The latest polls show Reform, led by Nigel Farage neck and neck, or slightly ahead of the Tories.
I took some time to read their manifesto and it’s pretty bloody awful.
BUT, and it’s a big but, there’s some stuff Reform is promising that no one else is offering. For example:
- lower rents through reduced migration
- free tuition for STEM degrees
- lifting income tax allowance to £20,000
Farage talks about the housing crisis all the time, and these specific policies are laser-targeted at younger people.
Farage wants to stop all non-essential immigration. Britain is like Canada, there’s vastly more immigration than there is housing being created and rents and house prices have sky-rocketed. (A detailed post on that soon.) Tuition averages about $6,000 pounds a year and young adults tend to be poor and have little income.
He also wants to reduce estate taxes, go all-in on anti-trans policies, get rid of clean energy and so on. He’s still a conservative loon.
But he’s offering what neither Labour nor the Conservatives are, or can.
He has the best chance of breaking the Labour/Conservative duopoly that Britain has seen in generations for the same reason LaPen is surging, Brexit happened & Trump is viable: the status quo sucks for most people and they want radical change. Since radical change to the left was stopped with Corbyn’s defeat and the Starmer’s purge of the left from Labout, it’s now the right’s turn.
Like an animal in a leg-trap who chews its own leg off to escape, people in pain who see their lives getting worse and no hope of improvement will take a chance on something radical. Sometimes, as with Javier in Argentina, that something radical is extremely stupid, but at a certain point people will try anything.
For a lot of people in Britain, as in France and Argentina and America, the risk is worth it.
As with Corbyn, the press is now turning hard against Reform. Any change from the neoliberal status quo will be opposed with their full weight. It worked against Corbyn, but at some point it will stop working.
Reform won’t win the election, but they don’t need to. They need to replace the Tories as the second party, either in this election or the next. Once they are part of the duopoly, power is only a matter of time.
Let us hope the left learns from this and raises its own challenge to Labour, replacing it, because Reform’s policies, overall, are horrid.
Neoliberalism is dying in country after country, who and what replaces it matters.
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