The Makerfield electorate poll released by Survation on Thursday night inspired a number of thoughts. “Oh, he’s winning!” came first, followed, sooner than I would have liked, by, “Oh, it’s a little close.” The poll helpfully summed up the situation in its headline, so I don’t have to say: “Left Consolidates, Right Divides, Burnham Ahead.”
You want the numbers, of course. Excluding the undecided, POLLS it put Labour’s Andy Burnham on 49 per cent and Reform’s Robert Kenyon – who thinks women can’t drive – on 39 per cent. The other major parties are effectively nowhere: the Greens on 2 per cent, the LibDems 1 per cent, the Tories 1 per cent too, but one based on fewer actual votes – a number rounded up, not down – which raises yet more questions about why MPs from the latter party still seem to think everything is somehow fine. I digress: the point is that what we call “the left bloc” is consolidating behind Burnham, the candidate most likely to defeat Reform, so that he can walk into Westminster and save everyone (citation needed).
This good news, however, is tempered by two minor annoyances. One is the margin of error: In a poll of this size, just 518 voters, Survation calculates that the current state of play is 95 percent likely to be within 4.8 points of each of those numbers. Even without getting into the whole “a poll is a snapshot, not a forecast” problem or considering the significant number of undecideds, this is certainly too close for comfort.
The other concern is the “proper division” part of the equation. If you have done the calculations you will have seen, there remains an 8 percent share of the vote to be counted. This, Survation thinks, is currently going to Rupert Lowe’s Restoring Britain, the option for those who feel that the UK Reformation is a little too tasty and multicultural for them these days.
This number at first glance seems impossible: how can a party containing a disgraced former Reform MP, little more than a Twitter meme that has metastasized, be ahead of the Tories or the LibDems? However this is second Survation survey he had found them doing surprisingly well. Reports from the field also suggest a surprising number of Restoration posters in evidence. Maybe it’s true.
One might be briefly tempted to consider this a good result. A victory for the left bloc consolidating behind its most popular candidate, while a fractured right is torn apart by infighting, would be a welcome change from much of British political history. Moreover, there would be a strange sense of poetic justice in watching Farage enjoy his own medicine – his candidate kept from victory by a more extreme version of the populist forces he himself unleashed.
As entertaining as the idea of someone doing to Farage what Farage did to the Tories is, I can’t help but feel that this is nonetheless an extremely bad development. Restore’s policies include banning not only the burqa and niqab, but also halal and kosher food; defunding the BBC and allowing it to “wither on the vine”; complete abolition of the asylum system; and a program of mass deportations. It is not to defend Farage’s party to suggest that the unmasking version could be worse.
A more imminent danger than the odd possibility of the Return winning current power is that of a reform leader who feels under increasing pressure to say the quiet part loudly. When the reform leader finally came out of hiding last week, after a long hiatus from media appearances while he waited for everyone to forget about the £5 million crypto donation, it was to throw some red meat at much of his coalition through a narrative of “two-tier policing” and a “Britain against white”. This did not merely serve to politicize a horrific killing against the expressed wishes of a grieving family: it was also clearly inflammatory. It’s incredibly easy to draw a line between Nigel Farage feeling intimidated by losing votes on his right and a night of violence on the streets of Southampton.
There is one more reason to worry. The rise of Farage may have pulled the Tories to the right after 2014, but it didn’t stop them from winning three more elections. What if the threat of Restoration pulls reform even further into unabashed nativism, Islamophobia, fat white nationalism—and they still win? What if, as seems plausible, the 8 percent of Makerfield’s electorate who are flirting with a Restore vote turn out to be not a shield but a ratchet?
Seeing those Survation figures first, I found myself really hoping they were right. However, the more I think about it, the more I hope they aren’t.
(Further reading: Knocking on Andy Burnham’s door in Downing Street)
