How Labour can beat Reform by exposing policies like tent camps for migrants

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party must now come under serious scrutiny of all its policies

I confess to knowing next to nothing about Reform UK’s policies but this is now an omission in need of remedy. What would they actually do if given power or even influence?

That question has Scottish relevance since polls suggest a dozen or more of them are likely to arrive in Holyrood after the 2026 election. A lot can change within a year, but it would be interesting to have a clue about who they are and where they stand on any devolved subject.

I doubt if many who voted for them in England on Thursday were much better informed than I would have been, or felt obliged to enquire into the details. It was enough to know that Reform would “shake things up” and that they don’t like immigration.

These two sentiments will take a populist party a long way but it is premature to draw more dramatic conclusions. It is how the established parties respond which will determine whether Reform continue to prosper or end up as transient disrupters who melt away under scrutiny.

Nigel Farage celebrates with the newly elected Reform MP Sarah Pochin (Picture: Anthony Devlin) | Getty Images

Deliver for the people

To me, the most important message came not from the bombast of Nigel Farage but the wise advice of re-elected Mayor of Doncaster, Ros Jones, a veteran campaigner who epitomises Labour values and narrowly survived the Reform surge. It was addressed to her own government.

“I think the results demonstrate that they need to be listening to the man, woman and businesses on the street and actually deliver for the people, with the people,” she said straightforwardly. That is a challenge purely for Keir Starmer and those around him, and their response will largely determine the fate of Reform UK, not least in Scotland.

Labour was not Thursday’s biggest loser because they had less to lose. The Runcorn defeat was not particularly significant because it is difficult to imagine a by-election arising for less propitious reasons than the Labour MP having battered a constituent at two o’clock in the morning. A lot of Labour people who had been to Runcorn were surprised by how close they came!

It is in Labour’s own hands to shake themselves down and start again. Ros Jones referred to the winter fuel payments decision and the impact of steps taken locally to ameliorate it. This remains the defining source of Labour’s difficulties since the general election and it would be a good start if those responsible would now admit it was a political disaster, atrociously presented.

That put Starmer’s government on the back foot from the outset and it has failed to communicate much sense of positivity or clear message of policy direction since. By the time the first anniversary of last year’s landslide comes round, there is an absolute obligation to produce a convincing narrative of what has been achieved or is in progress.

Tories suffering more than Labour

For the Tories, the challenge is much more desperate. In large swathes of the country, they face being usurped as the party of the right by Reform while in others, the Liberal Democrats are ousting them. The Scottish precedent suggests that once this scale of Tory cull takes hold, it is hard to reverse and there is little sign of Kemi Badenoch having answers.

Normally, it is the main opposition party which benefits from government unpopularity but that is not what is happening. The mood is more akin to ‘a plague on both their houses’ and even though Reform UK are now targeting Labour, it is the still the Tories who are suffering more with the real prospect of becoming irrelevant in large parts of the UK. Another leadership contest cannot be far away.

Meanwhile, my education in Reform UK policy began yesterday morning when I heard the newly elected Mayor of Lincolnshire, Dame Andrea Jenkyns, advising the nation that refugees should be housed in tents rather than hotels. This sounded like a plan which had been written on the back of an envelope in a saloon bar.

Can Lincolnshire look forward to a few of its green fields being offered up for tented immigrant communities any time soon – and if so what would the good burghers of surrounding parishes make of it? It’s just the start of a process in which the policy vacuum starts to be filled with nonsense and soon the façade of a serious alternative government begins to fade.

Labour put out some heavy-handed publicity in the Runcorn by-election about what Reform UK would do to the National Health Service based on Farage’s Trumpian pronouncements about private insurance. Yet if you look at the Reform UK website, they are committed to retaining an NHS free at the point of use and also to miraculously producing “zero waiting lists”. What is there not to like?

Scottish Labour’s task

In other words, Reform UK operate – like all populist parties – on the expectation that their target market is not remotely interested in policies beyond the headlines, since they never expect the people they are voting for to be in a position to implement them. Only when that becomes a serious possibility does scrutiny start to take effect. Reform UK must now be subject to a lot more of it, rather than mere denunciation.

There is no doubt Labour in Scotland have been hit as hard by perceptions of Starmer’s government since the general election, as was reflected south of the Border on Thursday. The corollary is that Anas Sarwar urgently needs these perceptions to improve, though he must also set out his own stall with attractive Scottish policies.

The consolation is that there are currently three houses – not two – which the Scottish electorate would happily cast a political plague on, with minimal enthusiasm for the SNP. For Labour to emerge from that impasse, the promise of change can still be decisive but it must be spelt out with clarity and conviction.