Nigel Farage Returning to Front Line Politics Poses Serious Threat to Conservatives: Report

HARTLEPOOL, ENGLAND - NOVEMBER 23: MEP and Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage visits a marke
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Oliver JJ Lane

Swathes of traditionally strong Conservative areas are now on majorities so marginal the Reform party simply standing against the Tories could unseat MPs, political analysts talking to The Guardian have said.

Potentially dozens of Conservative MPs including many household names hold seats which are now at serious risk of being lost at the next election if present trends of the one-time Brexit Party, now Reform UK, polling well and a Labour surge continue in the coming years.

The 2019 general election saw the Conservatives win a historic number of seats, but this was — at least in part — down to a last-minute gesture by Nigel Farage who led the then-Brexit Party to stand down his candidates in Conservative-held areas. With no competition for votes from the right, the Conservatives surged.

Yet this gesture by Farage was to allow the Conservatives to ‘get Brexit done’, an outcome that feels very doubtful to many Brexiteers, and it is clear the Tory betrayal of the voting public over immigration — a key Brexit-linked policy area — is ongoing. It is very unlikely Rishi Sunak could hope for the Brexit Party, now called Reform UK, to stand aside for him in two years’ time.

This, The Guardian reports, could see the Conservatives lose a number of big-name politicians, including party grandee Iain Duncan Smith and Boris-era minister Dominic Raab. They cite professor of political science Rob Ford who told the paper of this potential swing: “There’s a significant slice of seats where the Conservative majority over Labour or the Lib Dems is not large, and there was no Brexit party candidate last time. If a Brexit party-type candidate stands next time then the Conservative MP is struggling even before any swing to the local opposition”.

The paper also quotes well-known UK political scientist Professor John Curtice, who said of where Reform UK fits into this: “Reform UK need Farage to come back, and if he did – given that there is an immigration issue for him to leverage – then the Tories would have good reason to be concerned.”

Key characters in the Reform Party, including founder Nigel Farage and now-party leader Richard Tice are explicit now that the Conservative Party, which has been amply demonstrated to openly lie to its own voters on key issues that matter to them, needs to be outright replaced.

While that may be a laudable goal, it remains the case that the political and electoral system in the UK does a good job — by design — of keeping out insurgent and new parties. Indeed, excepting splits and schisms, only one new major political party has successfully emerged in modern British political history and that was over a century ago.

That is not to say also-ran parties can’t influence British politics without controlling the government, however. The Scottish Nationalist Party enjoys out-of-proportion importance as it has captured the north British home nation of Scotland and uses its power there to agitate for independence. The Liberal Democrats, the modern-day-descendants of the Liberal Whigs that were replaced by Labour as the ‘other’ main British party a century ago have seen power this past decade in coalition with the ruling Conservatives and managed as part of that to make damaging changes to the British constitution which were subsequently reversed.

Perhaps the clearest example of a minor party exerting influence without holding power is Nigel Farage’s UKIP, which pioneered Britain’s vote to leave the European Union in 2016. Farage himself can, through Brexit, also lay a reasonable claim to having defenestrated two British Prime Ministers.

The Reform party that he founded now polls around nine per cent. Certainly not enough to take power and, given the way the electoral system works, possibly not enough to even get seats in Parliament. Yet as the recent past shows, those betting against Farage changing the British political landscape tend to lose their shirts.

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