Farage as PM would be a disaster for Ireland

It couldn’t happen, could it? Nigel Farage as the British Prime Minister? No, surely not.

Well, following the recent local elections in England, many are no longer so sure. Farage’s Reform Party got 30% of the vote. No other party, including the governing Labour Party, came close to that figure in those elections. With that 30%, Reform won over 600 local council seats, two directly elected Mayors, and a Westminster by-election – in a traditionally extremely safe Labour seat – into the bargain.

This is the kind of thing that happens to governments. They tend to do badly in election contests that are held between general elections. It is a regular feature of political life – except in our last local elections, admittedly.

But anyone who thinks a result on the scale Reform secured is in any way normal is living in a political cloud cuckoo land. Normally when governments lose local elections, the main opposition party benefits. In these ones, the Tory opposition fared worse than Labour. The Tories lost two-thirds of their seats and secured about half the vote of Reform, who essentially stole their vote all over England. They are coming for the rest.

How you might ask can a party with 30% of the vote think about winning an overall majority in a general election? Because of how the British electoral system, known as First Past the Post, operates. In any constituency, you mark X on the ballot paper for your favoured candidate. The candidate with the most Xs wins, however low their percentage of the vote may be. For example, if a candidate has 30% of those Xs, and two other candidates have 29% each, the candidate with 30% wins. It is less that the winner takes all, and more that the leader takes all.

To our proportionally minded electoral eyes, it seems outrageous and even undemocratic. Many British would defend it on the basis that the primary purpose of their elections is to decisively elect a government, rather than deliver a fair and proportional result in parliament, as PR-STV does here.

It is becoming harder to make that defence. First Past the Post was just about okay as a system when they were two main parties – Labour and Conservative – competing. That was the case for much of the post-war era when Tory and Labour governments would be elected with north of 40% of the national vote, though none of them ever got close to 50%. Now though, with five or six credible parties competing, the system produces what are clearly unjustifiable results.

Labour in 2024 won a massive majority, gaining 412 of the 650 seats on offer. But they did this with one-third of the vote, 33.7% to be exact, winning more or less two-thirds of the seats with one-third of the vote. The shallowness of this victory is behind much of their recent troubles and also explains why Farage can dream of the Prime Ministership even though he has only 30% of the vote.

The reason behind the 2024 result also tells a lot about why Farage can aspire to such high office. Labour won in 2024 not because their vote increased, but because the Tory vote fell so drastically. In constituency after constituency, the Tories lost votes to Reform. Neither Tory nor Reform won the seat, but by driving down the Tory number of Xs, Labour, and in many places the Liberal Democrats, were able to win seats without their own vote going up very much at all.

Now what Farage wants to do is to transfer that Tory vote entirely to his party, and with that, Reform can then win those seats. That strategy is far from fanciful. It would certainly win Reform a pile of seats, though whether it would be enough to win an overall majority is another question. But even the possibility of it will change the strategy of all UK political parties.

A Reform and Farage government would be a disastrous outcome for us. This would be an overtly and aggressively nationalist government, and it would be almost impossible for us to maintain civil relationships with them.

What is driving this Reform vote? There are several factors which explain the political context. The Labour government has been at sea since it took office, with the weak state of the public finances at the root of many of their troubles. That has caused them to bring in many unpopular measures, such as removing a winter fuel allowance, and this has demoralised the Labour Party in the country. 

In tandem, the most significant issue driving the Reform vote is immigration. The Reform Party is essentially built around the geographic areas and social classes who most object to what they see as large-scale immigration into the country in recent decades. These people voted Leave in the Brexit referendum primarily to halt this process. That the Tory governments in the post-Brexit years did not do so – in fact, immigration to the UK, after a brief decline, has increased post-Brexit – is why these voters have now abandoned the Tories.

It is not just in Britain that this is happening. The challenge of responding politically faces many European leaders of the traditional parties. In Germany, the new Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has made clear that Germany’s migration policy is going to become much tougher, in response to the enormous growth of the vote for the Alternative for Germany party.

The new political landscape in Britain makes it even harder for Sir Keir Starmer to set a course for his government in response. His response to the local election results was to acknowledge the scale of the result and to formulate the response of the government as being to focus on: “More money in your pocket, lower NHS waiting lists, lower immigration numbers.” 

None of that will be easy, and the last one comes with further political challenges. Because Starmer is operating in a five or even six-party system, he can’t just take on Reform in isolation. The local election results showed that Labour lost as many votes to the Greens and Liberal Democrats as it did to Farage. As Starmer hardens his position on migration, some in his party will fear that they will lose more votes to the Greens and the Liberal Democrats.

But that is Starmer’s problem. For Farage, his objective is different. He wants to collapse the Tory vote, not because he wants to take over the Tory party as many assumed, but because he wants to replace it. For if the moderate Tory right can be persuaded to vote for the harder Reform right, then it will be electorally game over. If that happens, if you thought sitting in the Oval Office was hard, it will be an even harder job for a Taoiseach to head over to Number 10 to greet Prime Minister Farage.