Labour Mimic Reform UK in Desperation
Yesterday Labour’s Anas Sarwar said he was open to working with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK ‘on a case-by-case basis’ to become First Minister of Scotland.
Today Labour has launched a series of adverts with Reform-style branding and messaging as the party seeks to combat the rise of the rightwing party. The Guardian reports (‘Labour launches ads in Reform-style branding to boast about deportations‘):
“The Facebook adverts include a series from a group called UK Migration Updates boasting about how many people the government has deported. The adverts do not display the Labour logo and are in a similar shade of blue to that used by Reform UK.
The party has also set up a Facebook group called Protect Britain’s Communities designed to highlight the government’s record on crime and antisocial behaviour. The page also does not display any Labour livery but sports a large union flag.”
This afternoon new polling showed Reform projected to win 300+ seats (none in Scotland). It’s almost as if constant capitulation to the far-right is a terrible electoral strategy?
‼️NEW | Reform projected to win 300+ seats
🟣 REF 29% (+2)
🔴 LAB 25% (+2)
🔵 CON 18% (-3)
🟠 LD 13% (+2)
🟢 GRN 10% (-)Via @FindoutnowUK, 5 Feb (+/- vs 27 Jan) pic.twitter.com/sarxE59WD8
— Stats for Lefties 🍉🏳️⚧️ (@LeftieStats) February 6, 2025
This reminds us of another map that readers might remember…
Brexit doesn’t end because it wasn’t about facts or reason or policy. Brexit is about a sense of entitlement and overwhelming nostalgia for an ideal of an English past that is so comfortingly vague as to be meaningless. But Brexit – having been ‘achieved’ doesn’t go away anywhere, there is no conclusion to a sense of hurt. Now Faragism is morphing into something beyond being a powerful manipulative fringe, and Labour and the Conservatives are falling over each other to compete with each other in mimicking and matching them. Unionist politicians and media (Venn Diagram available on request) are still pretending this is 2014, or sometime when the case for the Forever Union could be predicated on an idea of ‘Britain’ as a progressive society, one that we needed to be part of to avoid our descent into parochialism, nativism, or racism.
This was laughable then, but now, with Farage and his movement at the gates of power, it is a parody. Not only does the independence movement need to radically update its prospectus for self-determination, but so too do the defenders of the British status quo.
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Better Together, eh?
well said!
To be fair, it would be good to see versions of those maps as equal sized population hex maps like this: https://www.everviz.com/chart-examples/uk-election-charts/uk-hexmap/
Which would be fairer to urban England, hard to see the inner cities of London, Birmingham and Manchester on a geographic map
The hex map really shows the significance and power of Scottish electorate in a Westminster election.
Whichever map you use the figures would indicate that Reform would probably form the government despite have no seats in Scotland.