Counting the members

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The response by the leader of the English Conservative and Unionist Party to the growth of the membership of Farage’s Reform was a masterful demonstration of how to ensure that your enemy’s successes receive maximum media coverage, underlining in the process the true extent of her political acumen. Whether her claims of fakery are true or not has yet to be fully resolved, although such evidence as has been produced suggests that a party led by Farage may have broken his habit of a lifetime by actually bearing at least a passing resemblance to truth, an outcome at which few can have been as surprised as Farage himself. We are told that, if the growth in membership numbers continues at its current pace, then Reform will have double the number of members in the Tory Party by the end of January. That’s mathematically true, but it’s also mathematically true that at the current rate of growth, the entire population of the UK will be Reform members in only 38 years from now. Simplistic mathematical truth isn’t always a useful or meaningful metric.

Given the lack of clarity about what ‘membership’ actually means for a ‘party’ which still appears to be legally owned and controlled by the man himself, and the suggestion that few of those ‘members’ are actually likely to end up pounding the streets, let alone ringing the doorbells of unsuspecting voters, membership numbers in themselves, whether accurate or not, probably don’t tell us a great deal about Reform’s electoral prospects, even if they do help to reinforce the idea that Badenoch could start a fight about nothing in an empty room.

More significant are the opinion polling numbers which have been appearing recently, showing that Reform has a certain momentum at present, to which Badenoch has kindly, if rather incompetently, added. But if a week is a long time in politics, it’s a very long time indeed until the next Senedd election, let alone the next UK election, and parties led by Farage have in the past shown an uncanny ability to self-destruct, so we should be careful about over-reacting to a few opinion polls. But neither should we be overcomplacent in the face of the rise of a political movement dedicated to the enrichment of the few at the expense of the many, aided and abetted enthusiastically be those who will pay the price: sometimes, it seems, turkeys really do vote for Christmas. Especially when the media seem so determined to talk up the possibility in order to give themselves something to talk about.

Much of the talking heads reaction seems to be about the policies and philosophies underpinning political debate in the UK, and whether ‘the right’ will somehow transition from Tory to Reform or come together in some sort of takeover of one by the other. That misses the point, almost as much as the comforting suggestion that Wales is somehow a ‘left-wing’ nation which will reject the even-more-extreme Toryism of Reform just as it has traditionally rejected the more mainstream Toryism of the Tory Party itself. None of that stuff about left and right is what drives Reform’s members, voters and supporters. Whilst those at the top of the party might have a clear vision about concentrating power and wealth in the hands of a few by impoverishing the many, it’s not one that they’re going to share – for obvious reasons. The rest are driven more by a ‘plague on all your houses’ mentality, an appeal to outdated English jingoism (yes, even in Wales), and a good dash of racism, albeit increasingly presented in terms of a clash of cultural perspectives. None of this is amenable to pragmatic argument about the detail of policies and promises which no-one believes are going to be enacted anyway.

But if it isn’t easy to counter these attitudes, it really is extremely easy to reinforce them, and it’s something which the Labour government manages to do regularly. Every time they tell us that there is not enough money for things such as winter fuel payments, they tell us implicitly that those things on which they do spend are higher priorities. It’s no surprise that some people see every penny spent on dealing with the desperate people arriving on these shores as being money which could be used for something else, if only it weren’t for these immigrants. Ask yourselves how many times you’ve seen memes suggesting that the homeless, or veterans, or pensioners are more deserving of our support than immigrants, with a strapline along the lines of ‘we should look after our own people first’. It’s a narrative which Labour’s own words and actions reinforce daily, even if not entirely intentionally – and it’s utter nonsense. The UK is one of the world’s richest countries, and it also has one of the largest gaps between the richest and the poorest – those two facts are not unrelated. The question we should be asking is how we use the wealth which exists. It’s a question which the Labour Party used to ask, but stopped asking decades ago in its rush to follow the Tories in their adoption of a wholly false theory of economics which just happens to benefit the few.

We can’t yet know whether the momentum which Reform currently has will continue and carry them into electoral success in future contests. But we can be pretty certain that if it does happen, the current Labour government will have facilitated and enabled it with its blind adherence to self-imposed fiscal rules and an unwillingness to challenge inequality in any meaningful way.