It’s been a funny old decade. Just over 10 years ago, the comedian Russell Brand was lionised in some quarters for appearing on a Question Time panel with Nigel Farage, and producing what was widely, if bafflingly, interpreted as a brilliant zinger about the then Ukip leader. “He is a pound-shop Enoch Powell,” honked Brand, “and we gotta watch him.” Well now. Perhaps it takes someone who needs to be watched to know someone who needs to be watched. Mr Brand returned to the UK this week from the Florida base of his conspiracist Christian media outlet,appearing in courttoday on rape and sexual assault charges. He denies them.
Anyway: the local elections, where the big thing that people said could never happen seems to be happening. Farage now leadsReform UK, which even last year used to be bundled in the “other” category by political pollsters – now its standalone poll results frequently top the charts, with the eponymous two parties of The Two-Party System doing not a whole lot better than simply wailing that it isn’t supposed to be this way. In terms of last night’s byelection, Reform has taken Runcorn and Helsby, one of Labour’s safest seats in the general election you might dimly recall it won by a massive landslide 10 months ago.
Reform might have nicked it in record-breaking fashion by only six votes, but the word you rightly keep hearing is “seismic”. Speaking of the mineral kingdom, the missing link between that and the vegetable kingdom – former Conservative Andrea Jenkyns – was victorious in the Greater Lincolnshire mayoral election, and is now the most questionably gifted entity ever to hold the position of mayor, including Mayor Humdinger in Paw Patrol and that goat that was once elected somewhere in Texas. She holds a majority of 40,000.
The Runcorn byelection may have been forced by the former Labour MP literallypunching one of his constituents, but people’s metaphorical sense of having been mugged by politics-as-usual was surely a big part of Reform’s surge. Keir Starmer didn’t even bother to go to Runcorn during the entire campaign. Hearing repeatedly this morning from the Labour party chair, Ellie Reeves, that “traditionally prime ministers don’t campaign in byelections” felt like just another way of falling back on weird conventions that no one normal has ever heard of, and expecting the old results. The old results are gone. Hearing people talk politician-speak has tipped over from being annoying, passed through being exhausting, and has now become actively enraging.
Yet as the Runcorn result was confirmed early this morning,Labourissued a statement that in many ways epitomises the sense that the old guard won’t – or perhaps can’t – see that they are going to have to find completely different ways of talking to people, let alone how to do it. “Voters are still rightly furious with the state of the country after 14 years of failure and clearly expect the government to move faster with the Plan for Change,” it droned robotically. “While Labour has suffered an extremely narrow defeat, the shock is that the Conservative vote has collapsed. Moderate voters are clearly appalled by the talk of a Tory-Reform pact.” Leaving aside the amusingly questionable analysis, who talks like this? People in politics, I suppose. It’s starting to feel incredibly bizarre, in an age which supposedly prizes authenticity over all things, that most political parties are still communicating in a weird, desiccated way that has all the welcoming charm and accessibility of a panic room.
Ditto the idea that a series of small precision pivots is the answer to what is happening with Reform. In the wake of the results, and with huge numbers still coming in, Labour figures were already briefing that the government might make little concessions this way or that. But which way? Going right loses you votes to the Lib Dems and Greens. Going left leaches more to Reform – with the same bind holding for theConservatives. And in any case, the people in question quite clearly aren’t voting for tinkering. They are voting for destruction – creative or otherwise – of the old ways, which haven’t worked for them. How on earth do you respond?
Not like Kemi Badenoch, is one of various answers on offer. The Tory leader was in seclusion at time of writing, but her party’s co-chair did emerge to explain: “Kemi has said this is a marathon, not a sprint.” I’m sure whoever used to finish fourth to Usain Bolt liked to claim the same. At this rate, the stadium will have been knocked down and redeveloped before Badenoch has a full policy platform, let alone reaches the finish line.
As for Reform, a huge amount of tearful wank was expended over the past few years about people “normalising” Farage, by extension suggesting that any voter who had time for his messages couldn’t really be normal. This is what I think of as the “People’s Vote Fallacy”, so-called after the equally wanky second referendum movement that was named in such a way as to suggest that its leadership were unaware either that there had already been a people’s vote, or didn’t really consider those who had won it to be people at all.
Even now you have the general secretary of the TUC, Paul Nowak, this week informing people via the pages of this newspaper that Farage is “a political fraud and hypocrite” and a “public school-educated ex-metals trader cosplaying as a champion of the working class”. Paul must know plenty of trade unionists voted for Farage. Is he saying they’re too dumb to see through him, or just conceding that more of the working class might end up drawn to Farage’s movement than his? Across the conventional political spectrum you can find bigwigs lining up to say Farage is appalling and a chancer, apparently without realising what that then makes them. Namely, someone people find less appealing thanthatguy.
Whichever way you slice it, we’re living in a time of flux, and though it is unclear what new order is coming down the line, it is increasingly possible to see that the old one has been fractured. There’s a good line in a Martin Amis novel about a man who begins to crave a cigarette even while he is smoking a cigarette, and on initial inspection it might seem like there is something of that to England, where, less than a year after a change election, people are fervently voting for change. But that would presuppose Labour had contrived to effect any sort of change at all – if it ever even had a plan for it. It doesn’t. Instead, politics is beginning to feel ineluctably tidal – like change is happening to this government, not because of it.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in ourletterssection, pleaseclick here.