The awfulness of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party government has empowered the corporate elitists of Reform UK. And even established pollster YouGov has now confirmed for the first time that Reform is the most popular party in Britain, thanks primarily to its strength in England. Yet already, some Labour MPs’ response to this is to call on Starmer to lurch further to the right – exposing just how politically and socially illiterate they are.
Reform leading in the polls
Reform has mixed racist, xenophobia, and anti-establishment rhetoric – and some nice-sounding public spending promises – to gain support for its far-right agenda of furthering privatisation, increasing environmental destruction, cutting taxes for the rich, and attacking human rights and workers’ rights.
Other pollsters have had Labour down in third place behind both Reform and the Tories recently, but YouGov’s poll leaves Labour in second place on 24%, one point behind Reform on 25%. The Tories lag behind at 21%.
Reform has moved up two points in the last week, while both Labour and the Tories have lost support. Labour has lost 33% of the voters it had in the 2024 general election. 11% of those went to the Liberal Democrats, but 8% went to Reform. The Conservatives, meanwhile, have lost 29% of their votes from 2024. And 24% of those have gone to Reform.
Reform is now the second most popular party in Scotland, and the third in Wales. But in England, Reform is the most popular party.
🚨 BREAKING: Reform lead with **YouGov**
🟣 REF 25% (+2)
🔴 LAB 24% (-3)
🔵 CON 21% (-1)
🟠 LD 14% (-)
🟢 GRN 9% (-)Via @YouGov, 2-3 Feb (+/- vs 26-27 Jan) pic.twitter.com/3YLX09jhJv
— Stats for Lefties 🍉🏳️⚧️ (@LeftieStats) February 3, 2025
A graph from Stats for Lefties shows the averages from different polls. And it demonstrates quite clearly how Reform’s significant increase in polling has coincided directly with Labour’s plummeting figures.
This is the first Reform lead with an established pollster, and I would now expect Reform to move into the lead in poll averages by the time we reach the local elections. pic.twitter.com/7hrgAKrB2F
— Stats for Lefties 🍉🏳️⚧️ (@LeftieStats) February 3, 2025
The establishment has failed us. But Reform is not the answer.
Labour and Conservative governments have followed a doctrine of bending down to private business interests for decades now. We have massive levels of inequality as a result, with the rich getting richer while establishment parties pay little attention to everyone else.
Britain is in a state of decay, and people desperately want action to deal with rising living costs (energy costs in particular) and public services that have suffered years of severe neglect. But they have quickly realised that their new Labour government lied to get into power and has no interest in challenging the rich and powerful because the neoliberals in charge respond only to corporate lobbyists.
Labour’s cronies have been sucking up to the right and attacking the left, in the hope of stopping their freefall in the polls. But the country simply doesn’t like Keir Starmer. Without a radical and unlikely U-turn to actually address the issues most important to the people who voted for Labour in 2024, he and his party are doomed.
Reform, meanwhile, is very much a party of the rich and powerful, as the support of far-right billionaire Elon Musk would suggest. It would simply ramp up the damage Labour and the Tories have done, while increasing societal division in the process. Because it’s currently the best-funded party with an anti-establishment message, however, it’s the most likely to gain power by harnessing the country’s anger at the status quo.
Change the whole system
British politics is an absolute farce – as Reform’s poll lead shows.
Our electoral system gave Labour 63% of parliamentary seats in 2024 despite it only winning 34% of the votes (“the lowest won by a post-war single party government”). Starmer’s corporate shell of a party got 9,698,409 votes in comparison with Jeremy Corbyn’s 12,877,918 votes and 40% vote share of 2017 (or even Corbyn’s 10,295,912 votes in 2019, despite the brutal media smears against him and the party’s disastrous adoption of a second-referendum policy). We also had the second-smallest voter turnout since 1885, at 60%, showing mass disenchantment with establishment politics.
No wonder YouGov has highlighted the connection between “the least proportional result in British history” and the rise in support for moving to an electoral system of proportional representation. Half of the country (and even Labour voters) back this, while only a quarter think we should keep the current system.
Of course, the response to Reform from some in the Labour Party is to once again lurch further to the right. But as Taj Ali pointed out, this never ends well:
Labour will never out-Farage Farage.
Across Europe, centrist parties have adopted right-wing narratives and policies. This has only strengthened the far-right. They set the agenda. They win the ideological battle. In the end, voters prefer the original not the copy. pic.twitter.com/q08qJnMHDK
— Taj Ali (@Taj_Ali1) February 4, 2025
Until left-wingers unite around a mass movement for democracy and social justice, fascism will keep knocking at the doors of power in Britain. And in 2029, it may just receive the keys.
Featured image via the Canary
