Ashfield is going to be an interesting seat at the next election. Lee Anderson won it for the Conservatives in 2019 with over 19,000 voters, and a majority of 5,733. He will presumably now try to hold it for Reform UK, whose predecessor the Brexit Party secured just 2,501 votes last time.
Perhaps he will. Anderson has the advantage of incumbency, and whatever personal vote he has managed to build up over the past four years. He also provides Reform UK, with its limited resources and anaemic ground machine, a natural locus for their campaign. A determined, by-election-style effort might well pull off a result as the major parties spread their attention across scores of battleground seats.
But then they won’t just be facing off against distracted national machines. Runner-up in 2019 was Jason Zadrozny, leader of the Ashfield Independents, who took an impressive 27.6 per cent of the vote and almost 13,500 votes.
Zadrozny knows the seat: in 2010 he came within 200 votes of snatching it from Labour as the Liberal Democrat candidate. He ought also to have a really formidable local campaign machine: the AIs have 32 out of 35 seats on Ashfield District Council (which Zadrozny leads) and ten seats on Nottinghamshire County Council (where he is co-leader of the opposition).
Their Wikipedia page does have a section excitingly titled ‘Charges of fraud, election offences and misconduct in public office’. But then the AIs picked up seats at the 2023 local elections, so it doesn’t seem to be bothering people.
Or maybe Labour’s national recovery will render moot all this local colour, and it will sweep back in a seat which it held with a majority of almost 9,000 only a decade ago. Either way, one can see why Anderson is shying away from calling a by-election (and will thus be very glad the Recall of MPs (Change of Affiliation) Bill, which he supported, is not law).
Beyond giving us nerds an interesting side-plot on election night, though, how significant is his defection? The obvious point of comparison is 2014, when Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless crossed the floor to join the UK Independence Party.
Then, as now, there was mounting dissatisfaction on the right with the direction of the Conservative(-led) government; their by-election victories in Clacton and Rochester & Strood helped to heap pressure on David Cameron and eventually make the fateful decision to promise a referendum on the EU.
On the face of it, the plight of the Government today is much, much worse. The Conservatives’ poll rating is awful, many right-wingers are furious with its record, and unlike 2014 ministers can hide neither behind Brussels nor the Liberal Democrat to explain away their failure to deliver the sort of policies their voters and activists expect. The time ought, surely, to be ripe for a right-wing challenger party.
Yet few people can think that Reform UK poses anything like the threat to the Tories that UKIP did ten years ago – not yet, anyway.
Although in the event they didn’t secure a parliamentary breakthrough in 2015 (although they did hold Clacton), UKIP came second in a hundred constituencies, despite Cameron’s pledge to hold an in/out referendum in the event that he secured an overall majority. Without that pledge, or had it not been delivered, UKIP would almost certainly have become a significant presence in the House of Commons at the subsequent general election.
That is not the case for Reform, for several reasons, not least of which is Nigel Farage’s apparent determination to take a back seat this time. Richard Tice not only lacks Farage’s singular talent for campaigning, but is also much less adept at (or at least inclined to try) playing the Conservative Party.
Wild talk that it needs to be “smashed and destroyed” rather undermines the efforts of those Tories trying to sell their colleagues on a pact with Reform. Combined with the lack of policies, it means there isn’t anything obvious the Conservatives can do about Reform; by contrast Farage, whilst never getting into Parliament, was at his most effective when he (repeatedly) forced Cameron to try to do something about UKIP.
Likewise, the aforementioned lack of any ground machine is a real handicap. Whilst UKIP had spent over a decade building up its presence in town halls, Reform sports barely any councillors (it has fewer nationwide than the Ashfield Independents have on a single council) and doesn’t even have a membership structure.
Finally, there’s policy. UKIP had many, but really it had one central ask: a referendum on the EU. That was simple to communicate and had broad appeal, as leaving the EU could mean many things to many people.
Reform has no such tentpole demand, which both limits its scope for shaping government policy and makes it more important that its actual proposals (a mix of Thatcherite economics and self-serving Lib Dem-style constitutional reform) are well out of step with the left-on-economics, right-on-culture quadrant that is the big gap in British politics.
Of course they can still hurt the Conservatives; under first-past-the-post, even a few hundred votes are enough to change the outcome in a close-fought seat. But they aren’t an independent, existential threat of the sort UKIP was developing into; as I put it elsewhere, they are salt in the Tory wound, not the wound itself.
Anderson defecting to Reform UK is thus, viewed one way, of a piece with the absurd scheme to try and reinstall Boris Johnson as prime minister, despite his not being in Parliament and Rishi Sunak, whom this plot aims to oust, being the man who decides if he gets to be a candidate or not. It’s anger without answers, a raging against the status quo without even the outline of a viable alternative.
Perhaps more MPs will defect. Perhaps Reform candidates will cost the Conservatives some close races. But comforting as it might be to imagine this could be fixed by reuniting the right, it is a sideshow; the existential threat to the party is that it is consistently at least fifteen points behind in the polls.
Should the Tories lose the next election, there will have to be a very difficult reckoning with why the past decade and a half have seen so little done to move the country in a more conservative direction. Formulating a new diagnosis and prescription for the Britain of 2025 will take a lot of hard intellectual and political work. All we really learned yesterday is that Anderson won’t be doing it.
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Author: Henry Hill
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