Every autumn, in September and October, the British parliament is suspended to allow the political parties to hold their annual conferences. Normally only two of these — those of the dominant Labour and Conservative parties — are of much interest to Westminster political observers.
But British politics is in turmoil. No fewer than eight political parties — one of which has not even been formed yet — are vying for power across England, Scotland and Wales. (Northern Ireland has its own political system.) Political journalists have had to criss-cross the country to report on formerly marginal party conferences and their surprisingly large numbers of new supporters.
Dominating the headlines is Reform UK, the latest vehicle for Brexiteer-in-chief Nigel Farage, former leader of the Brexit Party and, before that, the UK Independence Party. Reform has been top of UK-wide opinion polls for six months now, leading Labour by ten to fifteen percentage points (27–35 per cent to 20–22 per cent). This is unprecedented: no third party has topped the polls outside a general election since the Social Democrat Party of pro-European Labour rebels in 1982, and never a party of the far right. But Farage has an extraordinary ability to command the media — both the right-wing newspapers (the Mail, Telegraph, Sun and Express) that still set the political agenda for the BBC, and social media, of which he has become a deft exponent.
From being a single-minded critic of the European Union, Farage has evolved into a sub-Trumpian far-right politician of the type familiar in the rest of Europe. He rails against net zero and climate policies, attacks diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and refuses — echoing Trump — to say whether paracetamol is safe for pregnant women.
But Farage’s main focus now is immigration: he has said Reform would deport 600,000 alleged illegal immigrants and end the right of legal migrants to settle in Britain with their families. Excluding EU nationals (for whom such rights are guaranteed under the Brexit arrangements), these UK residents number around 400,000: typically doctors, nurses, care workers, hospitality staff and others who came in response to labour market shortages and have made the country their home.
In the past, Farage has been careful to cultivate a certain traditional British decency; but his new stance leaves little unspoken. He is tapping into a widespread and growing public anxiety about immigration, fomented by the regular arrivals of small boats on England’s southern coast carrying asylum seekers across the English Channel from France.
Originating mainly from Afghanistan, Iraq, Eritrea and other conflict-ridden countries, these would-be migrants — largely young men — have been housed in hotels in towns across the country while their asylum claims are processed, which often takes a year or more. This has caused resentment and hostility among local populations, leading both this summer and last to demonstrations and in some cases violence. The issue has been whipped up on social media by nativist and racist influencers spreading disinformation and conspiracy theories.
All this came to a head last month at a rally of more than 100,000 far-right activists and supporters in London under the slogan “Unite the Kingdom.” Nationalist speakers from across Europe were joined in Trafalgar Square by Elon Musk, beamed in from the US to warn that “violence is coming… you either fight back or you die.” It was quite a shock to liberal and multicultural Britain to discover that so many people could be organised in such a blatantly provocative manner, deliberately (and successfully) stoking fear among the non-white population.
Farage kept his distance; but there is no doubt that he has been emboldened by Reform’s dominant position in the polls. Winning 14 per cent of the vote in last year’s general election — though only five seats in parliament, courtesy of the UK’s first-past-the-post voting system — the party’s polling support has since grown sufficiently for it to be favourite to form the next government. Given its extremely thin cadre of competent politicians — two of its five MPs have already left or been thrown out, though they have been replaced by two Tory defectors — this is a prospect many sober observers regard as alarming.
For the Tories it could be fatal. Their new leader Kemi Badenoch, elected by the membership last year, has decided that she needs to fight Reform on its own ground. At this week’s party conference she announced a plan to deport 150,000 illegal immigrants a year using a new police force modelled on Trump’s heavily criticised Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. A Tory government, she declared, would leave the European Convention on Human Rights (which would mean the UK joining Russia and Belarus as the only non-signatories) and repeal the Climate Change Act, bedrock of the UK’s cross-party climate policymaking for nearly twenty years.
The Conservatives continue to slide in the polls, however. From their wipe-out 24 per cent vote in the 2024 general election, they are now at a disastrous 20 per cent or less. The public shows no willingness to forgive their chaotic rule from 2017 to 2024, which gave the country five prime ministers and a botched Brexit. Some of their voters have turned to Reform; some to the centrist Liberal Democrats. Badenoch is widely seen as a failure who will be deposed soon.
But if Reform has effectively replaced the Tories as the main opposition party, Labour is feeling equally threatened. Many of Reform’s new supporters have come from across the aisle, threatening formerly safe working-class Labour seats in the Midlands and North of England. In these “red wall” constituencies, where manufacturing and mining industries once provided jobs for life but boarded up shopfronts now stand testament to longstanding decline, Reform draws on widespread disillusionment and anger.
While London and the southeast of England have benefited from globalisation and economic growth in the past thirty years, these places have felt abandoned. And the politicians responsible, Labour included, all look alike: metropolitan elites who no longer understand or represent them. In the most recent large-scale opinion poll calculating the likely results of a general election held today, 276 Labour seats were projected to fall to Reform.
To the dismay of many in his own party, Labour prime minister Sir Keir Starmer has met the challenge of Reform by agreeing with them. In a major speech in May, the prime minister said immigration in the last decade had done “incalculable damage” to the country, and warned Britain was at risk of becoming “an island of strangers,” a remark he later said he regretted. (It was widely noted to be an echo, whether accidental or deliberate, of the language used by a notorious former Tory minister, Enoch Powell, who was expelled from the Conservative Party in 1968 for his racist anti-immigrant rhetoric.)
At its party conference last week Labour also took on the settled immigrant population, announcing that migrants will now have to live in the country for at least ten years (up from five) before they can apply to stay, and then only if they have never claimed welfare benefits and have done voluntary work in the community. For Starmer’s conference speech, peppered with appeals to patriotism, party members in the audience were issued with little Union Jacks and English, Scottish and Welsh flags to wave at appropriate moments.
But Starmer’s attempt to “out-Reform Reform” seems to be proving no more successful than the Tories’. His problem is that, for every voter toying with Reform who might be attracted back to Labour by the government’s tough language on immigration, more are leaving in the other direction. Labour is losing support both to the Liberal Democrats — who won a record seventy-two seats at the 2024 general election and are now neck and neck with the Tories in the polls — and a newly resurgent Green Party.
The latter had a particularly strong conference season, electing a charismatic new leader, Zack Polanski, on an “eco-populist” platform of unashamed support for migration, nationalisation of major utilities, a wealth tax and stronger environmental policy. Polanski is positioning the Greens firmly on the left of the political spectrum and appealing to disaffected Labour members to join them. Already up to 12 per cent in national polls, they could well supplant Labour in a number of cities where young socially liberal graduates struggle to find decently paid jobs and affordable rents, and disillusionment with current politics is rife.
But there is another challenger for their votes. Former left-wing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, now expelled from the party, is in the process of setting up a new one. Provisionally called Your Party, it brings together other former Labour MPs and the independents who won seats in the election on pro-Palestinian platforms. Corbyn declared that 750,000 people had signed up for membership in its first month, but just a few weeks later the party had already had its first split, its founding MPs falling out over both policy and leadership issues.
The new party has still not held its promised first member conference, but Corbyn’s name recognition means that it cannot be ruled out as a serious threat to Labour’s urban support. In a recent poll, one in five Britons said that they would consider voting for the new party, including one in three young people.
All this has left the Labour Party in a serious funk. No newly elected government has ever seen its poll ratings fall as far and fast as this one, and few prime ministers have been as personally unpopular as Keir Starmer. (His net approval rating is now minus 44 per cent.) On the doorstep, Labour activists report a startling dislike, frequently contempt, for the prime minister. At Labour’s party conference the fractious mood spilled over into outright rebellion.
The popular Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, a cabinet minister under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, roamed the fringe meetings and gave newspaper interviews criticising Starmer’s leadership and making clear that, given a chance, he would like the top job. In an upcoming party election for deputy leader, Labour members are almost certain to choose a close supporter of Burnham’s over Starmer’s candidate, an ominous warning to the prime minister.
Starmer can take comfort from the fact that Burnham, who is not a MP, can’t currently stand for the leadership (and Starmer supporters pack the party’s National Executive Committee, which chooses parliamentary candidates, so he can easily be blocked from running). But discontent with Starmer within his own party is now out in the open, and an alternative leader awaits.
These rumblings will almost certainly come to a head after next May’s elections for the devolved parliaments in Wales and Scotland, and in many English local councils. If the polls remain largely unchanged — and the government still has to get through what will almost certainly be an extremely unpopular and manifesto-breaking budget in November, when a large fiscal hole will have to be plugged by raising taxes — the party is heading for an almighty defeat.
The bloodiest carnage looks as if it will be in Wales, where Labour has led the devolved government since it was founded in 1998. Traditionally its main challenger has been the small but vigorous Welsh Nationalist party, Plaid Cymru. No longer: current polls have Reform and Plaid neck and neck on around 30 per cent, with Labour far behind on 14 per cent. The elections could give Nigel Farage his first serious taste of government, and a sickening humiliation for Labour.
In the Scottish parliament, where the Scottish Nationalist SNP has been the governing party since 2007, Labour won a majority of Westminster seats in the 2024 general election. But here too its popularity has since plummeted. From a 35 per cent vote share at the election, Labour now polls at around 23 per cent. The SNP remains on around 31 per cent, and is projected to be the largest party in the new parliament. Reform has more than doubled its vote share from 7 per cent to 16 per cent.
And in the English local elections, also next May, Reform could top the poll, taking further seats and councils from both Labour and the Tories.
What happens then? Constitutionally, nothing: Keir Starmer still has a huge majority of 148 seats in parliament, and he doesn’t have to call a general election till August 2029. He has plenty of time to get the economy moving, see inflation come down and improve public services, a combination that in normal times would be enough to ensure victory for a first-term government. His problem is that these do not feel like normal times. •
