A Receptacle Unceremoniously Jettisoned

Rod Liddle writes:

I’ve always suspected that the Reform Party’s 14 per cent standing in the opinion polls was a tad chimeric — and the Rochdale by-election result would seem to bear that out. Its candidate, the former Labour MP Simon Danczuk, finished sixth, with only 6.3 per cent of the vote.

I would guess Danczuk’s potential supporters instead put their tick beside the local businessman David Tully, which suggests to me that Richard Tice’s project is a receptacle for the protest votes from people despairing of our two main parties, but a receptacle unceremoniously jettisoned when a more attractive outsider comes along.

Reform UK’s elected representation consists of eight councillors, fewer than the number of members of many an Independent or Residents Group that exists on only one authority. I do not know how many of those eight were even elected as Reform UK. I doubt that it was all of them. I am not a member of the Workers Party of Britain. But it has an MP. A seven times elected MP in fact. Nigel Farage, by contrast, is a seven times failed parliamentary candidate.

When I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair’s Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not. We have made a start.