Here are some phrases I don’t want to hear today. ‘Protest vote.’ ‘The cry of the “left behind”.’ ‘A bloody nose for the establishment.’ For while it’s true that the colourless functionaries of our two-party regime will be holding their bloodied snouts today following a bruising blow from the electorate, none of those trite phrases captures the historic nature of what is happening. This is not just a ballot-box ‘screw you’ – it’s an attempted reordering of politics itself by voters with nothing left to lose.
The Reform surge in England is staggering. We might not have all the results from the local elections yet, but already we can glimpse a political upset of tectonic proportions. At the time of writing, 46 out of 136 councils in England have been declared. Reform UK has won about a third of the seats contested so far, giving it command over a vast swathe of English affairs. Labour is being pummelled: so far it has lost about half of the seats it was defending. As even the BBC was forced to admit, as a governing force in local politics, ‘Labour [is] going backwards big time’.
It was, in the words of one observer, a ‘turbulent night for the major established parties’. Labour has suffered the heaviest losses, shedding council seat after council seat to Reform and also to the Green Party. But the Conservatives are getting hit, too: at the time of writing, they’ve lost almost 150 councillors and one entire council. They’ll lose a lot more before the day is out. It feels like the duopoly is on its deathbed, with the pale-blue insurgents of Reform happily reading the last rites.
But even the numbers don’t really capture the revolutionary foment across working-class England. As Sherelle Jacobs of the Telegraph says, Reform is even seizing councils that ‘stayed Labour through Iraq, the Blair fallout, [the] financial crash, through Corbyn’. Working-class voters who put a peg on their noses and voted Labour even when it was overseeing the decimation of their bank balances, even when it was led by Magic Grandpa and his army of trustafarian Trots, are now finally saying ‘Nah, we’re out’. Because they have an alternative now: Reform. This is not just an act of disgruntlement – in Jacobs’ words, it’s ‘history in the making’.
It’s a seismic realignment. It feels like an unspoken, unbloody revolt: the calm but firm defeat of two-party politics by working-class communities who feel that such a system no longer represents them. Who feel, in fact, that the knackered duopoly, whether as a result of its moral cowardice or its strangulation by bureaucracy, is incapable of pursuing the restoration of sovereign integrity and social wisdom that they are crying out for.
Labour and its media sympathisers will comfort themselves today with talk of a ‘bloody nose’ from ‘voters who just want to be heard’, when in truth we could be witnessing as radical a transformation of the political landscape as the founding of the Labour Party itself was in 1900. We could be witnessing another reasoned intrusion of working-class voters into a political realm that they feel is too small, smug and insular to contain, far less enact, their political desires. Much is still in the air. At the time of writing, we don’t know how the chips will fall in Scotland and Wales. And such is the flux of our era that much might change again between now and the General Election. Yet no one can look at England this morning and deny that the masses have executed a coup against a complacent regime by choosing Reform as the new vessel of their moral hopes.
And who are these people? They’re the Brexit people. They’re the people who, 10 years ago next month, defied virtually the entire political and cultural establishment and opted to seize back Britain’s destiny from the unelected suits of the European Union. As John Curtice says, the Reform surge is most furious in those parts of England that voted Brexit. Support for Reform is running at around 40 per cent in councils where 60 per cent or more voted for Brexit, and at just 10 per cent in councils where less than 49 per cent voted for Brexit. So much for people regretting their Brexit vote. The Reform surge is the latest flourishing of the Brexit spirit, of that working-class yearning for a politics that is more grounded, more serious and more sovereign.
We are living through a fake revolt and a real revolt. The fake one is the rallying of student towns, leafy suburbs and digital radicals around the Green Party. Some of these Zack Polanski enthusiasts might have multi-coloured hair and pose for selfies at Marx’s grave in Highgate, but don’t be fooled: they are lining up behind the entirely reactionary cause of identity politics, no more growth, dicks in women’s bathrooms and Islamist grievance. The true revolt is coming from the working classes, who want Britain’s borders repaired, our history respected and democracy to have meaning.
Pick your side: the matcha Marxism of a keffyeh-smothered activist class that doesn’t know what a woman is, or the patient but unflinching plea for a restoration of normalcy being made by the men and women of the Red Wall.
There is a snooty tendency to look down on Reform voters as the tragic ‘gammon’ victims of Nigel Farage’s demagogic trickery. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Reform surge is proof that independent thought still lives on these isles. In defiance of the neo-religion of the distant elites, with its baleful theology of turning Britain into a glorified hotel for both the rich and wretched of the Earth, ordinary people talked, discussed, disagreed and revolted. The heretical ‘lower orders’ interrogated the orthodoxies of our time, all of them, and found them wanting. It is a very English revolution.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
It was, in the words of one observer, a ‘turbulent night for the major established parties’. Labour has suffered the heaviest losses, shedding council seat after council seat to Reform and also to the Green Party. But the Conservatives are getting hit, too: at the time of writing, they’ve lost almost 150 councillors and one entire council. They’ll lose a lot more before the day is out. It feels like the duopoly is on its deathbed, with the pale-blue insurgents of Reform happily reading the last rites.
But even the numbers don’t really capture the revolutionary foment across working-class England. As Sherelle Jacobs of the Telegraph says, Reform is even seizing councils that ‘stayed Labour through Iraq, the Blair fallout, [the] financial crash, through Corbyn’. Working-class voters who put a peg on their noses and voted Labour even when it was overseeing the decimation of their bank balances, even when it was led by Magic Grandpa and his army of trustafarian Trots, are now finally saying ‘Nah, we’re out’. Because they have an alternative now: Reform. This is not just an act of disgruntlement – in Jacobs’ words, it’s ‘history in the making’.
It’s a seismic realignment. It feels like an unspoken, unbloody revolt: the calm but firm defeat of two-party politics by working-class communities who feel that such a system no longer represents them. Who feel, in fact, that the knackered duopoly, whether as a result of its moral cowardice or its strangulation by bureaucracy, is incapable of pursuing the restoration of sovereign integrity and social wisdom that they are crying out for.
Labour and its media sympathisers will comfort themselves today with talk of a ‘bloody nose’ from ‘voters who just want to be heard’, when in truth we could be witnessing as radical a transformation of the political landscape as the founding of the Labour Party itself was in 1900. We could be witnessing another reasoned intrusion of working-class voters into a political realm that they feel is too small, smug and insular to contain, far less enact, their political desires. Much is still in the air. At the time of writing, we don’t know how the chips will fall in Scotland and Wales. And such is the flux of our era that much might change again between now and the General Election. Yet no one can look at England this morning and deny that the masses have executed a coup against a complacent regime by choosing Reform as the new vessel of their moral hopes.
And who are these people? They’re the Brexit people. They’re the people who, 10 years ago next month, defied virtually the entire political and cultural establishment and opted to seize back Britain’s destiny from the unelected suits of the European Union. As John Curtice says, the Reform surge is most furious in those parts of England that voted Brexit. Support for Reform is running at around 40 per cent in councils where 60 per cent or more voted for Brexit, and at just 10 per cent in councils where less than 49 per cent voted for Brexit. So much for people regretting their Brexit vote. The Reform surge is the latest flourishing of the Brexit spirit, of that working-class yearning for a politics that is more grounded, more serious and more sovereign.
We are living through a fake revolt and a real revolt. The fake one is the rallying of student towns, leafy suburbs and digital radicals around the Green Party. Some of these Zack Polanski enthusiasts might have multi-coloured hair and pose for selfies at Marx’s grave in Highgate, but don’t be fooled: they are lining up behind the entirely reactionary cause of identity politics, no more growth, dicks in women’s bathrooms and Islamist grievance. The true revolt is coming from the working classes, who want Britain’s borders repaired, our history respected and democracy to have meaning.
Pick your side: the matcha Marxism of a keffyeh-smothered activist class that doesn’t know what a woman is, or the patient but unflinching plea for a restoration of normalcy being made by the men and women of the Red Wall.
There is a snooty tendency to look down on Reform voters as the tragic ‘gammon’ victims of Nigel Farage’s demagogic trickery. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Reform surge is proof that independent thought still lives on these isles. In defiance of the neo-religion of the distant elites, with its baleful theology of turning Britain into a glorified hotel for both the rich and wretched of the Earth, ordinary people talked, discussed, disagreed and revolted. The heretical ‘lower orders’ interrogated the orthodoxies of our time, all of them, and found them wanting. It is a very English revolution.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
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