by Chris Harris
If you follow the British media, you could be forgiven for thinking Nigel Farage is already measuring the curtains at Downing Street. Reform dominates political coverage, every opinion poll is treated as another staging post towards government, and remarkably little attention is paid to what would actually happen in 650 individual constituencies during a general election.
Personally, I don’t believe Reform will be anywhere near 35% when that election comes, but even if they were, with Labour and Conservatives on 25% each, I still don’t believe that automatically translates into hundreds of Reform MPs. My suspicion is that their real success will be concentrated predominantly in parts of the old Red Wall and similar areas where their support is genuinely strong, leaving them perhaps 70 or 80 MPs rather than anywhere remotely close to power.
The Polls Ignore What Voters Will Actually Do
The reason is tactical voting. I have voted Labour all my life, but if Labour couldn’t win in my constituency and the Liberal Democrats were the best-placed party to beat Reform, I would vote Lib Dem. If the Conservatives were the only realistic way of keeping Reform out, I would vote Conservative. I suspect millions of people will make exactly the same calculation. A Reform candidate sitting on 34% against Labour on 29% suddenly looks much less secure when Conservative and Lib Dem voters realise Labour can beat them. In another constituency the Conservatives might be the challenger, and Labour voters will face the same decision. Recent by-elections have already demonstrated how quickly opposition votes can concentrate around whichever party is best placed locally to oppose Reform, hence three of the recent contests they were tipped to win, they didn’t. As a general election approaches, constituency polling and tactical-voting campaigns will make that choice clearer still. The question for many people will no longer be “Which party do I normally support?” but “Who can beat Reform here?” That is why I believe many of the marginal seats currently being casually coloured Reform on electoral maps simply won’t fall to them.
So Why Is The Media Obsessed With Reform?
Because Reform, and Farage in particular, is fantastic for audiences. Farage creates arguments, outrage, enthusiasm and fear, and all of those things produce clicks, viewers, listeners and social-media engagement. There doesn’t need to be some grand media conspiracy behind it; the commercial explanation is perfectly adequate. “Farage could be Prime Minister” attracts far more attention than a sober examination of constituency mathematics explaining why tactical voting would leave Reform with a sizeable but relatively powerless group of MPs. We live in an age when much of the media increasingly competes for attention rather than simply delivering information and sober comment, and Reform is an extraordinarily effective attention-generating machine. The danger is that constant coverage then creates its own momentum: Reform polls well, so Reform receives more coverage; that coverage produces more interest and more polling stories, which justify yet more coverage. Political importance and media entertainment gradually become confused, the reality of how our elections really work handily ignored.
Reform Will Win Seats, Not Britain
None of this means Reform should be dismissed. Their support is real and they could take a significant number of seats. But winning 70 or 80 seats, which I think is their ceiling, would itself be an extraordinary political achievement; it isn’t remotely the same thing as winning power. My view is that when an actual general election arrives, the anti-Reform vote will organise itself, constituency by constituency, in a way that national opinion polls simply cannot capture properly. Perhaps the biggest political story of the next election won’t be the supposedly unstoppable rise of Reform at all. It will be the discovery that Britain’s first-past-the-post system, combined with mass tactical voting, placed a much lower ceiling on Farage’s ambitions than years of breathless media coverage ever suggested.
I think Reform will disintegrate; they are already losing their shit and are currently propped up by a useless Badenoch. Again, the media are baffled: why are her personal ratings on the up while those of her party stagnate? After all, she is so good at PMQ’s. Because nobody watches PMQs. The media are giving her a thumbs up, the voter a thumbs down. But that’s our modern-day media. Shit.
#British Politics #Politics Blog #British Left #British Right #Bullshit Media
