Reform is now touching 30 per cent in the polls, as Labour lags on 22 per cent and the Tories trail on just 15 per cent. As such, the insurgent party must prepare for more frenzied attacks from the old parties whose dominance it now seriously threatens. Is Nigel Farage’s party ready to face the inevitably detailed forensic scrutiny of its still rather vague policy agenda?
One key question that Reform must answer is where they stand on the ideological spectrum: are they Thatcherite free marketeers, or neo-socialists prepared to use the state to mitigate the excesses of unbridled capitalism?
Reform must decide which ideological road to travel: left or right
The trouble for Reform is that, while their leadership troika are all convinced capitalists with a business background, their strongest support comes from the working-class regions of the Red Wall in the north, Midlands and Wales: all traditional Labour voting areas. Farage is a former metals trader who has spoken of introducing elements of the free market into the NHS; his deputy Richard Tice and Reform chairman Zia Yusuf are both successful millionaire businessmen with a strong aversion to state socialism. Can this trio really speak for working-class voters?
To avoid alienating their supporters, Reform’s leaders must play down their instinctive preference for free market solutions and appear favourable to less austere approaches. We can imagine that a Reform government in practice, for example, might prefer to subsidise the steel mills of Scunthorpe or South Wales with state cash rather than let a lame duck industry go to the wall as a free market Thatcherite would do.
Reform’s ideological dilemma was put into sharp focus this week by an interview that Richard Tice gave to the Daily Telegraph. Tice – who hopes to become Chancellor in a future Reform government – told the paper he was rowing back from a previous pledge to slash £90 million in tax cuts during Reform’s first 100 days in power. That ambitious tax-cutting plan – so dear to conservative hearts – was now just a desirable ‘direction of travel’, he said. It would have to await the party finding £150 billion in savings once they got their hands on the Whitehall books.
To gain power and prove that they are not merely a protest party but are a permanent part of the British political landscape, Reform must decide which ideological road to travel: left or right.
The difficulty of that choice is reflected across the Channel in France. Marine Le Pen’s populist Rassemblement National (RN) party, which holds views on mass migration and crime usually seen as hard right, is distinctly left-wing and neo-socialist on economic policy.
The thorny issue of immigration has already opened up another ideological fault line within Reform with the expulsion of outspoken MP Rupert Lowe from Reform’s Westminster ranks. As well as personal differences with Farage, Lowe had advanced a hard-line policy proposing the mass deportation of illegal and criminal migrants. This was popular with many Reform officials and members, whereas Farage, Tice and Yusuf – seeking to woo moderate voters – have adopted a far softer tone and approach.
It remains to be seen how Reform can simultaneously appeal to the two constituencies that they need to win over – working-class voters who are culturally right-wing but economically left and disillusioned Tories mistrustful of state intervention – without dissolving into ideological incoherence.
Unless Reform can demonstrate how they can translate desirable and popular aims into practically achievable policies, Farage’s party will remain vulnerable to charges that they too are unlikely to find the answers to the stubborn problems that have eluded their established opponents.
