OF course, it is only a single opinion poll. And it is more than four years to the next general election.
 
Still, the fact that Reform UK scored higher than Labour in one poll last week feels like a landmark moment.
 
It is hardly a wild outlier, since all polls now have Nigel Farage’s party at over 20 per cent, no more than a few points behind the (mis)governing party. The same polls put the Tories ahead of both, but with none of the parties cresting 30 per cent of the electorate.
 
If we are not there yet, it feels like a tipping point is not far away. Under our electoral system, which Starmer has firmly set his face against changing despite a shift to proportional representation (PR) now being the declared policy of both the Labour Party and the House of Commons, a tipping point is when the steady accretion of votes suddenly becomes the large-scale winning of seats.
 
It is an indeterminate point, hemmed in by contingent factors. The Liberal-SDP Alliance secured 7.8 million votes in 1983 and more than 25 per cent of the poll without reaching it. It ended up with just 23 seats in the Commons, sidelined by Thatcher’s post-Falklands popularity and Labour’s then-indestructible base in many working-class constituencies.
 
Nevertheless, such a seat-surge is in sight for Reform. The transformational moment may come in Wales, where the next Assembly elections are to be fought on PR, and Reform is slated to become a major force.
 
It may even win old mining districts represented by Labour for a century or more, exactly as their comparators have in France and elsewhere.
 
Some trade unions and the Communist Party are mobilising against this prospect. Labour, however, is not. Starmer made a point of crossing the Commons floor for a cosy chat with Farage while MPs were awaiting the result of the assisted dying vote.
 
Nor does he ever criticise Reform’s policies. Recall that Labour’s charismatic and capable candidate in Clacton was banned from even campaigning for the seat, eventually won by Farage, during the general election.
 
It is as well that more formidable obstacles than Starmer’s strategic nous stand between Farage and electoral victory. The most obvious is the split on the right with the Conservative Party.
 
Together, they are garnering about 50 per cent of electoral support, according to the polls. But that is actually, more-or-less, two 25 per cents, a very different prospect when it comes to winning seats.
 
Can that split be overcome? There are challenges. Kemi Badenoch does love a good culture war, but she seems neither brazen nor unscrupulous enough to become a Trump, nor would her party, as presently constituted, easily acquiesce in a deal with Farage.
 
Many Tory MPs still incline one-nationwards and are ready to point out that pandering to Reform voters will likely mean near-equivalent defections in the opposite direction to the Liberal Democrats, who, remember, won 60 Tory seats in July while Reform secured just five.
 
Trumpian Tories, like former MP Andrea Jenkyns and leading activist Tim Montgomerie, have now joined Reform. That strengthens Farage’s side of the divide more than it bridges it.
 
Another problem. Local authority by-elections tell a different story to the national polls. Reform is not doing so well there despite plummeting Labour votes.
 
This speaks to its amateurish or non-existent local structures and a shortage of well-rooted and plausible candidates as it painfully transitions from being Farage’s private property to a more conventional party with a mass membership.
 
Perhaps Elon Musk’s menaced millions will help this transformation, or at least fund that competent vetting agency, able to weed out lunatics, the just-a-bit-too-racist and covert Hitlerites, which was so conspicuously missing at the general election.
 
There is a still more substantive issue against Reform’s progress, too. Farage is a dyed-in-the-wool Thatcherite, a slash-the-state, cut-taxes, privatise and deregulate neoliberal. All this is masked by lashings of nativism and chauvinistic demagogy, but there it is.
 
He is a merchant banker in every conceivable construction of the term who clings to pre-Thatcher City of London habits only in his preference for getting pissed every lunchtime.
 
Reform has other faces to present, however. Lee Anderson scarcely reeks of big money, nor indeed of long lunches. Other sulphur hangs about him, perhaps a whiff of a diluted Strasserism for our times.
 
Anderson condemned the Post Office Horizon scandal as the consequence of “listening to the bosses, not the workers.” If Reform positions as the antidote to the failures of the establishment, his is the more authentic voice.
 
There is small chance of all this leading to a Reform government in 2029. However, an informal pact, driven from below, which sees Tory voters switching to Farage in those constituencies where their own party has never stood much chance the better to oust the Starmer candidates seems realistic.
 
Reform’s aim is to replace the Tories as the main party on the right of British politics — yet the road to that lies through contributing mightily to the disintegration of Labour. It is in Labour seats that Reform’s lower-hanging electoral fruit is to be found. Many of the 120 constituencies still Conservative-held are beyond its reach in most scenarios.
 
Thus, Reform can overhaul the Tories at the expense of Labour and perhaps become the self-declared voice of working-class constituencies in some form of governing arrangement with Badenoch’s Conservatives, with centrist Tories mute or marginalised. Not probable, but definitely plausible.
 
What would such a government look like? Presumably, it would endeavour to clamp down savagely on legal migration, to the immediate detriment of several key sectors of the economy, and otherwise follow a full-throated deregulatory, tax-slashing agenda buttressed by a more intense authoritarianism justified by culture-war tropes. No change in a neo-imperialist world policy could be anticipated.
 
It would scarcely solve a single problem, but the damage to society, democracy included, before arriving at that point of realisation would be intense.
 
The established organisations of the working class could spike the Farageist guns by more assertively confronting the social discontents which are fuelling Reform’s surge, it is argued.
 
So they could, but it is only half an answer. Strong union-led action in workplaces and communities to fight poverty, secure investment, build housing and improve public services is, of course, essential.
 
But what will it avail if, come the next election, the choice is still Starmer’s Labour or the Tories and Reform? How will workers cast their votes — for the party of the status quo against which they have just been struggling or for the champions of a demagogic pseudo-alternative?
 
The answer seems far from obvious. A strengthened working-class movement must offer a clear political articulation in contradistinction to the populist right alongside a day-to-day fighting lead.
 
Hypothetically, that vehicle could be a transformed Labour Party, but right now, that appears to be from the wing-and-a-prayer section of the menu.
 
Certainly, there is nothing in Starmer’s latest relaunch of his government — each time with a more shrivelled offering than before — that will disturb Reform strategists, a category now coming into being.
 
The premier owes his office to Labour not being the Tories and to Reform 2024 not only not being Tories either, but also quite determined to teach them a lesson. Who will Starmer not be next time, when not being Starmer himself may seem the ticket to office, and Farage decides Labour needs the remedial classes?
 
The other alternative lies in the projection of some update of Labour’s 2017 manifesto and a rallying of the forces that mobilised around it and secured three million more votes than Starmer did this year.
 
That isn’t an easy option. However, socialism, or even radical social democracy, offers a third political pole beyond moribund centrism and hard-right populism. It also offers a better future, and mass support for it is a very recent memory.
 
Compass, the liberal think tank, has produced a report pointing out that Labour’s electoral position is on “thin ice,” as argued here for some months. Forty per cent of the diminished 34 per cent who voted for the party don’t see themselves as strong Labour supporters, or were voting tactically, it found.
 
Five months of Starmer government have not improved the position one whit. Thin ice indeed, and Reform UK is the dark, chill waters beneath. Keep skating and hoping, or build a stronger vessel? It’s not a new question, but it feels like a more urgent one.