Brexit Diary: Say, Where Is Nigel Farage? It Could Take a Strong Showing by Reform To Bring Him Home
It looks like a electoral storm is brewing in Britain that could produce a hung parliament.
If a British premier serves as captain of the ship of state, we can imagine Rishi Sunak is telling the officers and crew of H.M.S. United Kingdom: Batten down the hatches. There’s a storm a-coming.
The Conservative Government will have to ride out the general election campaign, when it comes, as best it can. Only when the votes are counted, the wins and losses assessed, can conservative forces redeploy to meet the challenges from the left.
Is this the general consensus among right-wing Brexiteers? Definitely not. With no other good options available, though, it may be the Tories’ fate. For this seems to be the course Conservatives are charting following the local elections last week. As the Independent reports, the party lost control of 10 councils and close to 400 council seats in England.
Of 107 councils, Labour controls 51 to the Tories’ six. Overall, Labour won a total of 1,158 councilors, the Lib Dems 522, and the Conservatives 515. Among the other minor parties, Reform UK won two seats.
On the upside for the Conservatives, their Labour opponents didn’t do as well as many expected. Of those seats the Tories lost, Labour had to share nearly half with the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party. While Mayor Andy Street lost the Tory banner in the West Midlands, his Conservative counterpart, Ben Houchen, kept his standard flying in Tees Valley.
Even Labour’s victory in London’s mayor’s race was less than stellar. Given the leftist slant of the greater metropolis, Sadiq Khan’s win with 44 percent dims slightly when compared to the 33 percent won by the underdog, Tory rival Susan Hall. Indeed, there were rumors on Saturday that Ms. Hall had pulled off a shock upset.
Voter turn-out was down in some Labour strongholds in the capital, while turn-out was somewhat higher in the Conservative hinterland. Witness to his widespread unpopularity, Mr. Khan was “booed and heckled” as he celebrated his third term at City Hall.
Meanwhile, all eyes were on Reform UK. The nascent party acquitted itself well, giving the Conservatives a run for their money — besting them for second place in many constituencies, as their share in national polling steadily rises.
Speaking of Reform, what of its co-founder, Nigel Farage? Where has he been, during the febrile activity of local politics in England? Why, in America.
“Yes, we’ve got an election year, but the biggest election in the world is taking place here,” Mr. Farage is quoted by the Daily Express. “While I’m not ruling out anything in the UK completely, I think where I am this week is an indication of my thinking.”
He campaigned alongside Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020, and is expected to do so again this year — a UK general election notwithstanding. Speculation circulates that a place awaits him in a putative Trump administration or, perhaps, an appointment as UK ambassador to America.
So while Mr. Farage believes that in the wake of an imminent Conservative collapse “Reform will be the challenger to the Labour Party,” he coyly considers life Stateside.
Saying how “everything here feels so much more positive,” Mr. Farage notes that since “I’ve been commuting back and forth politically for a long time, the “Republicans really treat me like an American, they really do.”
Yet as the local elections demonstrated, Conservatives are not necessarily confined to the doldrums. For while the Labour party still enjoys a commanding lead, it “gained scarcely more seats overall than the Greens and various Independents combined.”
Such is the opinion of psephologists Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher, whose analysis of Thursday’s election into a “national equivalent vote” gives Labour 34 percent to the Tories’ 27 percent.
“Independent analysis shows,” Mr. Sunak said Monday, “that the result of the next general election isn’t a foregone conclusion. In fact, “the situation is closer than many people are saying or indeed some of the opinion polls are predicting.”
Were these numbers to remain steady — and local elections are notorious for low turnout — nevertheless, this translates into Labour winning 294 seats, short 32 to form a majority government in a House of Commons with 650 MPs.
Desperately trying to rally their demoralized supporters, the Conservative Government is already calling this “hung parliament” a “coalition of chaos.”
“Starmer propped up in Downing Street by the SNP, Liberal Democrats, and the Greens would be a disaster for Britain,” Prime Minister Sunak told reporters. As the Prime Minister fulminates about a Labour minority government and Mr. Farage ruminates about sitting out the UK election in America, whither the general conservative consensus?
In a boom-and-bust cycle caused by inflating the currency, Austrian School economists insist there’s nothing to do but wait for the economy to purge itself of the malinvestment. Brexiteers may have no better option than to wait for the purging of the political malinvestment. That is, to see what’s salvageable of the Conservatives out of power, shorn (it is hoped) of the social democratic element that leans more Labour than true-blue Toryism.
Only then, can the rebuilding begin. If Reform UK’s polling remains strong, it could have a role to play in this new party of the right. If Mr. Farage devotes his next months to2024 campaign in America, a strong Reform showing in Britain might just entice the hero of Brexit to come home and finish the work of Brexit he began.
