It’s Starting to Feel Like 2019 Again

We may be on the verge of a shakeup in British politics similar to the ones experienced in 2019.

After a lackluster start to a joyless campaign, a turn of events this past week has added some excitement to the 2024 general election in Britain. Nigel Farage made an about-face, announcing on 3 June that he would in fact stand as a candidate and lead the Reform Party’s election campaign after stating that he would only cheer the party on from the sidelines just over a week earlier.

Love him or hate him, Farage is an electrifying figure — enlivening to some and greatly off-putting to others. Although he has failed every time he has stood for election to Westminster, his impact on British politics over the past decade cannot be overstated. It was his relentless campaigning on the matter — and the impact that backbenchers feared his campaigning would have on their re-election prospects — that pressured David Cameron into holding a referendum on the UK’s membership in the European Union in 2016. In that referendum campaign, it was his appearances in the press and on the trail that kept issues like immigration at the top of people’s minds and pushed the ‘Leave’ vote over the line. After years of failing to live up to their pledge to abide by the result of that referendum, it was Farage’s re-entry into electoral politics in the 2019 European Parliament elections that embarrassed the Conservatives, knocking them into fifth place — while Farage’s Brexit Party came in first. Fearing that the Brexit Party’s success in the European election might undermine their tenuous position at Westminster as a minority government, the Conservatives ousted Theresa May in favour of Boris Johnson, a more credible candidate to ‘get Brexit done’ than his predecessor. When Johnson called for early elections in 2019 to secure a mandate to complete Britain’s exit from the EU without further delay, it was Farage’s Brexit Party that held his feet to the fire — and even peeled away enough support in some Labour strongholds to help elect a Conservative majority.

Farage’s re-entry into Westminster electoral politics, then, is a sign that a shakeup of similar proportions to those seen in his other engagements over the past decade may be upon us. This is particularly so in the present political climate. Although a Farage-led Reform Party is unlikely to prevent what looks like an impending Labour majority — one of potentially greater magnitude than that seen in 1997’s landslide — early signs suggest Farage is on course to have a major impact on the political right.

Since 2019, the Conservatives have failed to deliver much to conservative voters. While Johnson ultimately got Brexit done, the Conservatives failed to deliver on the related promises made as gestures of understanding to those who ‘loaned’ their votes to the Tories in 2019. The so-called ‘levelling-up’ agenda to aid regions left behind over the past five decades failed to live up to the hype and deliver the change promised. Despite the Conservatives’ promises to reform Britain’s immigration system implying that they would lower net migration, immigration soared after the 2019 election. Although Johnson and his successors have taken on those on the left fighting for what they view as social justice, with his successors declaring a so-called ‘war on woke’, the Conservative governments of the past five years have rather little to show for it.

As the 2016 referendum and elections of 2019 exposed, there is a large group of voters who feel left behind by the social and economic changes of the last few decades. Moreover, those elections showed these voters are looking for opportunities to express their anger with the parties that they feel betrayed them. In 2024, it is the Conservatives who are the target of their ire.

The echoes of 2019 can be seen in some of the recent polling. Using monthly averages of the topline results from YouGov polls conducted since the 2010 general election, we can see how 2024 may be shaping up to be another earthquake. In 2015 and 2016, it was UKIP’s support — averaging around 12 per cent, but reaching as high as 20 per cent at times — that forced Cameron’s hand in calling the referendum on the UK’s membership in the European Union out of fear the party would be torn apart by dissension and desertion (see the defections by Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless). In 2019, it was the fact that the Brexit Party eclipsed the mainstream parties to become the largest party in terms of voter preferences around the time of the European elections that threatened to relegate the Conservatives to minor-party status.

And so it is again in 2024. In most polls since November 2023, the Reform Party has polled at or above 10 per cent in YouGov’s regular surveys of the British electorate. In recent weeks, Reform’s share of the intended vote has crept up to the point that it is neck-and-neck with the Tories’ share, which has tumbled, fairly steadily, since losing their lead to Labour in late 2021. Their share has only fallen further since then as they have been plagued by scandals and embarrassment, not least being the (final) lockdown-related scandals that brought down Johnson’s government and the internal divisions within the party that led Tories to turn on their own, short-lived Truss government. Rishi Sunak’s stitch-up government has failed to stem this tide.

And there is little reason to believe that the course can be righted. Even as Labour endure infighting among their voter bases over the war in Gaza, their lead shows little sign of dropping below a level that would secure them a governing majority. (Though never say never.) The Prime Minister warned of the possibility of a Labour government raising their taxes during the first head-to-head debate with Keir Starmer; the credibility of such a threat aside, the impact of this line of attack is undermined by what is effectively a tax rise — and the wider decline in Britons’ standard of living — caused in no small part by the inflation experienced during the Conservatives’ time in office. And while the Conservatives have promised to put a cap on migration (in response to Farage’s entry into the race), such promises are too little too late — such a ‘cap’ being far above the Conservatives’ previous (broken) promises on this issue — by people with too little credibility.

It is the fact that conservative and other right-of-centre voters have so little to gain (the claims of people like Peter Hitchens notwithstanding) from voting for the Conservatives in what has appeared for some time as a foregone conclusion in 2024 that makes it likely that Farage and Reform are on course to shake things up. By entering a race in which Reform were already polling around 15 per cent (in YouGov as in other polls), Farage has the opportunity to drive their vote share even higher by capitalizing on those frustrated and betrayed Conservative supporters who are so fed up with the party that they are openly pining for the Tories to finish with zero seats.

Rather than staying home because they are unwilling to vote Labour to achieve their dream of seeing the Conservatives win zero seats, Farage’s entry into the contest adds some excitement, giving frustrated voters the prospect to effect change in this election. Because he is the man who has achieved the impossible in British politics (Brexit), and showed he could do it again if needed (2019), Farage’s promises to be returned as the ‘real’, perhaps official opposition may not be far-fetched.

At the very least, he and Reform offer frustrated voters a reason to vote (rather than abstain), to punish those who took them and their concerns for granted. Whether he can effect lasting change on the right — in the form of a once-and-for-all defeat to the Conservatives similar to that delivered to the outgoing Progressive Conservative government in Canada in 1993 — remains to be seen. That it is even possible, and that his entry into the race makes such an outcome appear all the more likely, suggests that we are about to witness a seismic shift in British politics.