There have been many Farage half-dawns. This time, it could be different.

We've never seen anything quite like this.

Tony Benn, one of the few truly charismatic politicians of the last century, famously (ruefully) observed that politicians could be categorised into two: "They are a signpost or a weather vane. A signpost points in the direction you should go, regardless of the wind. A weather vane spins around and changes direction with the wind." Although he is more supple than is commonly appreciated, Nigel Farage has fallen into the sign post camp, more often than not. Indeed, in the twenty years in which he has intermittently haunted British politics, he was the wind. Someone who through sheer force of personality (and embedded media support) funnelled more mainstream politicians into places they did not wish to go; someone who shaped the contours of the game, rather than becoming its main player. For the first time, looking at the sweep of Thursday’s local election results, I find myself seriously wondering if that might change.

Inevitably, with the (much missed) disappearance of most overnight counting, Runcorn attracted most attention for much of the morning (I wrote about the implications here). But Runcorn wasn’t really the story of these elections: that was the county council results. Though these contests were partial, largely away from the big cities and only in England, the totalising nature of the Reform surge was striking. On one level, they confirmed what we’ve known since July: that party politics, already deeply fragmented at the general election, has become even more fragmented since, with Reform, the Greens and the Lib Dems continuing to press down on an already historic low vote share for the two-party duopoly. That said, these results were even better for Reform than much of that polling would imply, and even worse for Labour and especially the Conservatives.

Consider just a few results. In Durham Labour lost 38 seats and have only 4 remaining. Reform won *65 seats*, having not had a single councillor before this week. The Tories lost 15 and have 1 remaining. This was a Labour controlled council for a century until 2021, one of the crucibles of traditional British labourism. On the Conservative side, look at Kent County Council: this had been Tory controlled since 1997. Until this week they had 62 councillors. Now they have just five. Reform took control with 57 seats and before this week they had had none whatsoever. In county after county, north and south, we saw the same thing.¹

I know many readers, listeners, viewers find the focus on Farage irritating. They believe he is a media creation, they believe he has had scant scrutiny, they believe he is a cad. Any or all of those things may be true, but none are sufficient to explain what we are seeing and what is happening in the country. To blame the media or to say that these results are not especially impressive, is simply to refuse to confront reality, to make the same mistakes liberalism has made in underestimating populist right politics again and again. Farage has had many incarnations, many vehicles and been present at and occasionally genuinely important in several political inflection points. But this is by far the most potent he has yet appeared; for the first time, I would argue, he is leading a genuinely national political force. I mean this in two senses: firstly in the simplest sense of the word: Reform may well become a GB-wide political phenomenon in a way neither the Brexit Party nor certainly UKIP ever managed. The latter, in particular, tended to dominate in the English shires, in the land of disgruntled half-colonels and perfect blue rinses. Neither enjoyed any significant local government base, with inefficient voter distribution, low turnouts and First Past the Post proving almost insurmountable barriers. At its peak, UKIP could only take one district council, in Thanet. The Brexit Party didn’t exist long enough to even try to make a dent. In Scotland Farage was always a bit-player, indeed often reviled as an embodiment of a bluff, crass pub-bore Englishness. UKIP established a bridgehead in the Welsh Parliament, but under the leadership of the absurd Neil Hamilton, quickly faded.

Contrast that with Reform today. At its peak UKIP had just over 500 councillors, something it took them over a decade to achieve. After a single night Reform now boast 677. Reform now control 11 county councils, many of which were Conservative or Labour controlled for decades- and won them at a canter. These are results an opposition party would give their eye teeth for and would typically signal that they were on their way to win a serious number of parliamentary seats. Meanwhile, Reform is eyeing a potential win in next year’s Senedd elections and is polling fair even in heavily Remain voting Scotland. This is more notable still when we consider the second way in which Farage is nationalising his and his party’s brand: this is the first time where he has led a vehicle without the adhesive of the European issue. Farage’s previous successes were buoyed by the anti-Brussels, anti-system vote, of his pitching himself as the English fox in the European hen house. He razed that house to the ground: now it is Westminster in his sights, and if anything voters seem even more receptive to it than before.

And is that really very surprising? Travel to most places in Britain and you will find a country of profound immiseration, about which politicians opine but rarely do much and which the British state seems sometimes to have almost abandoned. We are well into the second decade of an economic malaise which seems to elude even the most minor of ameliorations from “mainstream” political forces. To put it another way: things just get worse and worse and worse for the average person. Through Brexit, to Johnson, to Starmer, voters again and again pull the ‘change’ lever, only to find nothing seems to happen, and even if it does, mainstream political forces do a poor job in communicating it. This is not only delegitimising the main parties, but the democratic system itself. Labour ministers take to the airwaves and speak gravely of “difficult decisions”, that their hands are tied, that they would like to do more but circumstances do not allow- there is some truth to this but the British public have heard it for 15 years. Endless emphasis on one’s impotence is neither congruent with the message of change on which Labour was elected, nor helpful in convincing voters not to turn to extremes, who fizz with political possibility.

There is another sense in which this slide to Reform is being abetted by Labour and the Conservatives. One of the fundamentals of British politics right now is that the Tories and to a lesser extent Labour are basically arguing that Nigel Farage is right. The liberal centre right of the Conservative Party is barely twitching in the road. The Tories thus have been transformed, partly at Farage’s hand, into a radical right populist force, which does not demur from almost anything Farage says or does. It simply argues that they would better enact his agenda than he. Labour has individual things with which they take issue, especially the NHS, but the ideological faction which is in the ascendancy within the Labour Party right now, blue Labour, is distinctly Faragist, especially given he has deftly moved to the economic left in an attempt to appeal to old Labour voters. On immigration, social issues, even on Brexit, Labour’s message implicitly and explicitly is that Farage is more right than wrong. In such circumstance why should we be surprised that voters opt for full fat Farage, not skimmed? If as Nigel Lawson said, the party which wins the battle of ideas wins elections, is this not the only explanation of Farage’s success that we need? Because right now that battle is barely being contested.

But then such a contestation, at least from the Labour side would require a more solid conceptualisation as to what progressive politics actually is and how it differs from Farage’s radical conservatism, even if they sometimes share terrain. There is precious little of this in the Starmer project, being as it was an internal one of strength and party purification which through some contingency found itself governing, and thus requiring ideas it could extend to the external political world. As such, there isn’t much theory of the case as to why its opponents are wrong, little in the way of rhetorical binding which ministers can use to explain to voters what they’re doing and why. As such, Starmer, who has always been a weather vane, who has always been hostile to the power of ideas, finds himself buffeted around, as do his ministers. Endless talk of delivery isn’t enough, indeed delivery itself probably isn’t enough in an age where vibes rule and most voters don’t believe any political change is possible. To get a hearing in 2025 you have to have something to say as well as an idea of what to do. This lack of project and a dearth of gifted political communicators to explain what there is of it, merely empowers Farage further, which itself pulls Labour off course, in that it comes to prioritise Reform’s agenda over all others. That is yet another problem, because though it’s of a second order magnitude, Labour does have a left flank problem too. The Greens won over 2000 votes in Runcorn. Green votes cost Labour scores of council seats. On trans rights, on climate change, on inequality, on welfare- the government is offering little in either word or deed to its progressive base, indeed too often it seems to actively try and eschew them. It also, for geopolitical reasons, does not wish to do what has proved successful for progressive forces in Canada and Australia: to craft a politics of anti-Trumpism, deliberately painting conservative opponents, in this case Farage, as Trump aligned.

It will not be enough then to offer Faragism with a Labour rosette. Labour must focus on the reasons why there is such a profound anti-system element to our politics, and work out the areas where Farage is successfully channelling profound economic and social anxieties. But it must do so confident in its own assumptions and with a clear delineation as to why progressive politics is better placed to address that deep malaise. Right now, as closely as I follow things, I have little sense of why Labour thinks that is- so why should the country? In a choice between the signpost Farage and the weathervane Starmer, don’t be surprised if in a country yearning for something, anything to work- turn to someone pointing them in an actual direction.

P.S. As you might imagine we discussed the local election results in more detail on Friday’s News Agents. Do listen here.

1. Add into that mix some good Lib Dem performances against the Tories in the Home Counties, which made their results even more abysmal.