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Labour has just one overriding task. Forget all the other missions and milestones: Britain faces a peril that was beyond imagining a short time ago. Saving the country from Nigel Farage is the urgent, patriotic duty of this government; it is vital that it prevents an extremist, racist, authoritarian takeover which would be against the will of the overwhelming majority of the population. Nothing else matters more.
The Labour government has come adrift. It lacks direction and purpose. Its many welcome policies are missing any thread to make sense of them. Now a new role and function have arrived, uninvited. It’s not a political choice but an obligation when the country is under attack from a poisonous enemy. Electoral malfunction risks gifting unrepresentative power to a nativist, xenophobic, divisive, anti-democratic, utterly mendacious party which spouts contempt for knowledge, science and expertise, let alone community and compassion, and calls it “common sense”.
Yet the government has vacillated. When ministers mumble in response to repugnant racism, it speaks volumes. Silence is not an option when the right is becoming so toxic. The former Conservative and Ukip MP Douglas Carswell, once a relative Ukip moderate, recently tweeted: “From Epping to the sea, let’s make England Abdul free.” He marks the racist trajectory. Once he attacked Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech and praised Britain as being “more at ease with the multi-ethnic society”: now he speaks proudly what once was unsayable among Brexiters. Lucy Connolly, a woman from Northampton who received a year’s prison sentence for stirring up racial hatred against asylum seekers last year – after tweeting “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care … If that makes me racist so be it” – has become a free speech heroine platformed by the Telegraph and Reform.
Labour should have no trouble making racism unacceptable. Mock the right’s absurdities, such as Reform handing a conference slot to a vaccine-sceptic adviser to the Trump administration. Hammer Farage for the Brexit calamity, and shed the fear of alienating Reform voters: they are not coming back. Put David Lammy at the front of this assault: if permitted, he can be fiery on a public platform. But it’s what the leader says that seals the party’s fate.
Keir Starmer had the grace to regret his “island of strangers” speech. Now he needs to abandon soft-pedalling. Reviewing a survey of 30,000 people that was taken just after that speech, Rob Ford, a professor of political science at Manchester University, tells me it found Starmer had “increased the salience of immigration and decreased the Labour vote without gaining any voters back from Reform”. A similar dynamic is playing out across Europe. “If you hug the radical right,” Ford says, “you will lose.” The Tories’ fatal attempts to try to outdo Reform as their party heads for extinction are an object lesson in how futile this strategy is.
Instead, Labour should draw a bright red line and make itself the standard-bearer of the fight against Farage. “Blue” Labour and nervous “red wall” MPs are plain wrong to think they can woo back Reform voters. John Curtice, prime psephologist at the National Institute for Social Research, finds that half of Boris Johnson’s 2019 voters now back Farage, while Labour has lost just one in eight of its 2024 voters to Reform. These anti-migrant, pro-Brexit, socially conservative climate sceptics are wildly out of line with average British opinion. About 49% of them say equal opportunities for black and Asian people have gone too far: only 18% of the population agrees.
The British Social Attitudes survey found that 81% of Reform voters think migrants have undermined the country’s culture and economy rather than enriched it, against about 31% of all voters. Only 33% of Reform voters believe the climate crisis is caused by human activity, compared with 54% of the public in general. Nor do Reform voters lean left on spending. Only 25% want taxes raised to pay for health, education and social benefits, against 46% of the general public. Curtice’s message is that Labour should forget chasing these voters. The party needs to stop acting weak-kneed and nervous about being cast as the “elite”, when its own values are closest to the public, and should leave misguided Tories to scrabble after those votes.
But let’s hear those values. To fight off Farage, Labour needs to become acceptable enough to galvanise voters who are departing to the Greens and Liberal Democrats to, at the very least, encourage them to vote tactically. The cabinet reshuffle suggests no change of direction, but nor does it rule it out. Tightening effective handling of unregistered arrivals is an essential duty for any government: people rightly expect borders to be as controlled as possible.
But Labour is confusing an ordinary function of government with its own political purpose. It should stop endlessly emphasising migration, and remind people that Britain needs migrants to staff the NHS, build houses and work as scientists. It should use every chance to champion what Labour stands for. Start cutting child poverty. Talk up falling NHS waiting lists, free nursery places, progress on planning, new towns and mega-developments on green energy. “Growth” sounds abstract: these are all growth-makers.
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The loss of Angela Rayner is a tragedy. Her human warmth, her championing of social housing and her highly popular focus on working rights will all be missed from the cabinet. Labour should continue to talk up these flagship markers of its identity. With just 20% of the vote, according to a recent poll, Labour has very little to lose. No party has ever lost so much support so fast, Ford told me. So doubling down on a failed approach looks like folly.
With 400 seats and nearly four more years, there’s every good reason to stop prevaricating with the public and tell the truth about the economy before the budget. Taxes must rise for all, most of all for the richest, and council tax must be rectified: everyone knows it’s outrageously unfair, and councils lack funds for playgrounds, potholes and old people. Raising tax would break a manifesto pledge, but the alternative, public service cuts, would be worse. Being honest about this situation might help restore a little trust. Of course, a hostile media will monster Labour for this, but a dose of honesty would help the party regain some support.
Remember this: the die is not yet cast in this era of wild volatility. Look how Mark Carney in Canada and Anthony Albanese in Australia soared out of nowhere. Four years ago, we were at peak Boris Johnson, glumly anticipating another 10 years of his bogus bonhomie. Change could be as dramatic again in the next four years. Labour needs to be that change-maker to save the country from Farage.
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Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
