Some by-elections are remembered more than others for what they signal for the body politic. The Hamilton contest of 1967 is famous for its historic SNP breakthrough. Crewe and Nantwich, in 2008, signalled that swing voters were wearying of Blair and Brown’s tired New Labour project. Runcorn and Helsby will go down as something altogether more seismic. Reform won by only six votes after a tense recount. But the narrowness of the victory doesn’t matter. This constituency, an old, northern, working-class industrial town and surrounding villages, was among the safest tenth of all the seats in parliament. Labour had no right to lose. And yet the by-election — and the national turn to turquoise — is a harbinger of a near-future defined by an angry, Balkanised electorate, stumbling towards ungovernability, ultimately enthused by nothing.
This is an age of omnipresent, profound cynicism. Few expect Nigel to deliver us from tepid decline. Nobody even quite expects him to fulfil the most basic of promises, to “stop the boats”, or to staunch the rot of long-running outsourcing scams atop of English local government. The financial woes of the 350-odd authorities in the country, many of them teetering on the precipice of fiscal oblivion, won’t be solved by cutting back on DEI or net zero.
Despite his threadbare plans for office, though, the results across the country demonstrate that following the embarrassments of the mainstream parties in office, we’re now running our British, majoritarian, first-past-the-post system at European levels of political multipolarisation. The Tory party, the most successful in the history of Western democracies, has been supplanted by an agile, disruptive one-man band. And alongside the Faragists on the polling papers now jostle the standard continental panoply of Leftist ecologists, nationalist separatists, tentatively resurgent liberals, the diehard centre-Leftists, traditional conservatives, as well as independent candidates swept in via South Asian Baradari voting blocs.
The polycentric politics mirrors a diffuse, collapsing sense of a shared national culture. Gone are the days when the BBC had a near-monopoly on political news, and when the horse meat scandal or the “pasty tax” could dominate headlines for weeks. Instead, we have a schizophrenic media landscape in which a Presidential assassination attempt, or an Islamist mass murder in a Christmas market, is forgotten as quickly as a passing TikTok reel, like tears in the rain. The postmodern breakdown of our collective consciousness reflects the mood of a despondent, fragmented electorate searching for any answers from any direction after almost two decades of wage stagnation and the visible deterioration of our public spaces and common life. This is a warm petri dish for all manner of mini-Caesars and political entrepreneurs. Something had to give.
While the momentum is now with the party, a fifth Reform MP won’t make much difference in immediate practical terms. It would have been six if Rupert Lowe hadn’t believed his own hype, sucked into the vortex of memetic half-truths that make up the Twitter rabbit holes of the Very Online Right, succumbing to his digitally illiterate boomerism after being flattered by Elon Musk. The more ballots that were counted last night, the more Farage’s decision to exorcise Lowe from his parliamentary grouping was roundly vindicated.
The identity of Reform’s new Runcorn MP, Sarah Pochin, a former Tory councillor, is largely irrelevant. She represents merely a strong-willed protest vote. Reform isn’t a set of productive public policy plans — it’s a final stab-in-the-dark, a “none of the above” two-fingers up to the lanyard class. It’s a rejection of the hectoring public-sector management professionals, the smug Oxbridge wonks, the former lobbyist carpetbaggers and cabal of bland political consultants that now passes for a complete ballot of mainstream candidates.
“It’s a two-fingers up to the lanyard class.”
Reform will now have to prove themselves in local and regional centres of power. But Farage isn’t a competent administrator nor an effective great helmsman of state who will get things done. He is a signifier — the symbolic opposite of grey, stodgy Labour — and the vote is a rejection of the moribund Westminster system in its totality. And yet he now sits astride the Left and Right of British politics like the Colossus of Rhodes in Alan Partridge get-up. He embodies what an old, Gramscian Leftist such as Raymond Williams might call a national-popular “structure of feeling”. Trump is in the White House; progressive-liberal norms are breaking down. The world redivides into competing geopolitical power-blocs. And the demand from below isn’t for the kind of globalised openness and liberty provided by free markets, lax borders and limited government, but for a sovereigntist, neo-statist revival that is building national resilience, protective social policies, and domestic security. In this context, Farage is in harmony with the zeitgeist, while the rest of the political class seems hopelessly out of tune.
He stalks Labour and the Conservatives for the easy prey of their disaffected bases, and it hasn’t taken too hard a shake of the branch to cause many-an-apple to fall into his basket. All of the omens for the next general election point to a re-run of 2019 in which Labour’s Red Wall fell to Boris Johnson. Some commentators hopefully defined that election as a permanent realignment. While the project was eventually sacrificed on the altar of Johnson’s myriad personal failings, 2019 indicated that the working classes were tired of being told by radical liberals, and by a detached, effete, cultural-educational elite (whom they have had the misfortune of encountering in their day-to-day lives) that everything is the fault of a distant, kleptocratic financial-industrial elite (whom they have rarely, if ever, encountered).
But Johnson faced Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. At least it had a story to tell. Today’s Labour behemoth is run by a different wing of urban managerial progressives who have abandoned any semblance of narrative. They’re intensely relaxed about the nature of the beast, of capital, of “the 1%”. And the Faragists have stolen their clothes while they were bathing.
Reform has deliberately kept their platform broad and shifting: disruptive. And they seize opportunity where they see it. They demanded the steel industry be nationalised months before a hapless Prime Minister hurriedly recalled Parliament. They championed a “Buy British” policy in public procurement contracts. Their opposition to winter fuel and disability benefit cuts was more vociferous than most of Labour’s Bennite Socialist Campaign Group, who have been cowed into a terrified silence by the Stalinist disciplinary methods of the centrist leadership. Richard Tice, Reform’s deputy leader, called for Thames Water to be brought into public ownership. And Farage himself has spent the last few months of campaigning calling for “reindustrialisation”, comparing his own anti-corporate, anti-big business message with Corbyn’s, and explaining to journalists that he quite liked Arthur Scargill.
Bien pensant opinion might baulk at the apparent contradictions of a Left-ish approach to industrial policy and robust state interventionism, combined with a Right-wing approach to immigration and culture war traditionalism. But for huge numbers of ordinary voters, this positioning is just common sense, entirely coherent; its planned restrictions on the labour supply, its appeal to patriotism, and its communitarian ethos are even complementary to postwar, social-democratic nostalgia. This now is the centre ground of British politics.
Dominic Cummings saw this when he told followers of a “crude heuristic” — that the average voter is “national socialist”, harbouring an unconscious political syncretism that mixes redistributive economics way to the Left of many Labour MPs, with hard-edged stances on law and order, way to the Right of many Conservative MPs.
For now, Farageism is ascendant. Labour and the Conservatives have both lost. Bemused, buttoned-up local civil servants will soon be welcoming a new Reform cohort into Town Halls and regional corridors of power: an Olympic boxer; a former Tory Dame and Miss UK finalist; a cavalcade of political renegades. Whether a hodgepodge of inexperienced minor celebrities, former Thatcherite ultras and anti-migrant big statists can form a cohesive political whole remains to be seen. But today it hardly matters. What matters is that this unlikely bunch have upended the duopoly. The disrupters now are in charge. For our sick and tired country, Reform’s vague, big tent populism is just what the doctor ordered, and now everything has changed, changed utterly.
