The Conservatives are in permanent decline, unable to arrest their slide in the polls. They haven’t managed to poll beyond third place since April, and defections to Reform UK are now dangerously frequent. Danny Kruger became the first shadow cabinet minister to jump ship last week. Few think Kemi Badenoch will still be in place at the next Reform UK general election showdown.
British politics is following a familiar European pattern: Labour, weighed down by grim public finances and global volatility, leaking votes to the left while fighting off the radical right as the centre collapses beneath them.
There are, of course, reasons to think Reform UK might not make it to Downing Street.
They only have a handful of MPs, and two of those have already left. The pattern repeats at local level — 15% of their councillors in Kent have quit, and Durham isn’t far behind.
Reform UK, like all of Farage’s previous creations, is dominated by his personality. It’s both their weapon and their weakness. Farage is famous, endlessly platformed by friendly media, but beyond him the party is a collection of nobodies. Rupert Lowe is gone. Richard Tice, still loyal, lives in Dubai. Their supposed policy brain, Danny Kruger, is thicker than a whale omelette.
We saw in the Caerphilly by-election that voters can and will vote tactically to keep Reform UK out. The nastier their rhetoric becomes, the more incentive there is for everyone else to block them.
And above all, Reform UK’s poll lead simply isn’t big enough. Neil Kinnock, Michael Howard, and Ed Miliband all led by similar margins — and all lost. The kind of lead needed to overturn a government — Blair, Cameron, Starmer — just isn’t there. It might take less now, with loyalties fractured and politics tribal, but polls this far from a general election are like counting clouds.
And this isn’t the same electorate as before. Lowering the voting age and the move toward digital ID and online voting will change turnout patterns in complex, unpredictable ways. The fury from Reform UK and the Tories about these plans says a lot — they seem to know they’ll lose out.
But there’s another force at play. Someone is already spending serious money on a coordinated social media campaign, quietly targeting voter groups. The digital dark arts of Cambridge Analytica never really went away — they just became more sophisticated. Disinformation, outrage loops, and microtargeted fear are once again in full swing. The next Reform UK general election campaign has already begun.
And so, for Halloween, two possible nightmares.
1. Flash Flood
It’s May 5th, 2029. Voters go to the polls confident that the threat from Reform UK has passed. The economy has improved, scandals have bruised the party, and links to foreign powers have made them look toxic.
But by dawn, something has gone horribly wrong. Labour collapses just as the Conservatives did in 2024. The Tories are wiped out. Reform UK captures the entire right-wing vote while the left splinters — Greens, Lib Dems, Labour remnants.
A handful of disinformation campaigns swing the marginals. Reform UK are in power, by the narrowest of margins.
Asian markets open down. The pound starts falling. By the time the FTSE opens, it’s carnage.
Reform can’t name a cabinet. Danny Kruger appears on Today, mumbling platitudes. Government borrowing costs double. The Bank of England hikes base rates to 10%, then 15%, trying to hold the line. Pension funds totter. Insurers fold.
By the end of the week, Richard Tice is Chancellor, but there’s still no Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Currency controls are imposed. Ordinary people can’t withdraw their own money. Meanwhile, rumours swirl that key Reform figures shorted the pound — and moved their assets offshore hours before the announcement.
The Farage government lasts barely months. When it falls, the press and their pet influencers agree on one thing: democracy can’t handle crises like this. It’s time, they say, for a strongman to “fix” it.
2. The Rising Tide
The 2025 Budget doesn’t save the government, but it steadies the ship. Inflation eases. Rates edge down. A modest EU trade deal offsets Trump’s tariffs.
Reform UK still lead, but the gap softens. The Greens surge locally but threaten few Labour seats. Then everything changes.
The US economy crashes. The AI bubble bursts. Texas becomes uninsurable. Trump cancels midterms in Democrat areas and arrests opponents. ICE camps overflow.
The economic storm spreads to Europe. Global trade grinds to a halt under tariffs and protectionism. Outside the EU, Britain takes the full hit.
Starmer is replaced by Andy Burnham, but it’s too late. Le Pen is already in power in France.
Markets start pricing in a Reform UK general election win. The pound falls, borrowing costs rise. Panic becomes prophecy — the closer Reform UK get to power, the worse the economy gets.
As fear spreads, NHS staff and skilled workers emigrate. Businesses move assets abroad. The wealthy join them.
By the time the election arrives, the collapse is total. Reform UK win, promising to “clean house.” Ethnic cleansing follows.
The Farage government lasts only months before it, too, collapses — and once again, the press declares that democracy has failed. The people, they say, need someone to take control. And that, as always, is the end game.
Shouldn’t anyone terrified of the prospect of an outright Reform victory be campaigning hard for Proportional Representation, as this would make such a victory impossible?
I am never sure if I agree with that. It is based on the assumption that the LibDems and Greens would prefer a coalition with Labour, but that certainly wasn’t true in 2010.
It may be that Reform are so toxic they are “uncoalitionable” but I am sure plenty on the right of the Tories would join them, plus the Ulster Unionists
There were 2 reasons why we got a “Con-Dem” coalition government after the 2010 General Election:
1. The Lib Dems were a fairly free-market oriented party with a voter base tilted towards the affluent, meaning they were open to working with the Tories (particularly as the Tories were then led by the socially-liberal David Cameron),
2. The Tories beat Labour such that Con + Lib Dem was a majority while Lab + Lib Dem was still short.
And there’s an important point in how it’s the job of the mainstream centre-right party to keep the radical right marginalized. In PR systems that means being part of a cordon sanitaire that refuses to accept the radical right as coalition partners (as you just alluded to there), while under FPTP it means guarding the party itself against infiltration, as with when Edward Heath sacked Enoch Powell the day after the Rivers of Blood speech.
The current rise of the radical right is likely because changes in the economics of the media (as well as the stigma against the radical right fading, now that the World War II generation has passed away) has made the centre-right increasingly unwilling and/or unable to perform this role.
Now those are both nightmare scenarios that are scarily plausible and with the relentless extreme right wing narrative being force fed on social media it seems increasingly likely. I recently had a conversation in a bar (in Spain) with a friendly, sociable Geordie who talked eloquently about the north-east and his love of football and family. Suddenly he turned the conversation to the ‘Boats’. He then fumed about how the north-east was being destroyed by illegal immigrants and we needed to deport them all or sink the boats. He then said we needed a strongman to sort it all out and his vote was for Tommy Robinson. I thought for a second he was joking but he was deadly serious. When I challenged him about Brexit, immigration sustaining the economy etc etc he just shouted at me to shut up, he didn’t want to hear all that rubbish and put his hand towards my face and angrily said stop! I came away utterly shocked, downhearted and even more determined to leave. The absolute belief that he was right and no amount of discussion or debate about facts, causes or consequences was going to persuade him otherwise. That feeling was reinforced even more when I drove into Darlington town centre last week via the Amazon warehouse from the A66 and every single lamp post had England flags. The country is on a doom loop funded and lead by money from known and unknown sources. God help the UK! In the words of the (now infamous) Sun Newspaper headline from 1992 – “…will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights”.
You can only love so many people, but you can hate millions. To feel hate but to feel justified, righteous, in that hatred is intoxicating. This is the mob.
What makes it even scarier is that xenophobic authoritarianism seems to be on the rise throughout the Western world: it’s certainly not just a British problem!
Maybe the people funding the rise in authoritarianism in the UK are doing the same in other countries?
Indeed: you could liken authoritarianism to an epidemic in that it’s far easier to keep it suppressed in one country when it is suppressed in all other countries too.
The first domino to fall (in the sense that a far-right party entered the mainstream again) was Austria in the late 1980s, and by no coincidence it started in those parts of the country that had still been Nazi hands on VE Day.