Lots of angry people have a reason to listen to Reform now
September 20, 2024 5:24 pm
In politics, so much of your success depends on how you frame things. Labour knows that very well, having spent much of the past 14 years being followed around by a Tory framed copy of Liam Byrne’s “no money” note. That’s why so much of the first few months of the party being in Government have been dominated by framing the Conservatives as being unfit to return to power any time soon.
All the melodramatic shock at how much worse things are in the public finances and wider policy across departments is part of a frame that strategists hope will stay around the Conservatives right up until the next election and beyond. But while they’ve been busy putting together that frame for their largest opponents, they’ve inadvertently created something equally potent that another threat, Nigel Farage, is going to use, too.
Labour couldn’t have framed itself better over the past few months, at least from the perspective of Reform. Some of the framing has been unintentional: the row about Starmer’s freebie habit, for instance, wasn’t something anyone in Downing Street had put on the media grid, but it has dominated the agenda.
Other parts of the frame were a choice: cutting the winter fuel payment, Ed Miliband picking a fight with Nimbys about wind turbines, and a lot of talk about a “reset” with Europe were all deliberate decisions. All of them are things Reform wants to wind up Labour’s voters about.
I say “Labour’s voters” as though they belong to anyone. This assumption has been dead for at least a decade – just ask any of the Scottish Labour MPs swept away by voters they assumed were always “theirs” in 2015, or indeed the ones who came back at this election, having spent a decade trying to win back those voters.
The voting public is now volatile and distrustful of all politicians, feeling that if they’re all the same, then they might as well try a different bunch at the next election, rather like someone might regard a cheap dress from a fast fashion shop as something to buy and wear once with little damage to their bank balance. Labour’s voters might have switched sides twice in the past 10 years, and might be quite happy to try out a new, noisy political party that seems as angry as they are at the next election, too.
Labourites can talk all they like about the Establishment credentials of Farage by pointing to the fact that most Men of the People wouldn’t have been banking with Coutts anyway. But they still fail to understand that likely Reform voters don’t care about that because they feel Farage gets angry about the things they find infuriating too.
Sure, the institution that debanked him wasn’t open to the average Clacton man, but his response to it was about unaccountable power and elites trying to silence opinions they didn’t like. The Coutts saga had the opposite effect of silencing him: Farage has now made standing up to powerful people one of his major themes, and it works for him.
The early dysfunction in Starmer’s Downing Street plays into that anti-establishment theme perfectly too. Voters turned away from the Tories in disgust because they were fighting like rats in a sack rather than solving the problems normal people were worrying about. Now Labour is already engulfed in a briefing war about highly paid advisers and free designer glasses. They’re all the same, don’t trust them, has long been Farage’s refrain.
Angry pensioners, angry Nimbys looking at house building and wind farms, angry Brexit voters: all of them have a reason to listen to Reform. Starmer has done little to improve matters in recent days. As well as making a statement about being “completely in control” that should have been so blindingly obvious that no one would need the Prime Minister to say it, Starmer told broadcasters this week that the reason voters could see he was getting on with the job was this: “We have already set up a national wealth fund; we’ve already put in place housing frameworks.”
Those two things are meaningless to most people, even if they will benefit in some way from a national wealth fund and a government building more houses (as opposed to housing frameworks, which sounds like a document so boring not even ministers will read it, let alone a policy that will have a concrete effect).
Were they really the first things Starmer could think of as tangible evidence his government was already making people’s lives better? The man has some great – £2,000 – frames on his face. His wider framing isn’t helping him at all.