He could ne Britain’s Next Prime
Firstly, I have seen this all before.
Back in eighty — one I watched David Steel tell his conference that they should go back to their constituencies and prepare for Government. I hunted the net for a clip, but I failed to find one. Go search the internet for the history of David Steel, Liberal Party Leader — and see if he ever gained power.
I will wait.
Nigel Farage triumph in the local elections has filled him with confidence. He, like David Steel, is calling it the death of two-party politics. He believes he can be Prime Minister.
After the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, the Labour Party split over issues such as ending our own nuclear threat. The Gang of Four formed the SDP. The media were all over them. All you read and heard for months was about the end of the two-party state. Sound familiar?
They had their success, Labour MPs and members tore up their membership cards and accepted the SDP cause. They won councils and by-elections. The SDP leadership made an electoral pact with the Liberals, which led to David Steel’s conference speech.
Being a neo-communist at the time, I still believed in Micheal Foot’s Labour Party, and happily voted for them. Margaret Thatcher was highly unpopular in 1981. The end of Thatcherism seemed in sight for me. Being young and a little stupid I watched the Labour Party sink. The Conservatives rose to ever higher heights in their destruction of the Britain I had grown up in.
History repeats, but never perfectly.
Will that imperfect repeat mean that the British Donald Trump will find himself inside number ten at the next election? It is possible to turn his handful of MPs into hundreds over the next few years. The conservative party voters are not as loyal as the old Labour Party voter and the Reform party has gobbled them up. Nigel Farage has already turned his attention to the disaffected Labour voter.
A word of warning to all Labour MPs: do not take your vote for granted. I have a Labour MP. I have emailed them with a question — a personal problem not a policy one. The reply said (I paraphrase) I get thousands of emails and I will deal with them on a priority bases. I am still waiting for a reply. I am obviously not a high priority — I doubt that I ever will be. Being at the bottom of the pile will never get me to the top.
Fuck you, I will keep giving my vote to the Greens.
All the sound bites in the world are meaningless without action. The trivial things do matter. Hear the British people; understand us. We want to know that our pain is your pain. This Labour Government needs to show us, not just tell us, they feel our pain.
Nigel Farage connects with people. When they express their pain, he hears it. He needs stopping, his form of Thatcherism will take more people into serfdom.
How to stop Nigel Farage?
His supporters are all racists, bigots, the uneducated, and bullies.
That may be true, these people exist in our society and they do vote. But leave all those labels out of the vocabulary of your attacks. All that happens is you alienate those that like him. He cannot become the ‘outside of the establishment’ man. Trump turned his supporters into an army of pride, taking on the powers that had marginalised them, favoured others, and kept them down. Britain has a huge population that detests politics — that believes politicians have done nothing but stop them improving their lives. That the politics of the last few decades have not been about all the people, just the few.
The politics of left and right have collapsed in the UK. The ‘Labour’ party is no longer the party of fairness, of equality or the party that wants people to get on with their lives in peace and security. Look at what they have already done in the name of a balanced budget. Means testing a winter fuel payment (my published opinion), attacking people with disabilities, flying into a panic over tariffs from America.
Labour has become a Conservative Party.
The conservatives are simply a Reform party watered down. But they will eventually begin to ape Reform trying to be more reform than Reform. Hopefully, that will see them obliterated from British Politics. (I have an irrational hatred for the Conservative Party; I will never forget what Thatcherism did to this country)
Neither of these parties have any idea about how to win the vote of those that vote reform. If they had, the people would not have deserted them. And acting like reform will not return those voters. If at the next election voters have the choice of a Labour or Conservative party sounding like Reform, they will still vote Reform.
Why?
The British public are sick of both these parties.
Blaming each other for the reason our lives are sliding from bad to worse. ‘It was them; they make us do this to you.’ That is what the Conservatives said in 2010, and Labour has repeated in 2024.
Not all the public, but the net of ‘we are doing alright’ has holes so large that only the highest earners are not feeling the pinch. Labour needs to tighten the net. They need to tax higher and invest more. They need to raise the wages across Britain over inflation every year until the election.
Blaming covid, blaming a European war, for ever higher cost of living does not turn a voter into a happy person. We do not care for the reasons why; we want either prices to fall or income to rise. FOR ALL OF US.
Not just the few.
From potholes to not seeing a doctor on the day you are sick, we are not stupid enough to believe that Putin, Trump, China is at fault for that. Or that woke policies, working from home or equality assessors are the reason our council costs are rising.
Fourteen years of Tory Rule, the decade of Labour Rule before it that ended when they spent our money bailing out wealthy people who had been earning billions for years before.
I am sorry but neither party — Labour nor Conservative — the public no longer trust either of you.
If you really want to stop Reform — and Farage — copying him is not going to do it!
They now have Power in a handful of Councils.
Thinking Farage and his reform party will now show their true colours, that they will mess it up. You cannot just leave these people to implode, they may not. They may quietly get on with the job of running the councils, and just like all the councils work it will fly right under the radar.
Voting in local elections, argued often, is more about the national state than local politics.
Farage does have a weakness.
The NHS is his biggest weakness. He has stated in public that he wants an insurance-based system for our health care. Free at the point of use, funded by general taxation our NHS is a large part of our culture. The politicians of the right try to destroy it by stealth, under investment, increasing waiting times. But outright abolition would be political suicide. You will find that his stance on the NHS will come under more scrutiny.
But it may not ruin him.
I was speaking to two Farage supporters at work. They, like the majority I work with, are neither bigot, racists nor stupid. Like me, they may be under educated, we are the working class — we are all under educated. I explained about his desire for the insurance-based system. One agreed with me, and I know his vote would swing away, the other had greater issues.
Farage will spin it. He will try to insist that the insurance-based system will be the same as the NHS. He will attempt to fudge the issue, wrap it in language that it is something we already have. You will need insurance for any interaction with health providers. And if you have a condition already, will you be able to afford the premium?
The best Defence.
If the Labour Party, as the Government, really want to stop Farage, they need to reform the voting system before the next election. End the First past the post — the winner takes it all — system. And while you are changing to a proportional system, change the funding. Stop the private funding of all political parties. It is time for politics to be about the people, make parties get funding per member not from members.
Yes, that will give Nigel Farage even more power. But it will also stop him grabbing ALL the power.
The fact that they will junk their desire for PR the moment they think they can gain power through FPTP tells you all you need to know about Reform. They simply want power. Like all politicians, they have their agenda — mostly unspoken, and none of it is about service to all the people.
Yet another Conservative party fighting two other conservative parties.
Where does that leave those of us that still want compassion, that still want a socially liberal, fair access to opportunity, and the welfare benefits for tough times.
In the wilderness.
Which is where Farage should be.
I expect the Conservatives to be in favour of neo-liberal economics but when the Labour Party joined in that game, they failed the working class that they were set up to protect.
I will never vote for Farage. I will never vote for conservatives — no matter what label they hide behind.
But if Britain does elect Farage as Prime Minister the Labour Party will hold full responsibility for that choice.
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Nigel Hare 
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