The rise of the Green vote may yet prove to Reform’s advantage. Behind the mindless demands to “unite the Right” has lain an assumption that the Left is united and willing to vote tactically, whatever the choice, but it is not.
I have written here before about the silly assumption that Conservative and Reform supporters are prepared to vote for each other and how the Ashcroft polls prove that wrong because, of course, the Conservative Party has a sizeable chunk of left-wingers among its supporters who actively prefer the Lib Dems to Reform. He has now produced a similar survey of the Left.
Grouping the Left as a coalition of Labour, Lib Dems and Greens, it shows that 25 per cent of Labour supporters are unwilling to vote for one of the three parties, with 32 per cent of Lib Dems and 33 per cent of Green voters saying the same.
In other words, there can be no assumption that tactical voting would hold up in the melting pot of a General Election. That being so, uniting the Left is as unlikely a scenario as uniting the Right.
The presence, therefore, of the Greens on the ballot paper may damage Labour.
However, there is another way in which the current insurgency of the Greens could help Farage. Hitherto very few voters knew what the Greens actually stand for (open borders, legalisation of all drugs, abolition of private landlords, the abolition of the UK’s nuclear deterrent, reducing spending on defence in favour of more spent on overseas aid, a naïve belief in a “no first use” defence policy, net zero and focussing on climate change to name but just a few of its pronouncements).
It is not just a fuzzy, faintly amusing but harmless collection of tree-huggers.
In a by-election, it would not matter much if the Green candidate proclaimed a belief in a flat Earth, because every voter with a modicum of intelligence knows that the result would not cause the government to change if there is a big enough majority at Westminster. But general elections are different.
Nigel Farage needs the Greens to win big. More than 5,000 seats are about to prove why - Ann Widdecombe
|Getty Images
Britain has a well-established habit of running a mile from electing genuinely left-wing governments: think Foot, Kinnock, Corbyn as opposed to Wilson and Blair, so one can only imagine how voters would howl with horror at the prospect of the above manifesto becoming any sort of reality.
Yet it defines the choice, and Reform is vastly better off fighting a clear left-wing agenda than a muddle of supposed moderation.
Conservatives and Labour have fought over the middle ground for years: in the fifties and early sixties it was “Butskellism” so-called because the thoughts of Hugh Gaitskell (Labour leader) and Rab Butler (Conservative chancellor) were perceived as being in alignment), then it was the Progressive Consensus in the sixties and early seventies, then Blairism, then the Cameron coalition. Only Thatcher really broke the mould.
Reform offers that same clear break, and so do the Greens, but in a very different direction. The choice will for once be clear: which political agenda do voters prefer as opposed to which party might do the least damage, and in that situation Britain has never yet turned far left.
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