In the early hours of 5th July 2024, when Nigel Farage was confirmed as the new MP for Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, he celebrated with a threat. “We’re coming for Labour,” the Reform UK leader declared. “Be in no doubt of that.”
It should have been an outlandish boast from a fringe party that had won only five Commons seats. Keir Starmer became prime minister that night with a tally of 411 and a majority of 174.
But Farage’s influence has never been measured in parliamentary representation. He failed seven times to become an MP before capturing Clacton. That didn’t stop him becoming one of the most consequential politicians of his generation. He put Brexit on the agenda and bent the Conservative party to his will. He did it without touching the levers of power. He operates by force of campaigning charisma.
Starmer embodies the opposite ethos. The Labour leader doesn’t relish the limelight and has no intuition for electioneering craft. He is an administrator who won power with promises of managerial competence. He offered to restore a boring equilibrium after years of turbulent Tory rule.
British politics can be partitioned along many axes. The rivalry between Labour on the left and Tories on the right is the conventional model, and still the front line in the Commons. But that duopoly has been in decline for decades. In last year’s election, the combined Labour and Conservative national vote share—57.4 per cent—was the lowest it had been since 1918.
The Brexit referendum revealed a cultural faultline that cut across traditional party allegiances. The UK left the European Union five years ago, but “remainer” and “leaver” are still recognisable categories of political sensibility. They describe not just a one-off schismatic event in British politics, but also an unresolved tension that exists in some form in most western democracies. It is the same line that runs between red and blue states in the United States, and cuts through most member states of the EU. It is the contest between populist insurgency and constitutional pluralism; between defenders of the postwar liberal order and exponents of a new, crusading nationalism; between the rule of law and the cult of submission to a strong-willed ruler.
Those rival spirits are incarnate in the Labour and Reform leaders. Their battle is being fought indirectly, largely thanks to an idiosyncratic electoral system that allocates seats in ways that obscure the real contours of national opinion. But the competition that will define the rest of this parliament, the future character of British democracy and the strategic orientation of the country is between two irreconcilable models of political change: Faragism and Starmerism.
Neither man embraces any such label, or styles himself as author of a codified creed. The morning after the election, Starmer promised that his government would be “unburdened by doctrine”. He asks to be judged by practical “milestones”: reducing NHS waiting times, building more homes, lowering energy bills.
Farage’s career has always swerved that kind of accountability. His method is to get inside other people’s heads and scramble their plans. The Labour leader prides himself on being a problem-solver. Farage is the problem-stirrer.
He provoked David Cameron into calling the Brexit referendum, but was not involved in implementing the result. He dictated the terms of political debate on immigration, without having to confront any of the choices or economic consequences involved in managing borders in a globalised economy. He lit the nationalist beacon that lured successive Conservative leaders away from the currents of serious policymaking. Then he raided the cargo of voters that spilled out when Rishi Sunak hit the rocks. He sees an equivalent bounty becoming available if Starmer’s plans for national renewal fail.
Reform is second place to Labour in 89 seats. Most of those are former industrial towns containing a lot of angry, socially conservative voters—the kind of places that once formed the cultural heartland of the proletarian left, but have, in recent years, provided fertile recruiting ground for populist right-wing movements across Europe.
Starmer’s election victory expressed the elecorate’s contempt for the Tories more than enthusiasm for the alternative. Labour won 63 per cent of seats with 33.7 per cent of the votes—an extreme disparity by historical standards. The mandate is wide, but shallow. There was no honeymoon. The prime minister’s personal ratings have been on the slide since polling day.
Reform has overtaken the Tories in a couple of opinion polls, and nudges at parity with Labour. The consolation for the government is that voting intention surveys at this stage of a parliament are fairly meaningless. An election doesn’t have to be held before 2029.
Also, Farage’s ability to take up media bandwidth doesn’t alter the parliamentary arithmetic. The Tories have 121 MPs and are Labour’s closest rival in 85 of the 97 most marginal seats (defined as those where a swing of less than 10 per cent would unseat the incumbent). There is no route to power for Reform without partnering with or subsuming the Conservatives along the way.
The ideological boundary between the two parties is blurred, but that doesn’t make a merger easy. One is a vintage institution with roots wrapped around the foundations of British democracy. The other is a six-year-old limited company whose majority shareholder is also party leader (although Farage has claimed Reform will be democratised). Those are not compatible models.
Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, will fiercely defend the advantages and status that accrue to her as leader of the opposition. And while Toryism has become a narrower and more nativist creed since the Brexit referendum, it still aspires to be a broad church. Its liberal, centre-right caucus—the one-nation tradition—is much diminished, but not yet eliminated. There are MPs, party members and councillors who still want to contest seats lost last year to the Liberal Democrats in the Tories’ former suburban and rural heartlands.
Adding Tory and Reform vote shares is an elegant formula for “uniting the right” in order to reach a governing majority, but it ignores practical and cultural obstacles. Farage has a poor record of sustaining collaborations with anyone whose interests collide with his vanity. He is toxic to many Conservatives.
Many Reform supporters are vehemently anti-Tory, despite having voted Conservative in 2019. One pre-election poll showed three-quarters of Reform supporters view the Conservatives “very unfavourably”, with roughly the same proportion viewing Labour and Tories as no better than each other. This is a cohort suspicious of the entire political system, and hostile to its established brands.
Still, the electoral logic of collaboration could prove irresistible. There is a precedent in Farage’s decision not to stand Brexit party candidates in 317 Tory-held seats in the 2019 election. Many Labour MPs assume their competitor by the next election will be some hybrid entity of the populist right.
Local elections in May this year will catalyse the process. The Conservatives are defending councils last contested in 2021, when Boris Johnson was enjoying a “vaccine bounce” in opinion polls.
Tory candidates are the incumbents in hundreds of seats. Labour won’t benefit as the ruling party in Westminster. That gives Reform a chance to show momentum as an insurgent force in places such as Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Kent. The Lib Dems and Greens are also hoping to capitalise on Conservative decay.
A terrible night for Badenoch could stir the regicidal impulse rarely dormant in her party for long. Renewed Tory infighting would gratify Labour, but only temporarily. Hoping your enemies stay focused on damaging each other isn’t a strategy.
Even as rivals, the combined forces of Conservative and Reform have an aggregate effect in setting the terms of political debate. When the Tories chase Farage’s voters, they increase the salience of his arguments, and Reform will always win a rhetorical arms race. It doesn’t have a governing record to defend, and its politicians aren’t interrogated as serious candidates for ministerial office by national media. Farage gets to pipe the tune, and then scorn how other parties dance to it.
That mechanism has been ratcheting British politics to the right ever since Cameron settled into a routine of appeasing hardline Eurosceptics to manage divisions in his party. A succession of election defeats forced Labour into queasy accommodation with that agenda. This is more a function of geography than conviction. Starmer’s road to Downing Street passed through so-called “red wall” constituencies in northern England and the Midlands where voters were pro-Brexit in 2016, preferred Boris Johnson to Jeremy Corbyn in the 2019 general election and were only very provisionally amenable to Labour in 2024. Retaining those seats generates an irresistible imperative to act on issues that might fuel a Faragist surge—chiefly immigration.
This will be an acid test of whether Starmerism, with its emphasis on methodical pragmatism over gimmicky performance, can achieve public resonance. One of the prime minister’s first acts in office was to cancel the failed Rwanda deportation scheme that the Tories advertised as their remedy to small boat crossings in the Channel. Instead, the Home Office is to concentrate on aggressive pursuit of the gangs that run that traffic, and on clearing the backlog of unprocessed asylum claims. When it comes to the volume of legal migration—a much bigger number—Labour is no more willing than the Conservatives were to tell voters about the necessary trade-offs; that the demand for fewer foreign arrivals and the preference for fully staffed care homes, for example, might not be compatible.
Even when ministers have the will to be candid about such choices, they find it hard to project the message without distortion in a hostile media environment. Much of the national press treats Labour rule as an aberration against the natural order, and the prime minister as an imposter. Starmer’s administration didn’t help itself with a faltering first six months spent picking fights with pensioners and farmers, and defining itself more with promises of fiscal pain than hope and opportunity. But Conservative-supporting editors hardly bothered with even an affectation of balance or interest in the motives of their own readers, who helped propel Starmer to a massive victory.
Donald Trump’s triumph in the US presidential election last November intensified the air of provisionality around Starmer. It gave the British right permission to assume that the pendulum was swinging its way. For the Faragist wing of the Conservative party, Trump’s political journey since 2020 offers a reassuring parable of a swift return to power that obviates the need to re-examine dogmas that failed when last applied in office.
The Republican victory parade radiates populist energy across the Atlantic and leaves Labour looking isolated in the world. Joe Biden’s economic policy had been an inspiration for Rachel Reeves. As shadow chancellor she would cite Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, with its $1 trillion of green industrial subsidy, as proof that the dominant currents of international opinion were flowing left, away from laissez-faire neoliberalism and government shrinkage. The progressive activist state was the future. That analysis has been dropped from the chancellor’s repertoire.
The failure of Bidenomics to generate an electoral dividend for the Democrats is not the only reason Trump won in 2024, but it is a big one. It turned out there was an unbridgeable gulf between upbeat macroeconomic indicators—low unemployment, consistent growth—and American citizens’ downbeat assessment of their own financial security and purchasing power.
Even before the US election, Labour strategists were fretting about how to turn modest, incremental economic improvements into enthusiasm for incumbents during an age of endemic voter mistrust.
Starmer’s inner circle pored over an article published in 2023 in the US journal Democracy titled “The Death of ‘Deliverism’”. It argued that economic insecurity is a catalyst for populism, but not a complete explanation for it. Precarious personal circumstances aggravate a sense of collective cultural neglect by elites, and those feelings are not easily placated by infusions of public spending. Pragmatic statecraft struggles to satisfy the appetite for feelings of connection, belonging, esteem and respect.
That is a challenge for liberal-left political managers such as Starmer and Reeves, who see culture wars as a distraction from serious public policy. They want to wash away nationalist discontent by unblocking the sluices of wealth distribution. But the prospects of even a modest but palpable improvement in British living standards by the next election are currently uncertain. So far in 2025, the economy has flatlined, the pound has depreciated, and bond yields and the cost of servicing national debt have risen.
The chancellor has already pushed the limit of how much additional revenue she can raise through taxation without breaching pre-election pledges not to burden “working people”. The comprehensive spending review in June is likely to inflict brutal cuts to departmental budgets, provoking a backlash among Labour MPs and further unsettling the party’s base.
In 2029, Labour’s opposition will be Faragist in character, even if Farage does not lead it
In a plausible best-case scenario, where growth picks up and more fiscal headroom becomes available, the national mood is still unlikely to become exuberant. The legacy of more than 16 years of stagnant incomes and degraded public services will not be reversed quickly. Labour’s next election campaign will inevitably be some variation on the theme of pleading for patience and urging voters not to let a reckless opposition squander the progress made so far.
That opposition will be Faragist in character, even if Farage himself is not the leading candidate to be prime minister. There will be a well-financed campaign to present Starmer as the figurehead of an intolerable status quo. Labour will be cast as culturally and socially detached from the concerns of ordinary people. Mass migration will be diagnosed as the cause of national malaise and overburdened public services. Failure to grapple with that scourge will be attributed to woke ideology and metropolitan arrogance.
There will be a receptive audience for that message. Its size will depend on factors that aren’t all within the government’s control, not least the global impact of Trump in the White House. Even before his inauguration, Trump’s casual talk of territorial expansion and punitive tariffs sowed panic among America’s allies, and Trump-induced uncertainty has been the aggravating factor in global market conditions that narrowed Reeves’s room for fiscal manoeuvre. And that is before Starmer has worked out how to repair relations with the EU while also managing the spiteful caprice of an American president who demands unconditional fealty.
But Trump also presents a challenge for the opposition. He is not popular in Britain, and it is not obvious that Farage extends his voter appeal by playing the Maga cheerleader and Mar-a-Lago courtier. There is also a tendency on the British right to overstate the extent to which Trumpian politics speaks to and for British voters: easily done when your digital information space is curated by GB News and Elon Musk’s X feed.
Some issues that flourish in that radical right ecosystem do break into the mainstream. Musk’s relentless campaigning on grooming gangs—amplifying a far-right conspiratorial narrative in the process—is a case in point. The subject animates real public concern, and Badenoch successfully conveyed it to the top of the agenda with demands for a new inquiry. But there is no evidence that she can ride to heights of popularity or credibility on that bandwagon.
A YouGov poll earlier this year found that 71 per cent of respondents had a negative view of Musk. Even Reform supporters, who are better disposed to the tech billionaire than the median voter, are put off by his incessant meddling in UK politics. While he isn’t a proxy for Trump, he shares the same arrogant swagger and trolling malevolence that has always gone down poorly in Britain when performed by pushy Americans. It is a cultural aversion as much as a political intuition.
US mainstream conservatism also accommodates attitudes that were fringe by UK standards even before the Trump-era radicalisation—on gun control, abortion and healthcare, for example. And while the Republicans’ view of the war in Ukraine has been captured by Russia-friendly propaganda, British voters are not so amenable to fellow-travelling with the Kremlin. Declarations of admiration for Vladimir Putin were one of the few features of Farage’s record that put him on the defensive in election debates last year. His aversion to the NHS model of socialised medicine is another.
Farage’s advance on the mainstream is also checked by the company he keeps. One of Reform’s five MPs, James McMurdock, once served time in a young offender institution for attacking his then girlfriend. The Reform leader has made a point of distancing himself from Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the far-right activist who operates under the name Tommy Robinson, but all of Farage’s political projects have struggled to filter the florid racism and neo-Nazi sympathy out of their prospective candidate lists.
The true scale of public distaste for Faragism is obscured by the weakness of the centre right in the Tory party. There is an electorally significant segment of moderate ex-Conservative voters who were never enthusiasts for Brexit, find Trump viscerally appalling, and, while not enamoured with Starmer, had no objections to him becoming prime minister last year. When it comes to securing a second term, the Labour leader doesn’t need those voters to rally to his red banner if enough of them stick with the Liberal Democrats in seats that Ed Davey’s party took from the Tories last year.
That is an electoral safety valve, not an argument. While it is rational to start war-gaming the prospects for a Lib-Lab coalition as parliamentary obstruction to a Reform-Tory bloc, it is also a concession of defeat in the battle of ideas. What Starmer needs above all is a compelling argument as to why he—and not someone like Farage—needs to be in power. He needs a proselytising case for moderate, incremental reform that can compete with the call for anti-establishment insurrection. He needs to deliver tangible change in voters’ lives and a rebuttal to the nihilistic view that you might as well tear everything down because things can’t possibly get any worse.
Labour must aggressively pin down the irresponsibility and destructive relish inherent in Faragism. That might, at some stage, require the courage to point out something the majority of British voters already know—that Brexit was a bad call, or at least that those who insisted it would lead to salvation have disqualified themselves from dictating the next chapter of the UK’s history.
Starmerism needs to break out of its technocratic reservation to contest the terrain of national identity and sovereignty. That cannot be expressed through the superficial iconography of union flags draped over every dais where the prime minister speaks. It has to be developed as a principled argument about a modest but intense national spirit that runs deeper in British culture, and includes more British citizens, than Farage’s flimsy bombast. It is the spirit of keeping calm and carrying on, the quiet patriotism of the problem-solvers in contrast to the dubious loyalty of mercenary problem-stirrers—the clients of Musk, Putin or whichever offshore billionaire will finance their campaigns.
The prime minister has made tentative forays into this space. He derides Conservatives for refusing to atone for their legacy. When Musk’s attacks became too venomous to ignore, he pushed back with uncharacteristic ferocity. He made the essential difference between the politics of alleviating suffering and the politics of cynically exploiting it. That distinction needs to infuse more of Labour’s rebuttals. The question of who speaks for Britain should be framed in terms of who is serious about finding solutions and who relishes aggravating the problems.
Grand narrative is not Starmer’s natural idiom. Even his admirers concede that he is not a gifted political evangelist. Those aren’t reasons to forgo the art of storytelling. It is an indispensable component in any durable political project. There is a road that keeps Labour in power that goes by way of economic luck, measurable delivery in public services and tactical coalition-building.
But there is a lot more at stake than clinching a second term. It is already clear what the rival proposition will be—the tale of an ancien regime in inexorable decline, and its redemption by Faragism. Starmer needs to address and refute that story head on, starting now. He may not be a gifted orator, but it is imperative for British democracy that he finds his voice.
