Will the right unite – and how will the left respond?

The wiry figure of Dominic Cummings, who pops up from the shadows every now and again to stir the political pot, hit the headlines this week. Boris Johnson’s former trusted adviser and the mastermind behind Brexit, reportedly met Nigel Farage after he suggested voters should back Reform at the local elections.

During the EU referendum, Cummings was an enemy of Farage, who described him as a “horrible, nasty little man.” But according to the Sunday Times, the two divisive figures shared a “friendly chat about the general scene,” touching on US politics, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, as well as “how No 10 and the Cabinet Office really work, about the catastrophe of the Tory party and about what Reform has to do to replace the Tories.”

Although Cummings had once hinted at launching his own political movement, the Start-Up Party, he now seems to have shifted his focus. In February, he posted on X that he believes voters should back Reform. On Substack, he elaborated his plan: “Shove out Kemi [Badenoch] ASAP, take over Tories, get Trump/Elon to facilitate a merger with Reform, tip in a third force of elite talent and mass energy so voters see an essentially new political force whose essence is a decisive break with 1992-2024 … break the coalition supporting [Keir] Starmer, take over No 10, do regime change.”

Such fighting talk is at the heart of a ‘Unite the Right’ campaign, which, as the Sunday Times reports, has seen MPs, donors and former party aides meet in secret to discuss.

“Even moderate Tories are now prepared to see Farage as prime minister to stop Labour,” the report continues, adding that the campaign will be ‘explicitly agnostic’ about what any kind of form such cooperation would take. But there have been suggestions that it would mimic the model of the relationship between centre-right parties in Germany, with the Tories concentrating on the south and Reform in the north.

Reform denies a merger

But, as Reform continues to surge ahead of the Tories in the polls, the party has firmly denied any plans for a deal ahead of the local elections in May. They believe that an electoral breakthrough in May will give them the momentum to become the main opposition party. 

“There is no deal. The only reason the Tories are talking about it is because their poll ratings are about to fall off a cliff,” said a Reform spokesperson.

With poll ratings plummeting, the rebels are reportedly seeking to remove Badenoch as Tory leader, with one plotter saying, “more and more MPs realise she’s doomed.”

Cummings is a vocal critic of Badenoch, having claimed that the Tories are “dead in every way” with her as leader. While both Reform and Cummings are adamant that he is not coming to work for Farage, as Tim Shipman, author of the Times’ report notes, the presence of someone who has a history of making and breaking leaders — and who has publicly declared that Kemi Badenoch has already failed as Tory leader — “could prove highly significant.”

Reform’s ‘civil war’

And Reform isn’t doing itself any favours, having had a tumultuous few weeks, with headlines dominated by reports of an internal ‘civil war’ following the fallout between Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe. The MP for Great Yarmouth was suspended from the party over allegations of making verbal threats and engaging in workplace bullying. The fall-out has reportedly left many grassroots members ‘raging’ at the treatment of Lowe, who has said to have put ‘teams’ of lawyers on the case.

Yet despite the infighting, opinion polls show that Reform’s support has remained unscathed.  The latest YouGov/Timesvoting intention survey shows a tight race between the three main parties: Labour narrowly leading at 24 percent, Reform at 23 percent, and the Conservatives at 22 percent. The Lib Dems are on 15 percent, and the Greens are at 9 percent.

Interestingly, polling also shows that Farage’s support among Reform voters continues to decline. A recent YouGov poll shows that a third of Reform UK voters (33 percent) believe that the party would perform better under a different leader, including a fifth (21 percent) who think Reform would be doing ‘a lot’ better with an alternative leader.

This is not the first time the party’s leadership has come under scrutiny. In January, Elon Musk publicly suggested that Farage should step down, indicating that Lowe would make a better leader.

The support behind the replacement of Farage with an alternative leader is a worrying sign that Reform has become bigger than its leader and will be a formidable force in British politics with or without Farage.

Also worryingly is that while the proportion of Reform voters with a favourable opinion of Farage has fallen to 73 percent, having been at 86 percent the week before and 91 percent last month, it still compares positively to the 60 percent of Labour voters with a good opinion of Keir Starmer.

How will the left respond?

Which brings me on to Labour and the left. Shipman touches on how the polling raises questions of how well Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s political strategist and chief of staff, is positioning the Labour leader. McSweeney’s tactic is to neutralise issues where Reform and the Tories might win support, such as immigration, and keep working-class voters in the red wall onside. But this strategy comes with the risk of alienating Labour voters on the left, who could turn to the Greens or Lib Dems. This could be “critical if the right gets properly organised,” writes Shipman, pointing to a third of 2024 Labour voters who say they would consider voting Lib Dem or Green in private polling.

And the numbers don’t favour McSweeney’s approach. Recent data suggests that Labour has lost more than one in ten members since the general election, with one member leaving the party every ten minutes on average in recent months. The losses have been attributed to controversial decisions like the winter fuel cuts, the continuation of the two-child benefit cap and the reluctance to criticise Donald Trump.

Bring in a wealth tax?

Introducing more radical policies like a wealth tax could help win back alienated voters and neutralise the united right threat. As Rachel Reeves puts the final touches to next week’s Spring Statement, there are growing calls for a 2 percent wealth tax. Mobile billboards, commissioned by the campaign group, Patriotic Millionaires UK, have been touring the country, suggesting the absence of a wealth tax means the UK is missing out on £460 million a week.

A number of Labour MPs, including Diane Abbott and Richard Burgon, support the tax, as do the Green Party, lobby groups Tax Justice UK and Patriotic Millionaires UK, and Oxfam.

A recent poll from Patriotic Millionaires UK shows 68 percent of those with over £1 million to invest support the introduction of a net wealth tax on those with more than £10 million.

It follows a YouGov poll that showed overwhelming public support for the introduction of a wealth tax on those with more than £10 million.

Attacks on the ‘democratic rights of voters’

“Sustained attacks on the democratic rights of members,” have also been cited as a reason for members leaving the party, as three left-wing Constituency Labour Party representatives on the NEC asserted.

As the right contemplates a united effort to oust Labour, Labour itself appears to be actively discouraging tactical voting pacts.

Two Labour members in the East Sussex CLP of Lewes were recently expelled from the party over allegations they had backed tactical voting for the Lib Dems in a non-priority seat during the 2024 election. The claim is that the two ousted members “demonstrated the type of support for the Liberal Democrats that is incompatible with chapter 2, clause I.5.B.vi of the Labour party rule book”

The long-held Tory seat of Lewes was a successful target for the Liberal Democrats at the general election. Labour only achieved 6.7 percent of the vote in the constituency  which one of the expelled members put down to tactical voting.

“We were determined not to see a repeat of 2015, 2017 and 2019 in the constituency,” the former party member told LabourList.

They continued that Labour “ought to be taking a bigger picture” considering the first-past-the-post electoral system used to elect MPs.

“There was very obvious tactical voting across the constituency that had helped oust the Tory MP. That was the fundamental objective from our point of view.”

Tony Dowmund, another expelled former member, told LabourList that the party needs to: “be more honest about the degree to which the recent election results were down to tactical voting – which in many cases helped Labour”.

He added that Labour needed to build a “progressive alliance” capable of organising effectively against Reform and the Tories.

“A centralised, centrist, exclusive and authoritarian party isn’t going to be able to do this,” he said.

The expulsions follow a report by the campaign group Labour Together, which found that tactical voting was instrumental to the party’s landslide election result last year. The data showed an average swing towards the main challenger in both Conservative-Liberal Democrat marginals and Conservative-Labour marginals. Britain’s leading pollster, John Curtice, believes tactical voting may have delivered Labour up to 100 extra seats, as well as stacks of Lib Dem gains. After all, the spirit of last summer’s election was to punish the beleaguered Tories.

For a leader who once declared: “country first, party second,” punishing those advocating for tactical voting to defeat the Tories is “horribly short-sighted,” as the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee put it.

A sentiment shared by Professor Rob Ford, who told Toynbee:

“Be nice to people when you’re on top, as you’ll need them on your way down.”  

If the right unites, especially if Dominic Cummings, the inveterate plotter and ‘strategic genius’ (Barnard Castle rather undermined the genius label) gets into bed with Farage, the left could be in trouble come the next election.

The good news is that right-wing politics seems to be a vehicle for narcissistic personalities, the result being that they don’t stay in bed together for long. The bad news is that they cause a lot of pain before that happens. No doubt there is narcissism on the left too but thankfully it does not drive politics in the same way. Labour politicians need to bury any lingering narcissism and think seriously about how best to deliver electoral success on the basis of progressive ideas and policies, which as the polls still show, remains the majority preference.

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch

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