Restore’s rise is no cause for celebration

The poll of the Makerfield electorate published by Survation last Thursday night inspired a number of thoughts. ”Ooh, he‘s winning!” came first, followed, quicker than I‘d have liked, by: ”Ooh, that‘s a bit close.” The pollster helpfully summed the situation up in its headline, so I don’t have to :”Left consolidates, right splits, Burnham ahead”.

You want the numbers, of course. Excluding undecideds, the poll put Labour‘s Andy Burnham on 49 per cent, and Reform‘s Robert Kenyon – the one who thinks women can‘t drive – on 39 per cent. The other big parties are effectively nowhere: Greens on 2 per cent, LibDems 1 per cent, Tories 1 per cent too, but one based on fewer actual votes – a number rounded up, not down – which raises yet more questions about why MPs from the latter party still seem to think that everything is in some sense fine. I digress: the point is what we‘ve come to call the ”left block” is consolidating behind Burnham, the candidate most likely to beat Reform, so that he can ride into Westminster and save everyone [citation needed].

This good news, though, is tempered by two minor niggles. One is the margin of error: on a poll this size, just 518 voters, Survation reckons the current state of play is 95 per cent likely to be within 4.8 points of each of those numbers. Even without getting into the whole “a poll is a snapshot, not a prediction” problem, or considering the sizable number of undecideds, that is surely too close to comfort.

The other worry is the “right splits” part of the equation. If you‘ve done the maths you‘ll have spotted there‘s an 8 per cent chunk of the vote left to be accounted for. This, Survation reckons, is currently going to Rupert Lowe‘s Restore Britain, the option for those who feel Reform UK is a bit too milquetoast and multicultural for them these days.

That number seems at first glance unlikely: how can a party containing one disgraced former Reform MP, little more than a Twitter meme that metastasised, be polling ahead of either Tories or LibDems? Yet this is the second Survation poll to have found them doing surprisingly well. Reports from the ground suggest a surprising number of Restore posters in evidence, too. Perhaps it‘s real.

One might briefly be tempted to consider this a decent outcome. The left block winning by consolidating behind its most popular candidate, while a fractured right is riven by in-fighting, would be a pleasing change from, well, much of British political history. More than that, there‘d be an odd sense of poetic justice in watching Farage get a taste of his own medicine – his own candidate kept from victory by a more extreme version of the very populist forces that he himself unleashed.

As fun as the idea of someone doing to Farage what Farage did to the Tories is, however, I can‘t help but shake the feeling that this is nonetheless an extremely bad development indeed. Restore‘s policies include banning not just the burqa and niqab, but halal and kosher food; defunding the BBC and allowing it to ”wither on the vine”; the complete abolition of the asylum system; and a programme of mass deportations. It is not to defend Farage‘s party to suggest the mask-off version might be worse.

A more imminent danger than the outlandish possibility of Restore winning actual power is that of a Reform leader who feels under increasing pressure to say the quiet part out loud. When the Reform leader finally came out of hiding last week, after an extended break from media appearances while he waited for everyone to forget about that whole £5m crypto bro donation thing, it was to throw some red meat to the right-most part of his own coalition through a narrative of ”two-tier policing” and an ”anti-white Britain”. This did not merely serve to politicise a horrific murder against the express wishes of a grieving family: it was also clearly inflammatory. It is unnervingly easy to draw a line between Nigel Farage feeling scared of losing votes on his right, and a night of violence on the streets of Southampton.

There‘s one more reason to worry. The rise of Farage may have pulled the Tories to the right after 2014, but it didn‘t stop them from winning three more elections. What if the threat from Restore pulls Reform even further towards unashamed nativism, Islamophobia, full fat white nationalism – and they still go on to win? What if, as seems plausible, that 8 per cent of the Makerfield electorate who are flirting with voting Restore turn out not to be a bulwark, but a ratchet?

Looking first at those Survation figures, I found I really hoped that they were right. The more I think about it, though, the more I really hope that they‘re not.

[Further reading: Andy Burnham’s door-knock to Downing Street]