Politics: more broken than Britain?
By Richard North - April 16, 2025
It was yesterday that The Sun delivered a front-page banner headline proclaiming: “Britain is Broken”, this coincidentally the slogan that Farage’s Reform party has adopted for the forthcoming local elections on 1 May – not forgetting the Runcorn and Helsby by-election.
The story was also carried online under a classic Sun punny headline: “Keir’s worst Nigemare”, covering the findings of a Survation poll carried out for the paper, testing the views of voters living in the East Midlands, West Midlands, North East, North West, Yorkshire and the Humber – the so-called “Red Wall” seats.
The findings for Labour are indeed dire, suggesting, in the words of Harry Cole, the paper’s political editor, that Reform would sweep through Labour’s Red Wall in the May elections, with 68 percent of respondents thinking that Britain is broken, while Reform’s support since the last election has soared from 18 to 30 percent.
The poll puts the top three issues needing “radical reform” as immigration, the NHS and the economy, while Farage beats Starmer by one point (26 to 25 percent) as the politician thought to make the best prime minister. In terms of voting intentions for the regions tested, Reform comes top at 30 percent, Labour comes in at 27 percent and the Tories trail on 22 percent.
Putting the results in perspective, Survation CEO, Damian Lyons-Lowe, says that the polling: “indicates Reform’s presence this year is likely to cause huge disruption to the status quo across the Midlands and the North”.
The same day this report appeared, Farage was in Durham, happily parading an enlarged facsimile of The Sun’s front page, declaring that his party will be “planting our tanks” firmly on Labour’s lawns, asserting that “Labour have abandoned working people to become a party of middle class, North London lawyers who have completely lost touch of working people and their own heartlands”.
The event, combined with The Sun’s report has provoked a flurry of further reports, not least from Politics Home, which has been running the headline: “Reform puts ‘Mr Farage’ front and centre of Runcorn by-election campaign”, indicating that The Golden Boy wasn’t leaving the contest to nonentities such as the party’s candidate, Sarah Pochin.
Instead, he was positioning himself at the heart of its campaign in the constituency where activists are fighting what is by common a two-horse race between Labour and Reform.
Politics Home reporters have been on the ground, in an area, described by one local Labour source as “a tale of two constituencies”, combining the industrial town and cargo port of Runcorn with surrounding rural villages, including Helsby.
The reporters found what seemed to be a clear difference between campaign literature being dispensed by the parties. Farage featured heavily in his party’s material, while images of the Starmer and Badenough were more difficult to find on their parties’ leaflets.
This makes the contest, according to David Jeffery, a senior politics lecturer at the nearby University of Liverpool, “Reform’s to lose”, but it also puts the onus heavily on Farage. If his party doesn’t win, it will be seen as his personal failure.
A source close to the Labour campaign, we are told, admits that Reform was a “real threat” and predicts a close result, saying: “We are throwing everything into it and taking nothing for granted,” adding that a “good ground campaign could make or break it”.
Pochin, when she is actually allowed a word in edgeways, claims that the number one issue for locals in the constituency is illegal immigration. “Runcorn”, she says, “is being dumped on with illegal immigrants”, carefully avoiding any references to her former role in welcoming refugees to the area.
She has not, however, neglected local issues, campaigning for an end to the local bridge toll, new leisure facilities and a regeneration of the Runcorn town centre, arguing that a Reform victory would serve as a forerunner to “revolutionary” change coming in constituencies across the country at the next general election.
Not to be left out, The Times is also on the case, looking at the bigger pictured with the headline: “Nigel Farage vows to reindustrialise UK as Reform sets sights on Labour”, noting that the party leader is targeting the Red Wall and breaking with his Thatcherite roots, shifting to the left on the economy
Attempting to outflank Labour to its left on the economy, praising trade unions and calling for the return of nationalised heavy industry, coal mining and oil and gas extraction, Farage now asserts that his party’s support “is coming directly from people who have been, in many cases, lifelong Labour voters”. The Times though, refers to polls which show that most of the party’s gains are coming from the Conservatives.
Farage nonetheless suggests that Labour’s “safest possible seats” in England and Wales, including those in Durham, were now at risk of switching to Reform. He insists that voters who had backed Boris Johnson in 2019 were “never coming back”, and while not being rash enough prematurely to declare victory, agrees with Labour that the Runcorn result will be “incredibly close”.
On that bigger picture, Farage claims credit for the government’s decision to take control of British Steel but still calls for the firm to be nationalised, blaming “Red Ed” Miliband’s net-zero policies for its failure.
He also makes a pitch for fossil fuel extraction to resume, arguing for self-sufficiency in oil and gas, while the party’s chief whip, Lee Anderson, wants coal mining to return to the industrial north, mimicking Trump with a call to “Dig, baby, dig”.
Says The Times, this call for reindustrialisation marks a deliberate breach with Reform’s Thatcherite roots. Farage is calling for a “pragmatic” relationship between his party and the trade unions and declined to criticise Unite’s ongoing bin strike in Birmingham, instead blaming Labour’s “soft-touch” approach in negotiations.
All this – and more – we are led to believe – is making Labour distinctly nervous, which has the Guardian batting for its favourite with a headline: “Cutting DEI won’t fill potholes”, telling us that Labour is “ready to play long game against Farage”.
The text has a Labour official dismissing The Sun as “just one front page”, with the paper arguing that the Survation poll presents a more complicated picture than Farage would like to present.
To begin with, it says, while Farage billed the poll as showing Reform stealing Labour voters, the detailed tables told a different story. Of people who said they would vote Reform on 1 May, just 8 percent had backed Labour in the 2021 local elections, while nearly 40 percent had voted Conservative.
This is not the only sign of dissent. The Financial Times has Paula Surridge, a professor of political sociology at Bristol university, saying the “degree of Labour to Reform swinging is very small”. She notes that the proportion of people who voted Labour in 2024 who said they liked Farage or the Reform party was in the single digits.
The thrust of the Guardian piece, though, is that Labour is effectively conceding that Reform will make some gains but will keep a close watch on any Reform-run councils, and to pummel them as routinely as it has done when the Greens have done the same.
“Saying you’ll cut diversity and inclusion to save money won’t cut it when you’ve got a council to run,” a Labour official says. “You can trim all the DEI programmes you like, but that won’t fill the potholes or magic up any SEND pupil places”.
The mention of diversity programmes – which Farage has done several times – brings in a particularly big imponderable, says the Guardian: as he receives more scrutiny, how will voters take to his fairly unfiltered, high-octane UK version of Trumpism?
What this then amounts to is Labour realising that it is in for a much longer game than one newspaper front page or a single set of local elections, where it will seek to contrast Reform rhetoric with its inability to deliver, while on the other hand talking up Labour “delivering on things that people notice, whether it’s the money in their pocket, GP appointments or potholes.”
For the moment, though, all eyes are on Runcorn, with the New Statesman suggesting that tactical voting may come to the rescue of Labour as Tories and Greens pile in to vote for the Labour candidate on a “stop Farage” ticket.
With only two weeks of campaigning left, though, Farage is doing his best to reorientate his party to the centre, arguing that, whether you are “centre left or centre right”, Reform is the place to vote.
One wonders, therefore, whether Farage might be repeating the Cameron mistake of abandoning his base in order to dominate the centre ground, only to find that the gains there do not make up for the losses. Should that be the case, Farage could end up being more broken than Britain.
