THE row between Nigel Farage and Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch over membership numbers points to the runaway growth of Reform UK.
Whether Farage is right that his party now has a larger membership than the Tories is of secondary importance. Reform UK is certainly growing fast, and Farage — cosseted and amplified by important sections of the media as always — can present himself as the most dynamic actor in British politics.
Reform UK claims to have exceeded 130,000 members on Boxing Day.
Membership of political parties in Britain has been declining for decades. There are two relatively recent examples of parties bucking the trend.
The Scottish National Party saw an extraordinary surge following the 2014 independence referendum, at one point almost doubling in size in a week. At its peak its 125,000 members made it the most truly mass party in Britain, given these were all by definition in Scotland, which has less than 10 per cent of the British population. Since 2019 it has seen a steep fall in membership.
And the Labour Party enjoyed a huge increase in size in the early years of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, briefly becoming a visible campaigning presence in hundreds of constituencies outside the usual election windows.
The focus on community mobilisation faded after the 2017 election, partly because the party prioritised a parliamentary strategy in the hung parliament that election produced and partly because of the right’s success in bogging down constituency parties in sectarian infighting. After becoming leader Keir Starmer abolished the community organising department entirely.
Labour has seen its membership decline precipitously since, a process which its leaders have openly welcomed as active socialists are driven out and the party made a more pliant instrument of the Establishment.
Both the SNP and Labour saw dramatic growth when they captured a zeitgeist. A majority of Scottish voters opposed independence in 2014, but the separatist cause won more support than expected and suddenly looked like a plausible vehicle for rupture with the status quo.
Corbyn’s Labour, too, for some years expressed the hopes of millions that real change was possible. Reform UK is nowhere near as large as Labour or, adjusted for Scotland’s size, the SNP during these periods, but we would be foolish to ignore the fact it currently has the political momentum.
Doubly so because Labour has deliberately cut itself off from the sort of grassroots politics which might counter it.
Labour is deeply unpopular: a Sunday Times “megapoll” at the weekend found it would lose nearly 200 seats were an election held today, haemorrhaging them to the Tories, Reform and the SNP (as well as independents: the poll found Corbyn and the “Gaza independents” would keep their seats, and more would be elected).
Reform have proved shrewd at seizing on Labour’s policy mistakes: despite Farage’s commitment to tax-cutting, service-privatising Thatcherism, the party organises protests against cuts to winter fuel payments, has attracted support from some Waspi women campaigners following Labour’s betrayal of that cause and has even called for the nationalisation of Thames Water.
But its main appeal lies in the idea, however mendacious, that it represents ordinary people and not the same old Establishment insiders.
A mass membership Labour Party, with committed local activists forming a year-round community presence, could meet this challenge, unmask the contradictions in Reform’s offer and get a hearing when arguing against the far right.
That is the Labour Party Starmer has deliberately destroyed. Labour now is so contemptuous of its members and its own conference decisions it cannot plausibly claim to be rooted in communities at all.
Organising against Reform UK must happen everywhere, and will need to involve Labour members as well as trade unions and the whole of the left.
But it needs to happen at the grassroots — which means it must reject identification with either the policies or practices of Labour as it governs today.
