Farage wins big, but do his victories last?
Nigel Farage’s political business vehicle Reform has won hundreds of seats In local Elections in England. Alarm bells are ringing for anti-racists and the left (inside and outside of Labour) needs to work even harder on an alternative to Farage’s Trumpian politics.
Peter Kellner, who once ran YouGov has produced an interesting assessment on what happened after Farage’s previous electoral successes. They have happened although you will need to scroll down a lot in media coverage to find details. 24 hour news media is about now and not about history or context.
Kellner mentions several examples of what happened when Farage’s earlier political vehicles won elections. Namely UKIP and the Brexit Party. Farage eventually fell out with everyone in UKIP and walked out and decided to change the name of the Brexit Party to Reform.
In 2013 local Elections in England UKIP got 19.9% of the vote and 147 Councillors. They didn’t win any Councils however.
In the 2016 Elections for the Welsh Assembly (now Senedd) UKIP won 7 seats and 13% of the vote. By the time of the next election in 2021 none of them were still in UKIP and it won no seats.
In the 2019 Election for the EU Parliament the Brexit Party topped the poll getting 30.5% and 29 MEPs.
It will be interesting to see how long it is before Commissioners are sent in to run Councils Reform has won in 2025 because they are failing to fulfil statutory duties. It will also be interesting to see how many of the Councillors elected get expelled or split. After all when the convictions of Reform representatives are thought of its often not political ones but the kind a Court of Law decides.
None of which btw is a reason for all those who want to see Farage stopped from addressing the points in my first para.
Peter Kellner, Guardian
Ukip’s 10-seat majority in Thanet should have given it four years of power to show what its new brand of politics could achieve. Alas, it turned out, that was very little. Six months later, five of its councillors defected, following internal rows about a local airport. A byelection subsequently restored its majority, but only until another councillor defected, saying Ukip had failed to make “significant change”. The following year, 12 Ukip councillors peeled off to form an independent group. Ukip’s days in charge of Thanet were over. In 2019, it fielded just three candidates. They all lost. Thanet was not the only place where Ukip struggled. In 2017, seven of its 12 councillors in Great Yarmouth defected to the Conservatives – although to be fair, some defections elsewhere went the other way, including two Tory MPs, Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless.
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