I have awoken here in the UK to the excellent news that Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform, has been re-elected in a by-election in Clacton. That is not really the excellent bit, which is that 10,000 or so of the fine people of Clacton would rather have a man with a bin on his head as their MP than our Nigel, who now returns to parliament to face an enquiry into the £5 million gift he has received, and looks like a chump too.
Which reminded me of something I read recently about insurgent/protest parties such as Reform. Not only is the electoral system weighted against them but they face a fundamental problem.
They have to keep the ball rolling. That is to say that their vote is based on a feeling of outrage or pessimism at the current state of affairs which only they can address. But Reform, as UKIP their last incarnation, identified that big issue as membership of the EU and we left, then they blamed immigration which is now falling and then they identified asylum seekers, who are also fewer in number.
Now they are claiming that all foreign born criminals need to be deported and that London is a crime ridden, Islamic hell hole.
But the issues it is outraged against are getting smaller, all are patently untrue but now many people know they are untrue too. Crime in London is falling not rising, without immigration the economy and the NHS would collapse, and their is no sharia law in the UK.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t an irreducible minimum of hard core, very angry, left behind white voters who think Nigel is God. There is.
But the insurgency is losing momentum, its politicians look increasingly as bad, if not worse, than the established ones they claim to despise and the things to get angry about are no longer so obvious, so large or so threatening.
If Nigel had like Trump got elected he might have managed to keep that never ending feeling of anger and despair at the state of the world going. But I doubt it, there is a limit to how long you can tell voters things are awful, when you are in charge and have been elected to fix the “mess”.
I may be wrong but I feel Reform have peaked and peaked 2 years before a general election. Oh, and Nigel Farage now faces that parliamentary enquiry into his finances that he obviously thought a by election would kill off.
As I said, excellent news.
From Jonty Bloom Media Ltd
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
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