Image - Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street
A Labour second term will not come from coalescing around voters on the left, nor out flanking Reform on the right. It will come from owning the space of competent and stable government and proving to the voters that matter most that this is a viable alternative to the populist insurgency of Nigel Farage.
Right now, things aren’t looking too great for the government. Labour are consistently polling in the low 20s and trailing Reform by up to 10 points, one of the largest poll drops for a newly elected government in its first year since opinion polling began.
Nigel Farage’s Reform UK are insurgent and growing. They took a host of councils off the hands of the two main parties in May and have since ridden a wave of support that has seen them sit top of the polls and set the political agenda around their key talking points. There does now exist a growing consensus in politics and among the public that Reform, at the very least, have a chance of winning office and Farage becoming Prime Minister.
They may only appeal to a specific proportion of the electorate, and they may well be unable to go higher than levels of support they’ve harboured this summer, but as we saw from the last election – where Starmer won a landslide on 34% of the national vote – those numbers are all you actually need to win in today’s fraught political landscape.
Their offer may also be severely lacking in any coherent detail. Pledges to raise income tax allowance, abolish business rates and reduce corporation tax whilst, at the same time, increase public spending by some £80bn require the most absent interpretation of economics to be understood as possible. There are no surprises here, though, given the party’s offer is put together by a man for whom a necessity of a grip on political possibility has never been needed. He made his name engaging in theatrics in the European Parliament trying to gain public attention, quite successfully, whilst at the same time boasting one of the worst voting records among British MEPs and famously attending just one of 42 fishery committee meetings in three years.
This absence from reality may very well also be already playing out in local councils, where promises made in May to solve local governments’ financial difficulties through simple waste-reduction measures now appear to be tough to act on. Shockingly, firing “DEI hires” and scrapping “net stupid zero” won’t go far to address the collective 2.2bn funding shortfall that county authorities face in the next two years. Their own DOGE team’s review found just 5 “DEI hires” nationwide and, on whether abolishing flood scrutiny committees– as Lincolnshire council have done – will help their 200,000 homes at risk of flooding, the jury is out.
It very well may be the case that all these things are true, but to the people who will vote for Reform at the next election, that isn’t important. What is important to them is that Reform offer something entirely different from the Conservatives, who failed to improve the country in fourteen years. In their eyes, if Labour are judged to join them, and that both the two main parties can’t make it work, then Farage is worth a shot.
That is why it is so important that Labour are seen to deliver. They need to be judged to improve the state of the country and people’s lives and are rightly governing with this in mind.
Reform are, to their core, a party of protest, not a party capable of governing. It must be hammered home to the electorate that voting for Farage is not a harmless protest, it is the handing of the keys of power to a man who has never showed an ounce of capability to govern.
They face a fundamental governing dilemma, though. Whilst the government must improve the state of public services and living standards, it is absolutely crucial that this goes hand in hand with economic stability. It is effectively a governing pendulum, and if one side swings too far in favour of rapid improvement of public services, and a programme of tax rises and increased borrowing follows, there would be serious trade-offs in business investment and confidence, which is vital for economic growth.
On the flipside, if the pendulum were to swing too far in the favour of economic stability, and vital public service funding was seen as too risky, voters would lose confidence in Labour to improve people’s lives and the state of Britain, and they would be confined to the scrapheap of seemingly failed governments.
Starmer and his government must absolutely keep the pendulum of this dilemma in the centre. Public services need a level of investment that will enable people to see positive change. At the same time, Labour must be seen to preside over a stable economy and be competent on economic management.
The political era that we now find ourselves in is different from eras of the past. Not only has the historic two-party system now diluted into a landscape of multiple-party competition, but the Tories – the old enemy of Labour, who were always waiting on the side lines positioned as an alternative government more at comfort with those in the English shires, are a weak echo of what they once were. Destroyed by fourteen years of failure to govern, and selfish infighting, they are not a vehicle that enough of the public have faith in should they feel dissatisfied with this Labour government.
What is key is that Reform do not automatically move into this position. Their voter base and their potential appeal is much more limited than Labour’s traditional nemesis, who have so often destroyed their credibility to govern. Reform’s appeal is mainly to the social conservatives who held Brexit in high esteem, but they do not appeal as easily as an alternative government to those sceptical of populism as the Conservatives have been in the past.
This is an opportunity. It means that Labour are not facing a force that can harbour support in the ways that the Tories once did. For all the talk of Starmer and Labour only winning government in 2024 because they were a viable alternative to the Tories, and as accurate as parts of that may be, it is still very much correct to say there isa route to winning again in 2029 in this way.
That’s not to say that government communications don’t need to improve and that’s not to say that the voters feel enough of a sense of governing purpose and an authentic vision for the country, but it is to say that Starmer positioning himself and his government as a stable and competent force for Britain is more favourable to enough of the electorate than the instability of Farage and Reform.
Just as the ability to win majorities on an unprecedentedly low proportion of the vote could work in Reform’s favour, we know that it has already worked in Labour’s favour, and could very well work again, should those votes fall in the right places.
It cannot be ignored that there are those within the Labour Party who believe very strongly that a platform of uniting the left vote, winning over dissatisfied progressives sympathetic to the Greens and the new Corbyn-led Party, is the route to this, but it must also not be ignored that alongside sidestepping the realities of our first past the post voting system, an offer to these voters – who strongly favour wealth taxes and large scale public investment – would risk swinging the pendulum of the government’s public service improvement-economic stability dilemma too far in favour of public service improvement too rapidly, and would seriously risk sacrificing the government’s perception of competent economic management. If this were to happen, not only would many of these voters probably opt for an alternative party anyway, but the prospect of having a Labour government elected again on the basis of their competence and stability would be destroyed.
The reason why Labour won in 2024 was because they were able to take a large number of seats that Boris Johnson’s Conservatives won in 2019, as well as a number of seats that had previously been Labour under Blair and went to the Tories in the years that followed. In key seats of the English midlands and north, such as Bassetlaw, Scarborough and Whitby or Carlisle, the numbers of voters voting for parties on the left simply do not add up to the numbers needed to win again.
The people that voted Labour in these seats and helped Labour to win in 2024 are not people who vote for progressive unity, but for whoever convinces them that they will best represent their priorities. To these voters, predominantly in post-industrial areas, they will vote for the party that convinces them that they care about improving their local areas, address feelings that they have been let down by politics, have a reputation for economic stability and can efficiently manage immigration.
These voters want delivery on these four key areas. A government that can show them that the NHS and public services are improving; that their local areas are improving after years of decline; that the economy is in stable hands and that the government is competent at managing the issue of immigration and asylum is one that they will put their trust in again.
Crucially, these voters, who tended to come from the Tories to Labour in 2024 in these seats, helping Starmer to win them, and who he will need to win over again, are sceptical of the populist ‘tear things down’ mantra of Reform.
To win again, Labour simply must win over these voters. Right now, immigration (specifically, asylum) - is an area they will need to be seen to be delivering on and put to bed the view that the government is unable to effectively manage it. They will need to be honest about the realities of asylum, and the necessity for difficult international co-operation to deal with it, but they do need to show that they can do what previous governments have been seen to be unable to do and to actually make progress on their promises. Better messaging and a clearer vision will help this, no doubt. If Starmer can quickly recover from the evident communication issues of the first year and convince the public that this government is one with an authentic vision, and that is delivering positive change – particularly on NHS waiting lists and appointments, workers’ rights and global leadership -then there is still a route to victory. He will be able to set himself up for a 2029 campaign that contrasts itself to Farage’s instability, with a “the plan is working, don’t surrender it” campaign.
The path to winning again is, in many ways, the path that saw Labour win in 2024, but involves delivery on the change and stability that was promised. The task for Starmer is to prove that competent and stable government is the only alternative choice to the chaos of Farage-led government, and that trusting in the plan is a means of bettering Britain.
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