Broadcast on Friday evenings, this episode is going out the day after the English local government elections on Thursday 1st May in which the populist right wing Reform UK party led by Nigel Farage, his latest political venture, made dramatic gains winning well over 600 seats. They took a swathe of shire or County Councils, mostly from the Conservatives but some from Labour as well in addition to three newly created Mayoralties and overcoming a 14,000 plus Labour majority to win by six votes the by-election of Runcorn and Hemby. The Reform representative on the Any Questions panel, the commentator Tim Montgomerie (formerly of Conservative Home) asks his Labour counterpart, Lucy Powell the Commons Leader whether she had seen the Channel 4 documentary broadcast earlier in the week on the grooming gangs scandal; the historic and current incidences of the grooming and rape by predominantly Pakistani heritage males of predominantly white girls and young women; usually residents and former residents of the care system. Lucy Powell’s response was “Oh, we want to blow that little trumpet now, do we? Let’s get that dog whistle out, shall we?” [1] In an instant, Ms Powell handed Reform and other opponents of multiculturalism and “woke;” a key weapon to be used on the doorsteps in future elections. Evidence from the horse’s mouth of a leading Labour government luminary of the liberal, metropolitan elite’s contempt for the concerns and suffering of ordinary people; of the liberal establishment’s determination to cover up - for the sake of supposed racial harmony and misguided political correctness - the industrial scale sexual exploitation of vulnerable children and young people.
This vignette poses the fundamental conundrum as to how progressive and democratic politics deals with the challenges that the radical and populist Right poses. How does Labour and the social democratic left navigate the cultural or wedge issues of identity of our time such as immigration and the compatibility of second or third generation migrant populations to secularism and feminism? Dismissing out of hand, or appearing to, of any child protection concerns by pointing to the dog whistle in the plaintiff’s mouth and to be fair Lucy Powell has apologised for her rash response on Any Questions, is plain wrong. A proper response would be to express the necessity of supporting rape victims and to berate state failure in this regard. Calls for a national inquiry into grooming gangs should be based on prima facie evidence of official malfeasance and negligence aka Bloody Sunday, Hillsborough, Infected blood, Post Office, and Horizon etc. They should not be a response to the racialised weaponising of CSE by bad actors such as the expelled Reform MP Rupert Lowe and the far-right street agitator Tommy Robinson. The toxicity of the grooming gangs’ sagas and the scars it has left in communities in towns like Barrow, Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford are undeniable but calls for a national inquiry can and must be based on the universalist grounds of the upholding of the rights of women and children.
Many Labour figures from across its spectrum see Reform as an existential threat. Louise Haigh, the former Transport Secretary, has called for an economic reset, “ripping up our self-imposed tax rules … [for] a serious programme of investment and reindustrialisation.” From the socially conservative but economically interventionist Blue Labour faction, the MP Dan Carden warns the working class has rejected Labour: ''People feel abandoned – not just economically, but morally. They look at Westminster and see strangers in charge.'' Kindred MP Jonathan Hinder accuses Labour of having transmogrified into a hyper-liberal party rather than a socialist one, and plead for a tougher stance on immigration, which, he argues “is fundamentally an economic issue as much, and working-class people are generally the losers.”[2]
This vignette poses the fundamental conundrum as to how progressive and democratic politics deals with the challenges that the radical and populist Right poses. How does Labour and the social democratic left navigate the cultural or wedge issues of identity of our time such as immigration and the compatibility of second or third generation migrant populations to secularism and feminism? Dismissing out of hand, or appearing to, of any child protection concerns by pointing to the dog whistle in the plaintiff’s mouth and to be fair Lucy Powell has apologised for her rash response on Any Questions, is plain wrong. A proper response would be to express the necessity of supporting rape victims and to berate state failure in this regard. Calls for a national inquiry into grooming gangs should be based on prima facie evidence of official malfeasance and negligence aka Bloody Sunday, Hillsborough, Infected blood, Post Office, and Horizon etc. They should not be a response to the racialised weaponising of CSE by bad actors such as the expelled Reform MP Rupert Lowe and the far-right street agitator Tommy Robinson. The toxicity of the grooming gangs’ sagas and the scars it has left in communities in towns like Barrow, Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford are undeniable but calls for a national inquiry can and must be based on the universalist grounds of the upholding of the rights of women and children.
Many Labour figures from across its spectrum see Reform as an existential threat. Louise Haigh, the former Transport Secretary, has called for an economic reset, “ripping up our self-imposed tax rules … [for] a serious programme of investment and reindustrialisation.” From the socially conservative but economically interventionist Blue Labour faction, the MP Dan Carden warns the working class has rejected Labour: ''People feel abandoned – not just economically, but morally. They look at Westminster and see strangers in charge.'' Kindred MP Jonathan Hinder accuses Labour of having transmogrified into a hyper-liberal party rather than a socialist one, and plead for a tougher stance on immigration, which, he argues “is fundamentally an economic issue as much, and working-class people are generally the losers.”[2]
To calm progressive nerves, the polling expert Peter Kelner has pointed out that Reform may have won 677 council seats; but they were at the expense of the Conservatives. Labour did lose 187 seats: but the Liberal Democrats gained 163 and the Greens 44 for a net progressive gain which indicates that the progressive constituency is holding – even making – ground. But nevertheless Reform is here to say which is likely to be confirmed by the elections to the Welsh Senedd in May 2026; at the moment Reform leads the polls in Wales on 30%, with Plaid Cymru second and a Labour a poor third on 18%[3]. In the aftermath of last week’s polls, psephologists extrapolated from the respective shares of the vote in what was admittedly a contest across about a third of England, that Reform would win a 30% share of the national voter in a General Election which would be sufficient to win a majority of seats and therefore form a government. A sobering, alarming prospect perhaps but one which is far from written in the stars if progressive forces align properly.
At the moment it is the Conservative Party, that election winning machine with the Nietzschean Will to Power and the amoebic ability to represent the nation, which faces the greatest existential threat from Reform. This 200 year old institution has slumped to 17% in the polls and is becoming the biggest casualty of the fracturing of the century long two party (Tory-Labour) duopoly caused by the Reform and Liberal Democrat electoral insurgency. It has not advanced one millimetre from its historic record defeat in the last July’s general election which returned a Labour landslide majority in terms of seats but a paper thin one in terms of voting preferences. Data has shown that about 57 of the newly elected Reform councillors has previously stood for the Conservatives, and Tory MPs have reported losing many of their activists to Nigel Farage’s party, adding to its improved political organisation. Big beasts of the party’s past and present have warned of an extinction event. Simon Clarke, an ally of Boris Johnson and former minister and MP, states bluntly that Tory Party members needed to face the reality that the Tories have “not had a clear, compelling narrative for a long time” and have to accept “that we are fighting to justify our existence”. His biggest single worry “is that the pipeline of future Conservative voters is completely dead.”[4]
Arch Brexiteer, former Minister Steve Baker who lost his seat in the Tory wipeout last year and a strong backer of the current Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has said “… we failed to answer the immigration question and have not adequately raised living standards.” He forecasts that if Ms Badenoch has not reversed Tory Party fortunes by next year’s council elections “bigger than the ones we have just had” that Tory MP’s led by supporters of Robert Jenrick, to the right of her and the defeated candidate in last year’s leadership contest, will move against her.[5] It has to be said that Kemi Badenoch has barely laid a glove on Keir Starmer at Prime Minister’s Questions due to her predilection for raising culture war issues rather than substantive critiques of government policy and that she is notoriously reluctant to do the hard yards of meeting, communicating with and gladhanding the party grassroots.
Jeremy Hunt, former Health Secretary, has warned that the party could not rule out extinction and that it would take a while to recover from the “massive earthquake” that had caused the two-party system to crack. From the opposite wing of the party, veteran Party grandee Lord Heseltine, former Deputy Prime Minister and passionate pro-European, says that he is optimistic about the party’s capacity to recover but it needed to forge a better relationship with the EU and start making positive arguments about immigration as a force for good in the economy. (Good luck with that, more than a few sceptics would say!) Perhaps the most telling contribution in the last week was made by the former Chancellor George Osborne who cautioned that the party was making a mistake by focusing on culture wars and trying to ape Reform, telling LBC: “If we spoke a little bit less about transgender toilets and a bit more about taxes, then we might be on to something”[6]
The rise of Reform and its previous Faragian apparitions of UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) and Brexit parties is in no small matter related to the psychodramas on EU membership which convulsed the Conservative Party since the early 1990s leading the then PM David Cameron to try to shoot the UKIP./ Eurosceptic fox by holding the fateful in-out EU referendum in 2016 which led to the UK’s departure from the European bloc; Cameron’s resignation followed by four Tory PMs in the next eight years as Parliament struggled to put flesh on an EU withdrawal deal; the country became divided into Remain and Brexit tribes and the One Nation Tory tradition was expunged from a Conservative Party that had become an English nationalist sect whose vote is being steadily cannibalised by the real thing – Reform UK. Not quite the fate that has befallen the Republican Party in the USA with its hostile takeover by the Alt-Right and the displacement of centre-right parties in France, the Netherlands and Italy by nativist, anti-migrant parties but definitely a cautionary tale. And lessons which are transferable to the Labour Party.
For Labour’s strategists has run scared from owning the party’s progressive roots for far too long says Will Hutton. He claims that the Labour Party is the best change agent Britain possesses. Its missions are common good outcomes in economy and society; to promote fairness and opportunity for all; to create a social floor below which no one should fall and to make the case for public institutions [7] However Labour’s timidity is in articulating such a vision and its failure to develop a coherent project beyond “clearing up the mess left by 14 years of Conservative rule”. Its more radical policies - the workers’ rights bill, the renationalisation of the railways, the creation of BG Energy – are not integrated into a convincing narrative. Missteps such as the abolition of the Winter Fuel Allowance and disability benefits were driven by the imperatives to stay within Chancellor Rachel Reeve’s self imposed fiscal straightjacket and not by any moral mission. Labour duly paid the price in the Runcorn by-election where the Winter Fuel Allowance abolition was a much more salient issue on the doorsteps than any hot button culture issue such as alleged “two-tier” policing, small boats or transgenderism in the opinion polls. The degradation of the public realm – crumbling schools and hospitals, dilapidated housing, pot-holed roads – would have been major factors in the loss of the Labour run local authorities of Doncaster Metropolitan Council and North Tyneside to Reform.
Which brings us to today’s supposed attempt by Labour to reconnect with its grassroots – the publication of the government’s White Paper on immigration and Keir Starmer’s accompanying speech in which he promised to “take back control of our borders” and claimed that immigration rates were causing community divisions and creating “an island full of strangers” Sir Keir has clearly been on a journey from his days as a human rights lawyer and his defence of migrants on his accession as Labour leader in 2020. Now he deploys the strapline of the Vote Leave campaign in 2016 and language which lies somewhere on the spectrum between the then PM Theresa May’s “citizens of nowhere” speech in 2016 and Enoch Powell’s infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968. The Act proposes that care homes no longer employ overseas staff; that the period of residency required to acquire UK citizenship be raised from five to ten years; that work visas be only issued to graduates and that universities be charged for every visa issued to overseas student. Whither the party on internationalist solidarity. The shifting of the dial on immigration towards restrictive and performatively cruel policies has been the greatest success of populist right wing parties in Europe. That a Labour Government is now feeding into the discourse and practice of populist poison on immigration is arguably Nigel Farage’s greatest triumph so far.
References
[1] Andrew Marr. As the right advances, Labour must show it has something to offer that Reform doesn’t. The New Statesman 9-15 May 2025
[2] Ibid
[3] Will Hutton. Labour’s Farage disguise is already wearing thin with Britain’s progressive majority. The Observer 11 May 2025 p.34
[4] Rowena Mason and Michael Goodier. Conservative party is fighting for its life, says former cabinet minister. The Guardian Saturday 10th May 2025 p.12
[5] Ibid
[6] Ibid
[7] Hutton, op cit
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
John Gray remarked sometime ago that liberals were unable to comprehend that what they term the "populist revolt" was a reaction against the liberals own politics. I was reminded of this point by this article.
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