Voting Labour Won’t Save Us From Reform

Reform has set out its stall ahead of local elections on 1 May. It is standing more candidates than any other party, contesting 99.4% of the 1,641 council seats up for election, plus all six mayoral races and the Runcorn and Helsby by-election. But casting a ballot for Labour in the hope of stopping Reform won’t save our communities from far-right creep.

Nigel Farage’s latest vehicle – a private company disguised as a political party – is busy showcasing itself as a viable alternative to the existing red, blue and yellow teams. On a national level, Reform’s polling looks healthy, with some surveys placing it neck and neck with Labour; others predict it bagging a majority at the next general election. 

It doesn’t matter whether Labour points out that Reform’s local council candidate ranks are swelled, to the tune of more than 60 candidates, by defectors from the Tories, desperate to save their political skins. Farage has been smart enough to reject coalition advances from Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, and he’s leaned into just enough economic populism to potentially mask his true, billionaire class instincts. 

There’s a reason that your nan – and the bloke in the Post Office and the kid you went to school with who always shouted ‘is it an ox-bow lake’ in geography lessons – are all thinking about voting for Reform. It’s ‘something new’. It’s not Labour, the Tories, or the Lib Dems – all tainted with decades of dishonesty and disappointment. Reform is also very loud, gets bags of valuable airtime and knows how to work a blast furnace photo opp – unlike, say, the Greens. 

This is precisely why holding your nose and crossing the ‘Labour’ box is a failed strategy for halting the march of light teal-branded fascism. Reform thrives on widespread hatred and distrust of the legacy parties – which, let’s be clear, those parties fully and completely deserve – flourishing in the vacuum where a populist leftwing alternative could be. 

A charismatic disruptor drawing the electorate together on the basis of class solidarity in the face of exploding levels of inequality – the Gary Stevenson party, if you will – doesn’t exist (yet). Reform is the best-known alternative option, and attempting to hold it back by rewarding Keir Starmer’s “party of work”, which pushes pensioners into poverty and strips the sick and disabled of their meagre financial support, is akin to shovelling more coke into Farage’s blast furnace. 

Aren’t we all nauseated to the gills by having to vote for some empty suit over another slightly oilier suit so that the really depraved, effluent-stuffed suit doesn’t get its paws on power? Isn’t this pattern of negative voting part of the whole twisted problem? Sure, there were some people who were fully Starmer-pilled ahead of last summer’s general election and genuinely thought the “heir to Blair” could turn the country around. But there’s a reason Labour’s win was dubbed a “loveless landslide” – people voted for the red team to get the blue team out. The Tories had presided over 14 years of austerity, decline and rising living costs. The general thinking was ‘surely Labour can’t be worse’. Now, nearly nine months on and gestation complete, we’ve seen it’s pretty much identical in all the ways that really matter. 

Labour represents the same failed economic model as the Tories. Under Keir Starmer, the public sector has remained poor and diminished, while rapacious profiteering and the super-rich suck all the capital out of our high streets and services, taking away our ability to enjoy a semi-decent quality of life. 

Labour promises the same levels of inequality; the same bite of austerity, where the nation’s books are balanced on the backs of the most vulnerable, and unaccountable private companies are allowed to snatch our paychecks for water, energy and rent. Starmer’s government has failed to protect households from an ‘awful April’ of spiralling bills, boxed itself in with arbitrary fiscal rules, and hoovered up freebie tickets and clothes and luxury accommodation like there’s no tomorrow – and it’s all sounding a little bit too familiar.

What’s more, Labour is already letting Reform set the agenda, only taking control of beleaguered British Steel after Farage called for nationalisation, and going full-hostile environment by boasting on Instagram about removing tens of thousands of people from the UK. A vote for Labour isn’t a rejection of Reform – the tail is already wagging the dog. 

Labour isn’t going to listen to the electorate’s concerns about the way it’s governing if people reward it with their votes. You can’t pressure a party to alter its policy direction by giving it a thumbs up at the ballot box. Now is the time to pump energy and votes into progressive independents wherever they’re standing. The success of Jeremy Corbyn and the independent alliance, along with four Green seats and a barnstorming performance from Leanne Mohamad in Ilford North in summer 2024, should be the blueprint going forward. 

The future doesn’t look bright for Reform because the electorate generally likes Farage – his approval ratings are worse than Keir Starmer’s, which is genuinely saying something. Farage has successfully changed the course of British politics by steering pressure vehicles like Ukip – and his new heavy-duty lorry is on course to actually pick up a smorgasbord of both local and general election wins. Propping up Labour’s deceit and failure only prolongs the sickness at the heart of our politics. Reform’s brand of anti-Westminster rebellion, sitting atop a boil of far-right pus, can only be fully lanced by a leftwing economic populism of common sense and compassion.