Where Britain's new populist revolt could hit hard
Source - Matt Goodwin 19/02/24
There’s a new third force in British politics. And it’s going to have a major impact on the country’s rapidly approaching general election.
That’s the key message from the by-elections last week, which saw the insurgent Reform party, led by Richard Tice and overseen by honorary president Nigel Farage, surge into third place, well ahead of the Liberal Democrats and the Greens.
Critics will note Reform is nowhere near as strong as its two main predecessors, namely the Brexit Party, which polled 30% at the 2019 European Parliament elections, and the UK Independence Party (UKIP), which averaged 38% across the final by-elections before the 2015 general election. And they have a point.
Reform’s 10% of the vote in Kingswood and 13% in Wellingborough, alongside its average rating of 10% in the national polls, pale in comparison. And these numbers don’t bode well. Put it this way, if Nigel Farage and UKIP could only win one seat in 2015 after polling nearly 13% of the vote and four million votes, then what chance does the Reform party really have?
It’s a fair question.
Yet, even still, Reform is clearly on the up. Once you remove Britain’s undecided voters from the polls, the party is already attracting one in four of the people who voted for Boris Johnson and the Tories in 2019, and one in four Brexit voters. My own polling, meanwhile, finds at least 16% of all voters would consider voting for Reform this year, suggesting this new revolt on the right has not yet peaked.
Furthermore, it could also be argued —as I’ve done so— that in many ways there is more space today for a party like Reform than there ever was in the early 2010s. As I’ve pointed to time and time again, look around Britain today and you will find an enormous reservoir of public anger with issues Reform is now targeting.
With unprecedented levels of mass, legal immigration. With spiralling numbers of illegal migrants on the small boats. With Britain’s inability to remove illegal migrants and foreign nationals who commit serious crimes from the country —like convicted sex offender Abdul Ezedi. With a broken economy which we’ve been told time and time again needs mass immigration yet is still not growing.
And, more generally, with a politics and national conversation that are still shaped far too heavily around the socially liberal if not radical woke beliefs, tastes, priorities, and lifestyles of the new elite who, at best, represent just 20% of Britain.
The obsession with Net Zero. The obsession with ‘diversity’ in all its forms. The obsession with looser if not open borders. The obsession with branding anybody and everybody who doesn’t play ball as ‘racist’.
And the way in which they impose their luxury beliefs on the rest of society, simultaneously advocating policies which bring them few costs and more kudos from other elites while imposing enormous costs on everybody else.
All of which raises an important question.
If I’m right, if Reform does have space to cut through and have a major impact on the outcome of the next general election then where, exactly, might this happen? Which seats will be most receptive to this growing grassroots rebellion? And where, exactly, might Reform hit the Tories and also the Labour Party hardest?
We can answer these questions by drawing on something I’ve used in the past to successfully identify the most ‘UKIP-friendly’ seats during the early 2010s, and the most ‘Brexit-friendly’ seats at the 2016 referendum.
This analysis, I’ve since been told by well known campaigners, was used to identify not only key target seats but also help push Brexit over the line in 2016 (though I should add this information was made available to both sides of the referendum).
The key difference this time around is I’ve updated everything.
To identify the most ‘demographically favourable’ seats for Reform, I use the latest 2021 census information to find seats filled with the very kinds of people who are most likely to vote Reform —who are mainly, though not exclusively, working-class, older, white voters who usually avoided university and live outside the cities.
We can then rank all seats in the country based on how receptive they are. For example, the seat of Wellingborough, where Reform polled a record 13% of the vote last week, is ranked 85th in the list, suggesting there are much better options.
So, in short, what follows is a list of fifty seats where, if Reform invested money and manpower, the party would likely be met with a welcoming response from local voters. And this list also points to something else, to the potential longer-term strategy Reform might be thinking about and which I’ve written about before.
This is not just about where Reform might do well this year; it’s also about where, if the party was serious about mounting a long-term challenge to the big two parties, perhaps even trying to replace the Tories over the longer-term, it could do even better in 2028 or 2029. This ‘two-election strategy’ would see Reform establish itself as the main opposition in dozens of seats this year before then going on to make much wider gains at the election to follow.
For example, while Labour look set to do very well this year it is also significant that of the fifty most favourable seats for Reform nine are held by Labour while many of the new seats that have been created by boundary changes have also historically been dominated by the Labour Party. So, this list is as much about a party that is looking toward the late 2020s as it is about the general election this year.
So, without further ado, here are the fifty most favourable seats for Reform at the 2024 election —information I imagine will be useful to both the party’s supporters and opponents. I have also ranked every other seat in the country for those who are interested —just drop me an e-mail. Good luck to all sides!...
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