CMV: Nigel Farage will be the next Prime Minister of Britain
I do not want this to happen but I fear it is inevitable. This is my hunch not a doctoral thesis. These are my reasons:
- Starmer’s approval ratings are unrecoverable. The only way Labour can win the next election would be if he steps down. This isn’t going to happen because the Labour spin doctors who control the levers of power are as convinced by Starmer as the consultant class who supported Biden and Harris. They arrogantly overlook the fact that Starmer only won because of the FPTP system and not because people actually wanted his government. He achieved only marginally more votes than Corbyn in 2019 and significantly less votes than Corbyn in 2017. Starmer won based on indifference, not because he stood for anything.
He is not a populist like Blair who won a larger proportion of the vote in 1997. His landslide unlike Blairs is a house of cards waiting to fall.
When it becomes clear that Reform has a chance, the Conservative party led by Kemi Badenoch (or whoever replaces her if she doesn’t last until the next election) will collapse in support.
We’ve seen centrist or neoliberal governments across the developed world fall and we know how this ends. Like Communism spread from the Soviet Union to China and other parts of the world, far rightism is spreading across the western world, not because people actually want it but because it’s the only vehicle of change on the table.
There is no socialist or left wing opposition to Starmer apart from the Green party and other parties who do not have a realistic chance of gaining power. When it comes down to Starmer or Farage, some of these people will vote for Farage simply to protest in the way people voted for Le Penn to protest against Macron. Except it will be worse because there is little to no socialist opposition.
The media is overwhelmingly right-leaning. In the past 5 years we have seen the emergence of Talk TV, GB News and more aggressive anti-woke headlines from the monarchal press. It is all virtually unchallenged except for Novara Media and a few other left leaning YouTube channels, This is the perfect recipe to elect a far-right government.
Farage will win convincingly with a diverse coalition of traditional Labour voters and Middle England swing voters.
In the last election the swing away from the incumbent party, the Tories, was as or possibly more significant than the swing towards the Tories in the 2019 election. Having consecutive swings this large is unprecedented. You have to go back to WW2 to the shift from Churchill to Clement Attlee or MacDonald to Baldwin before you find something this volatile. We are talking about seats which have always voted Tory or Labour for hundreds of years significantly shifting in a single election cycle. 2024 is not 1997 and 2019 is not 1979.
In 2024 Reform got 14.3% of the vote. Tories got 23.7%. They therefore would need about a 10% increase to be level with the Tories or a 5% swing from Tories to Reform, which is nothing, and that’s only the 2024 election results. Current polling has Labour in third place on 23% behind Reform on 24% (source: Britain Elects, Findoutnow polling data). Tories are only ahead of Reform by 2 points on 26% and we’re nowhere close to an election. Give it 4 years, they’ll easily have a high enough voting percentage to win a working majority.
I hope I’m wrong but it seems with Starmer’s catastrophic approval ratings, his failure as a change candidate and rapidly increasing anti-wokism, there is only one way I see this heading.