Reform’s left turn is a wake up call for Keir Starmer

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage is elected to the seat of Clacton. Picture: AFP.

One uncontroversial compliment we can pay Sir Keir Starmer is that he always does his homework. As a young barrister, toiling away in a grotty flat above a brothel on north London’s Archway Road, he was so engrossed in his notes he did not notice a gang of burglars making off with his television.

Old habits die hard and last month he prepared for the arrival of Kemi Badenoch at prime minister’s questions with the same monastic intensity. Like a football manager, he spent the preceding weekend studying every clip of the Conservative leader addressing the Commons he could find. Labour colleagues who had shadowed her found the prime minister’s name flashing on their phones. The man who cannot bear to be beaten left nothing to chance.

It would be wrong to say that Starmer and his strategists no longer worry about the Conservatives. Let’s just say that after a few weeks on the receiving end of her questions he now feels confident enough to measure his prep for Badenoch in hours rather than days.

And though it’s too early to say the next election is a straight fight between Labour and Reform UK – looking at the polls, with three parties bobbing listlessly in the mid-twenties, it’s innumerate too – the most difficult questions Labour is likely to face in the coming months aren’t coming from the Tories.

By now we know what the prime minister has to say to Reform on migration. That rhetoric is as robust and uncompromising as any of Nigel’s lines. That’s enough of him, though. Let’s consider Richard Tice instead. Somebody has to, and soon that somebody may well be Rachel Reeves.

Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Picture; AFP.

Pay attention to what Farage’s deputy and economics spokesman says and it isn’t difficult to imagine a near future in which Reform is outflanking Labour on the left as well as the right. That, as the many of the social democrats retiring hurt throughout the West might tell you, is a threatening place for a populist party to be.

In recent months Tice has said two things that Labour cabinet ministers have not. The first: under no circumstances should the struggling British Steel plant in Scunthorpe close. Its Chinese owners are at loggerheads with Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, over how much government and private cash should go towards its rescue. While open to nationalisation as a last resort, Reynolds views state ownership as “the least attractive option”. Tice, on the other hand, makes no bones of arguing that the site is of strategic importance to the British economy and ought to be in public hands if foreign capital is unwilling to foot the bill.

Then there is Thames Water. During the election campaign Labour stressed it did not intend to take that into public ownership either. On this, at least, they have been good to their word. This week the High Court kept alive Thames Water’s hopes of avoiding temporary nationalisation via a £3 billion loan from its biggest lenders. Should that deal fail – and it might yet when the courts revisit things in February – the utility will be on the brink of collapse by March.

Deputy leader of Reform UK, Richard Tice. Picture: AFP.

Ministers do not want that to happen because, to coin a phrase, full-fat nationalisation is the least attractive option to this Labour government. Not for Reform. Tice argued last week that Thames Water should be “put out of its misery”, allowed to fail, and sold to the taxpayer for £1. The alternative, he says, is a scenario in which City moneymen – this former asset manager knows whereof he speaks – “rip off consumers even more” with sky-high interest rates paid off, in the end, by hard-up households.

That intervention sent a chill down the spines of what’s left of the soft left in and around the cabinet. One of their number ominously describes Reform as “gaining economic sentience”.

Until now Labour politicians have tended to console themselves with the notion that Farage and his boys are little more than the Sealed Knot of Thatcherism: re-enacting old battles in pinstripe armour with little heed for whether their voters think it’s all a bit weird. Sometimes Farage can’t help but affirm their prejudices: recall the election debate in which he suggested the “NHS model isn’t working”. Privatising hospitals is not what his people want to hear.

But what about nationalising monopoly utilities? Wielding the National Security and Investment Act to take steel plants and semiconductor factories into state ownership? Campaigning against the takeover of Royal Mail by the Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky? Reminding voters that most of the utilities for which they pay through the nose are owned by funds in China, Canada and wherever else? The Reform leadership is in private discussions about all of that. It is thinking more seriously about what it says in public too. Note, for instance, that Farage and Tice chose not to run their mouths off and pledge to compensate Waspi women this week.

On utilities and strategic industries, Reform is going where No 10 and No 11 won’t. There are countless reasons why not – most of them to do with the government balance sheet – but the sum of it all is a vast expanse of political space to the left of Starmer and Reeves. If they don’t want to fill it, somebody will. And that somebody is likely to be Reform.

Little wonder so many Labour MPs are up in arms and moaning to ministers about this week’s proposals to carve up English councils and create new mayoralties. Those in places such as Kent fear, probably rightly, that ministers are building bully pulpits for the populist right. Just look at Lincolnshire, where Dame Andrea Jenkyns – late of Boris Johnson’s fan club, now Reform’s one-hundred-thousandth member – will be promising to nationalise Scunthorpe’s steel.

From inside No 10 the rebuttal is simple enough. If Starmer and Reeves fulfil their promise to grow the economy, greater generosity to voters will follow. But again: cabinet ministers examining another month of anaemic GDP figures aren’t quite as optimistic. Already their departments are paralysed by the looming spending review. Even small outlays of state cash have been paused as ministers await its judgments. All the while Reform’s tanks are rolling on to what used to be Labour turf. They can only hope the growth figures beat them to it, or Starmer might not have time to catch up.

The Times