Oh garçon, I’d like Enoch-was-right Toryism with even more grifting, please. Yes of course I’ll have the side of self-sabotaging incompetence and unhinged shouting at clouds, that’s the flavour right there.
~ Rob Ray ~
Jordan Tarrant-Short, a man in his 30s who has somehow never quite managed to throw off that Young Tory look, won an unremarkable by-election on May 2nd in a quite striking way.
For the last five years Tarrant-Short has been standing in Rochdale by-elections as a Tory and losing, handily, to Labour candidates. Despite a couple of second places, it’s never been close. Something about his self-satisfied, smirking, oleaginous Conservative chops just couldn’t cut through in a red seat.
This year however he won in the Balderstone & Kirkholt ward by-election, tearing down a 31-point gap established in 2021. All he had done was switch parties to Reform.
As with most council by-elections, we’re talking small numbers of voters – 2,362 people turned out. But the way they split is notable:
| Reform UK | Jordan Tarrant-Short (Elected) | 766 | 32.55% |
| Labour | Leanne Greenwood | 624 | 26.51% |
| Workers Party of Britain | Laura Pugh | 398 | 16.91% |
| Conservative | Mudassar Razzaq | 212 | 9.01% |
| Independent | Billy Howarth | 180 | 7.65% |
| Liberal Democrats | Chariss Laura Peacock | 109 | 4.63% |
| Green | Martyn David Savin | 65 | 2.76% |
Compare this to the 2021/2024 elections:
| Labour | 1473/1086 | 60%/53% |
| Conservative and Unionist | 710/298 | 29%/7% |
| Greens | 186/150 | 8%/7% |
| Freedom Alliance. No lockdowns. No curfews | 88/– | 4%/– |
| Workers Party of Britain | –/395 | –/19% |
| Liberal Democrats | –/122 | –/6% |
As I say, striking. While a large chunk of the people who still care to vote – barely 28% of the electorate – moved over to Reform, they did so to back a longtime Tory candidate who had repeatedly failed, and badly, in previous outings. But the stolen votes from Labour, and nearly as much so from the Tories, aren’t just going there. The Workers Party took nearly 400, while their former candidate, the far-right activist (and Reform sympathiser) Billy Howarth picked up 180, and the Lib Dems grabbed 109.
Why am I talking about this somewhat obscure bit of voting drama in the wake of Reform’s general surge? Because I think this microcosm speaks a great deal about the abject state of electoral politics, at the tail end of decades of centrist neoliberalism telling us There Is No Alternative if you don’t want worse to get in. This turn away from the status quo is not a sudden collapse, but the natural conclusion of a spiral decades in the making.
In this thumping embarrassment for centrism – and even of classic hard-right politics as Labour increasingly hangs out in spaces previously reserved for the likes of the BNP – we have the public’s ultimate reply. There’s no credible left grouping, and the status quo is an ongoing slide into impoverishment. So for the loyal election-goer, what remains is varying formats of nationalist who promise they care about you even if they don’t care about the lives of refugees, and who haven’t had a chance to screw things up yet..
Much is being made of these gains essentially being a protest vote, along the lines of Nigel Farage’s most successful-ever political vehicle, Brexit.
But there’s a fair bit overlooked in that sentiment, depending on who you talk to. For some, this party led by a multi-millionaire, public funds-robbing, tweed-toting chinless stockbroker’s son, a multi-millionaire property baron and a millionaire Goldman Sachs alumnus is genuinely seen as the honest voice of the common man. For others it’s a means to an end on immigration (even though the party offers very little that Labour isn’t already doing ). And for some, it’s a simple fuck you to the status quo, even though this is a party led by the rich with policies like “cut waste” and “fill potholes” – truly revolutionary.
A significant difficulty for the status quo parties is that (entirely warranted) criticisms of Reform as led by a proven liar, bought and paid for by the offshore rich, infested with corruption and fascists, is in large part simple hypocrisy. With the exception of that last (clearly not the deal-breaker at local level that you’d hope) they can all be Spiderman memed. Especially, in Starmer’s case, the constant, bald-faced lying and breaking of pledges, alongside a rapidity of decline into anti-working class barbarism that has shocked even those of us who knew from the start where it was headed. As Novara Media noted in their coverage, the consensus of opinion when you talk to people is “they’re all as bad as each other” and when you mix that with the sense that Reform are at least getting up the right noses, it’s (clearly) a potent mix. One which exposes the complete stupidity of Labour’s strategies in all kinds of areas, most particularly migration – it doesn’t matter how nasty government policy is, it can never “address concerns” that aren’t based in policy but in feelings and habit.
The left, specifically the Greens, meanwhile have made modest gains but nothing like the breakthrough needed in an era so open to shift that both the major parties lost two thirds of their seats. Some of this is beyond their control: Worthies are less inclined to sink money into opening a fully-funded propaganda network (like GB News) to pump out Green talking points than far-right billionaires who see direct value in shifting culture rightwards. And the likes of the Mail, Sun, Times etc are less likely to give them a break if they get mentioned at all. Other elements are more the Greens’ own fault – lacklustre leaderships who haven’t the media chops of a Farage, difficulties in the coalition of left and right, and a failure to cut through with head-turning policies or a sense of, for want of a better word, prickishness against the powers that be. They’re nice, well-meaning. And in the world of politics that translates as useless.
So in this sense it’s not always a protest vote, as such. It’s a “what else am I going to do” vote. Reform’s approach is tailored for a particular strain of “everything’s shit especially London” British miserablism, but other than a particularly indulgent line on barely-concealed racism it’s really quite remarkable how unremarkable this London SW1-based party is. What it has is the same lack of tarnish from time and power that Corbynism had, in its early days. For non-politicos it’s a brand, for the most part they didn’t know or care who Darren Grimes was beyond some faff or other on GB News – though they will now he’s head of Durham Council.
The jabber about a Tory-Reform pact being pretty laughable, the next couple of years are about Reform trying to manage the places it now controls, expand its voter base beyond an enthusiastic core and come up with some policies which sound good enough for government (as opposed to nonsensical stuff about taxing solar panels or swapping income taxes for sales taxes). That will be much harder, and there will be lots of opportunity for them to stuff it up.
But in that vein, should anarchists care? We aren’t part of the vaunted (and largely obsolete) “ground game”, many of us don’t even vote.
Well yes, of course. Mainly because where Reform leads, news agendas follow. Social culture follows in large part from the debates those news agendas produce. And social culture is where the battle lies for helping working class people of every stripe, under any party. We don’t need to be Labour supporters to go after Farage’s merry band of posh far-right grifters – they already stink up our communities with their mean-spirited whining. The Tarrant-Shorts of this world, before they were Reform, were knocking about in (darker) blue rosettes saying the same crap.
It’s on us to make clear that when politics is a pile of bullshit the solution is not to find another cowpat and call it caviar. The vaccuum in party politics is filled by Reform mostly because “who else” – and our answer to that is simple. There’s no-one else, especially not Reform. It’s just us, all of us, versus them. Voting has never been more useless, government never so unhelpful, capitalism never so greedy. It’s time for working people to take matters – the future – into our own hands.
Pic: Nigel Farage, from Wikipedia
