Fear of Farage risks leaving Labour’s left flank unguarded

BUNGAY, England — Nigel Farage has Britain’s Labour Party on the run. Now some MPs think an excessive focus on the right-wing populist is opening the party up to fresh attacks from the left.

The Greens had their best-ever general election result last year, landing four parliamentary seats, including one each for co-leaders Adrian Ramsay and Carla Denyer. That leaves the left-wing outfit — long used to getting fewer column inches than Farage — equaling Reform UK in House of Commons seats.

POLITICO’s Poll of Polls now puts the Green Party’s vote share on 9 percent.

Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system makes an electoral breakthrough on the national stage for smaller parties like the Greens and Reform UK extremely challenging.  

Yet in a former grain silo-turned-cafe in the newly won seat of Waveney Valley,  in the heart of rural Suffolk, there is hope the Greens can both consolidate and achieve further inroads among Britain’s progressive voters as Labour makes vast cuts to disability benefits, promises fiscal discipline, and wavers on environmental policies.

“We are already on an upward trend, so we’re looking at building on that, but now it’s in the context of people feeling very let down by Labour,” reflected Ramsay, the Green co-leader and local MP.

Some Labour Party MPs think an excessive focus on Nigel Farage is opening the party up to fresh attacks from the left. | Neil Hall/EPA-EFE

If the Greens win council seats at next month’s local election, Labour Leader Keir Starmer is likely to come under some pressure from MPs unhappy with his direction of travel. The shock defeat of rising star Labour frontbencher Thangam Debbonaire to the Greens in Bristol at the last election still haunts some on the Labour benches.

“The Greens have the potential to be a real threat,” said a Labour MP whose nearest rival was a Green candidate at the last election. The same MP, granted anonymity like others in this article to discuss internal party thinking, warned that Labour is heading for a “crash course collision” with many of the people who voted for it at the last election. 

“I can’t tell you the number of conversations I’ve had with people that are just so disappointed,” the Labour MP said. “They didn’t expect that this is what they were going to get.”

John McTernan, a political strategist who served as a key aide to centrist Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair and used to rage against left-winger Jeremy Corbyn when he was Labour leader, agreed that the party ignores its progressive voters at its peril.

 “Labour sits in a very exposed position in a country that has repeatedly voted for change for the last decade,” he said. “Rather than chase one bit of its coalition support, Labour needs to deliver change to every single part of the country that voted for it, and create a new coalition of voters to support it for the next election.”

Finally in fashion

Starmer’s focus has seemingly been on appealing to Reform voters, with election literature dominated by the union flag, video footage of deportation operations publicly released, and the government’s high-profile takeover of British Steel last week.

If Starmer does turn off progressives, the Greens are waiting in the wings. Ramsay is hopeful that the upending of the global trade system with the return of Donald Trump to the White House could present an opportunity for his party, which has long pitched itself as against globalization.

“We’re the ones that have been saying for decades that economic globalization does great harm to people and the planet,” Ramsay said.

And, like Farage, Ramsay is also adopting an insurgent pose. 

“There is a real sense that people are very understandably disillusioned with a political guard, and just feel that successive Labour and Conservative governments have failed them,” he said, though he insists there is a “stark choice” between the offer being presented by the Greens and Farage’s Reform UK.

The four MPs the Greens now have in parliament are “crucial,” he said — and make a difference to the party’s “credibility.”

Labour’s answer to this should involve burnishing its soft-left credentials, according to McTernan.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer with his deputy Angela Rayner, one of those from the “soft left” of the party that strategist John McTernan says should be used as “hero ministers” by Labour. | Neil Hall/EPA-EFE

Labour should be making “hero ministers” of its best communicators from this wing of the party, he said, name-checking Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy, and Climate Secretary Ed Miliband. McTernan argued for more focus on some of the popular Labour policies — increased rights for workers and renters, for example, and support for house-building — being overseen by Rayner.

Miliband’s remit — pushing to help decarbonize the U.K. — puts him at the forefront of a massive issue for Green voters. McTernan even believes that there is the potential to peel away Reform voters on this front, despite Farage’s constant slamming of the net-zero agenda. “Working class voters are very committed to taking strong action against the climate crisis,” McTernan argued.

Adrian who?

Labour can take some comfort from the fact the Greens still have a low public profile. YouGov polling last year found that only 2 percent of voters could name Ramsay when shown a picture of him. The Labour MP quoted above took heart from this, pointing out that Britain still has “a very presidential style of government.”

Ramsay admitted that capturing attention in the same way as Farage — a plain speaker often pictured with a pint of ale in hand — is a “challenge.”

“Nigel Farage is very effective at being shouty and grabbing headlines,” he said. “We continue to look at how we best do that in a way that brings attention to our policies.”

But he insisted that the party is becoming “louder and more robust” in challenging rivals like Reform and raising its media profile. 

Some in Labour fear that work could succeed — particularly if the fractured right, which includes the Conservatives battered at the last election, unites.

“Labour can win when the right are driven down, but they can’t win if the right unite, and you don’t win against a united right by trying to be another right-wing party,” McTernan argued.

“That space in politics has gone. The space for consolidation is progressive.”