But while Nigel Farage and Richard Tice celebrate their polling bump, let’s keep a few things in mind. Firstly,  they’re only closing in on a Conservative party that’s (by the same polling) set to lose well over 300 seats. Realistically, Reform may win at most 3 or 4 seats in Parliament – hardly enough to exert any influence over policy beyond their usual rabid shouting and complaining.
On a similar note, Farage’s entire strategy – pulling away Conservative voters and leveraging his influence for power over their policies – doesn’t work if Sunak can’t win any power to begin with. Farage’s own Brexit cult seems to have subsumed the entire British right-wing, and it’s made the entire movement monumentally unpopular. The rising tide against the British right will likely drag them all down – for a time, at least.
That doesn’t mean we should be complacent. Westminster insiders know that this election is pretty much already settled in Labour’s favour. For Tice, Farage, and the Tories they’ve radicalised, 2029 is the real prize. The populist right has a reputation for biding its time and re-emerging from the shadows when the public's guard is down.
A Labour government will have many tough calls ahead to ensure that our political system is fair and secure enough to resist their illicit funding and disinformation tactics.
In other news…
Frank Hester, the Conservative donor who said that Labour MP Diane Abbott “should be shot,” is confirmed to have still donated an additional £5 million to the Conservatives after the incident.
Labour has dropped a long-standing legal campaign against five former staffers previously accused of seeking to undermine Keir Starmer’s leadership.
Labour First Minister of Wales Vaughan Gething has closely lost a no-confidence vote, put forward by Welsh Conservatives over a donation from environmental activists – Gething plans to “carry on”.
The line-up has been confirmed for the first multi-party election debate this Friday at 7:30pm on the BBC: Angela Rayner (Labour), Penny Mordaunt (Conservatives), Stephen Flynn (SNP), Daisy Cooper (Lib Dems), Carla Denyer (Greens), Farage (Reform), and Rhun ap Iorweth (Plaid Cymru).
Thanks for reading.
All the very best,
The Open Britain Team
