Don’t say we don’t tell you this stuff, readers.
Because we always do.
We figured this one out after a little while too.
Because the answer is that yes, in the short term they do. Reform knew that the way their vote was spread out they’d get very few MPs for their votes under the First Past The Post electoral system.
Each seat won by Reform effectively cost them a little over 1 million votes, by far the costliest in the election. By comparison, the Lib Dems – who got 600,000 fewer votes – got an MP for every 49,000 – just 1/20th of the price.
(The Tories’ MPs came at a similar cost – 56,000 votes each – while Labour’s were the cheapest of all, at 23,500 votes each. Sinn Fein got a bargain at 30,000 a pop, the SNP’s cost 79,000 votes a head and the Greens got stung for 485,000.)
But Nigel Farage’s party are playing a longer game. In 2019 his Brexit Party stood in well under half of seats, giving the Tories a clear run to secure a majority and “get Brexit done”. But this year he went in for the kill.
He knew that if you want to achieve power in a particular sector of politics, you have to first take out the main player in that sector, and to do that you need to weaponise your opponents. So he set out to help Keir Starmer deliver a mortal blow to the Tories by splitting the right-wing vote, with spectacular success.
(The election results show that Labour would have struggled to even be the biggest party in a hung Parliament without Reform, let alone have a colossal majority.)
It’s a lesson that Reform’s obvious parallel in Scotland, Alba, has been slow to learn. They’ve wasted years offering olive branches to the SNP only to be beaten around the head with them.
(In fairness, that’s not entirely dissimilar to Farage’s approach to the Tories, but since Farage had already shown that it didn’t work, Alba should have noted the example.)
Alba now have two vital years to try to seize the initiative, with few of the advantages Farage enjoyed (constant media coverage, wealthy donors and a whole slew of very supportive newspapers). It does have some experienced and talented people, and a charismatic and wily leader who is more than a match for Farage but who as yet hasn’t put the SNP fully in his crosshairs.
But after last night, John Swinney’s party are a mess of broken shells, as vulnerable as they’ll ever be to being evicted from the cosy nest they’ve made for themselves. Alba need to be merciless now, or die. Don’t say we didn’t tell you. We always do.
