The local elections take place tomorrow, but what am I voting for?
In 1993, The Cranberries put out an album which features the evergreens Dreams and Linger; the latter, which appears on NOW 27, has just surpassed one billion Spotify streams, joining a very exclusive club of just under 1000 songs to do so. Other recent additions include: classic rock from Foreigner, Pink Floyd and Van Halen; country songs from Luke Combs and Post Malone; and the ten-minute version of All Too Well by Taylor Swift.
But this piece is not about those songs; instead it focuses on the title of that Cranberries album: Everybody’s Doing It, So Why Can’t We?
I was struck by a series of missives on Bluesky by Charlotte Lydia Riley, a professor at the University of Southampton whose books include Is Free Speech Under Threat? and Imperial Island, her ‘alternative’ history of the British Empire. I found a book she edited, The Free Speech Wars (2021), in Waterstones last year, and have it on my Leaning Tower of Tsundoku.
Responding to complaints by journalist Jennifer Williams about the ‘broken…social contract’, Prof Riley scaled up Williams’ grumblings from the local to the national: ‘Large numbers of people voted Labour because you can’t get an ambulance to come to your house any more and there’s sewage on all the beaches’. I used to wonder if anything in Britain worked, and it seems Prof Riley is aware of this too.
‘There’s no affordable childcare, people are dying on NHS waiting lists and in ambulance bays, school buildings are crumbling, the trains are never on time, the roads are full of potholes and you can’t swim in the sea. People might be forgiven for asking what they are paying taxes for, actually.’
Lo and behold, in ride the four horsemen of Reform UK. A piece on PoliticsHome reported that, should Reform win control of councils in tomorrow’s local elections, or win the seat of Runcorn and Helsby, they will attempt to do none of these things; instead, says the MP for Ashfield, who has been a member of the Labour and the Conservative Parties, they will copy Elon Musk and try to make efficiency savings by ‘cutting DEI’.
Their constitution, formerly a contract, promises all the populist sweets – standing up for ‘British culture, identity and values’, stopping the boats, restoring ‘law and order’, cutting taxes, slashing energy bills which are in thrall to global events and market fluctuations – while also hopeful of landing a killer punch on the ‘failed’ Conservative Party.
Money talks, as it always does: the billionaire real estate magnate Nick Candy is sweet-talking donors, which is making life difficult for the Tories, who have been so reliant on rich backers like Frank Hester. The party took Hester’s millions in spite of his comments towards the Labour MP Diane Abbott which were definitely racist but were called ‘wrong’ without explanation by desperate MPs defending the indefensible. Then there are the ex-politicians and staffers under investigation for betting on the date of last year’s General Election using insider knowledge, a few years after those ‘all guidance was followed’ parties which, to my understanding, were not cricket.
In a brilliant piece on his Forking Paths Substack, Brian Klaas outlined the importance of the schema, of branding, which mostly takes the form of negative attacks on others, rather than positive PR; think of how Donald Trump used nicknames to whittle down his rivals for the Republican ticket in 2015, one of whom, Little Marco Rubio, is now a nodding dog overseeing Trump’s foreign policy.
Then there’s Liz Truss and her lettuce, Boris Johnson and his hair, and the schema of branding the Chancellor the quite pathetic Rachel from Accounts. Phillip Hammond got the nickname Spreadsheet Phil, while George Osborne got away with parroting the phrase ‘long-term economic plan’ as an excuse for his austerity-led policies. To win in politics, Klaas puts in italics, ‘it doesn’t matter what’s true; it matters what mental framework voters use to assess political options before them’.
You can see precisely this strategy in the tactics of the Leavers back in 2016, summarised in James Graham’s TV docudrama as ‘£350m and Turkey’. Whoever said that people will remember not what you say but how you say it, is the progenitor of modern political discussion. Has Fr Farage ever said anything quotable or, indeed, notable? What is his ‘The lady’s not for turning’ or ‘We shall fight them on the beaches’? Does he need one, when all he needs to do is get people to feel an affinity with him, to be empowered to vote, and to flash his winning smile, his equivalent of a supermodel’s bit of leg? He mostly sits tight.
The main parties, to paraphrase a line used of Johnson by the other architect of Britain’s leave vote Dominic Cummings, veer hither and yon like a shopping trolley. Farage convinced five deprived areas of the country – Boston and Skegness, South Basildon and East Thurrock, Ashfield, Great Yarmouth and Clacton – to vote for his new party, coming second in many seats to Labour. Naturally, one of those five MPs is now independent, having been kicked out of the party for dissent, which means Rupert Lowe sits beside Jeremy Corbyn, who effectively won the seat of Islington North for himself.
Corbyn won the leadership of the Labour Party in 2015 by deviating from the norm, which made Labour’s election prospects in 2017 and 2019 tougher than they ought to have been. Nonetheless, UK grime musicians got behind the man, and activist journalists like Owen Jones and Ash Sarkar also fought for the cause. Jones has turned his attention to a new movement, We Deserve Better, while Ash trod the podcast circuit to promote her much delayed book Minority Rule, in which she told progressive folk to stop wanging on about race and gender.
Perhaps she knows what will happen in the next few years, given that the big money is backing a party which was set up as a limited company. She and dozens of other political pundits will be offering hot takes on Friday after the local elections, but I think the danger is that Reform UK look and sound like the other parties: their MPs have been jailed for domestic violence, have been rude to staff on the parliamentary estate, defect from other parties, have experience running small businesses and can hold their own in a room with right-leaning politicians.
What is it that distinguishes Reform UK from other parties? The colour of their rosette, or the fact that they are untested at a time when the big beasts have far fewer members than they used to have. This can benefit the Liberal Democrats, the traditional third party who won 72 seats in the 2024 General Election, and the Green Party, who are interested in trans and human rights issues now that they no longer have the monopoly on matters ecological.
But neither the Lib Dems nor the Greens are offering quick fixes to deep problems. They do, however, have leaders or co-leaders untainted by their association with the presidents of Russia or the USA. But can their political schema beat Fr Farage’s schema, and can his in turn beat those of the main parties? If everybody’s doing it, why can’t they?