are desperately insisting that this somehow proves they are unstoppable, and that Greater Manchester was just another little stepping stone on their inevitable march towards Downing Street.

Personally, I think both sides are missing something.

The truth, as it so often does, sits somewhere a bit awkwardly in the middle, and for the purposes of this post, and deeply uncomfortable as it is, we do need to give Reform a little bit of credit where it’s due.

Pretending they didn’t have a good by-election simply isn’t honest, and I am, if nothing else, always honest.

They came second, and that is quite important. They managed to push the Conservatives into not only second place where they’ve traditionally sat behind Labour, but fifth, which, if you’d said that to someone five years ago, they’d probably have assumed you’re suffering from heat induced delusions.

More importantly, however, they have now quite firmly established themselves as the primary opposition to Labour across massive parts of Greater Manchester, especially in places like Wigan, Oldham, Rochdale and Tameside. They are no longer a fringe protest movement. They’ve managed to build a genuine electoral base, and Labour and other progressive parties would be exceptionally foolish to ignore it.

Looking at the results, Sian Astley picked up just under 112,000 first preference votes, or just under 21% of the vote. That isn’t nothing, it’s definitely not a rounding error, and it isn’t a party that’s disappearing. It represents well over 100,000 people in Greater Manchester looking at every option available to them and deciding that Reform was the preferred choice to run one of the largest city regions in Europe.

Any politician dismissing that as irrelevant deserves whatever comes next.

But, and this is a pretty big but, the mythology surrounding Reform has become considerably bigger than Reform itself.

Think back to a couple of weeks ago, when expectations, after the local elections, were that commentators were confidently and breathlessly suggesting Manchester would become Reform’s first major metropolitan prize.

We’d had a run of extraordinary results for Reform with councillors absolutely everywhere, and every poll, headline and television panel seemed to carry the same assumption:

Reform is gathering pace and nobody knows how to stop it.

But then we got to the actual count yesterday.

Labour finished on 47.15% of the first preferences, and Reform finished on 20.99%. That is not a squeaker. It is not a photo finish.

That is a gap of over 26 percentage points before a single second preference had even been counted. Once the second preferences were counted, Bev Craig ended with just over 309,000 votes to Reform’s 157,000. That wasn’t Craig scraping over the line, she gave them an absolute walloping.

Before people jump in and start moaning that Labour only won because of second preferences, all I can say is “well, yes, that is literally how the system works”. You don’t get to complain that people preferred someone else to your candidate, that’s the whole point of having an election.

In fact, I think the second preferences tell us something pretty important.

Reform has become very good at attracting people who actively back them, but it’s far less adept at attracting people who wanted somebody else first. That’s a fundamentally different political challenge to what they’ve been doing.

It’s one thing to build an enthusiastic base. It is another, however, to persuade everyone else that you’re a safe pair of hands. If you’re trying to run an entire city region, you’re going to need more than people wearing turquoise T-shirts and telling everyone who’ll listen that Nigel Farage is the second coming of Christ.

The other number that really caught my eye wasn’t Reform’s result at all. No, it was the Tories, or perhaps, more accurately, it was the complete and utter state of them.

They didn’t just lose to Labour, they didn’t lose to Reform, they also somehow managed to lose to Restore Britain, a whole political movement that basically consists of Rupert Lowe shouting incoherently at the internet for 24 hours a day.

Imagine telling David Cameron fifteen years ago that one day the Conservative Party would finish behind not one but two other parties in a mayoral election in Manchester. He’d probably have laughed, or asked whether you’d been on the drink.

Restore Britain finished on just over 46,000 votes, while the Conservatives managed just over 41,000. That must be absolutely terrifying to the Tories, and it will be putting the fear of God into CCHQ.

What this election demonstrates, in essence, is that the right wing race isn’t just between the Conservatives and Reform - the Conservative vote is being pulled in multiple different directions. Some have gone on to Reform, some have gone even further right to Restore, a couple have drifted back towards Labour, and quite a few, at least in Surrey and surrounds, towards the Lib Dems.

The Conservative coalition hasn’t just shrunk, it’s completely fractured into a thousand pieces, and once a coalition starts to break apart like that, it’s incredibly difficult to put back together.

I will add here that despite the fact that Kemi Badenoch has actually had some decent polling results in recent months, I just cannot see her managing to pull back that coalition. She doesn’t have the personality for it, and the Tories just don’t have the track record for it, looking at the last fifteen years.

To bring this Saturday ramble to a close, some people will look at these results and conclude that Reform’s moment has passed, and I don’t think that’s necessarily true, or at least I think it’s a little more complicated than that.

Other people will look at exactly the same numbers and conclude that Reform is still, somehow on the brink of taking over Britain, and I don’t think that’s true either. What I think we’re actually seeing is the point where Reform UK stops being a terrifying unknown quantity and starts to become a party that we can actually measure against objective reality.

For as long as Reform has existed, it’s been a party that’s part political movement, part atmosphere and vibes.

Every election, according to Nigel and Co, was supposedly going to be the one - Caerphilly, Gorton and Denton, one of those was going to be the count that proves their mettle, and in each one of those, all we saw was that they came second.

Every poll they led in was the breakthrough. Every disappointing result was somehow spun into evidence that the next one would be different. It was always tomorrow, always the next election, always just over the horizon.

The thing is, tomorrow arrived yesterday in Greater Manchester, and while Reform didn’t collapse, it didn’t conquer either. It has established itself as Labour’s principal challenger, and it demonstrated that it has a deep reservoir of support in parts of post-industrial England. But it still lost, and it lost convincingly.

I would warn, as well, that this doesn’t mean Labour gets to put its feet up. If anything, they should be asking why more than one in five voters looked at this system and thought, “ja, that’ll do”.

Those voters are telling you something that is very worth paying attention to: they feel ignored, and they feel that politics isn’t working for them. They’re telling you, emphatically, that economic growth in central Manchester doesn’t necessarily feel like economic growth if you’re sitting in Wigan wondering why your high street still looks like it lost a fight with the recession and your public services still look like they’re in the middle of Austerity.

You don’t beat that feeling of malaise, neglect and overall disappointment in politics by calling people names - you beat it by making people’s lives noticeably better where they live.

I sincerely hope that this message strikes through to the actual party of government.

There is an opportunity in the next three years to make meaningful change to people’s lives, not just in Greater Manchester, but across the country. We now know where Reform stands as a party, and while Labour while in power most certainly should not be letting the Reform tail wag the dog when it comes to policy, they absolutely should be taking note on where exactly to improve people’s lives and how exactly to do so.

Ultimately the best way to defeat Reform is not to become Reform with a red rosette. It is to make Reform unnecessary. Let’s do that instead.