Murton is a rather frowsy former pit village in County Durham, about half a dozen miles down the A19 from Sunderland. Chip shops, tanning salons, elderly people with no teeth on mobility scooters, huge cannabis farm in the disused old Co-op store which has just been busted by the Old Bill. It almost became a ghost town after the pit closed in 1991, but they built a largeish retail park on the outskirts so people could spend money they didn’t have on useless shit and bad food. Its north side has one of the lowest average incomes in the county (£34,400) and a much lower than average life expectancy. Benefit take-up somewhat high, above 50 per cent.
I hope, in these few sentences, I have brought the place to life for you. Breathe in its flavour – smoke from the coal fires, the patchouli reek of spliffs, the spicy tang of infrequently laundered chain-store leisure wear, boiling animal fat from the chippy. You may never have heard of Murton nor care why it exists (which somehow it still does) – but beware, Murton is a harbinger of what our future might hold, politically. A kind of template, perhaps.
The Reform popular vote in the polls has shrunk and shrunk until it now stands at 23 per cent
If ever there was a Red-Wall seat, Murton is it. And indeed when Durham county council fell to Reform in one of the most spectacular and comprehensive of Nigel Farage’s victories last May, Murton gave both of its seats to Reform. The revolution had begun. Labour were swept away last May, with Reform winning a quite staggering 65 seats in Durham.
One of the Murton councillors elected recently stood down because of work commitments, and in the by-election held last week, Labour gained the seat back from Reform with some comfort. Now that wasn’t supposed to happen, was it? And yet it fits a recent pattern, one which should be deeply worrying to Nige and the gang. Caerphilly, Gorton and Denton and now Murton. Reform tipped to win all three seats and ending up winning none of them. The most worrying was the Murton one: this wasn’t a failure to gain a seat, it was a failure to hold one.
Only a moron would challenge Farage’s achievement in leading Reform to secure 15 per cent of the vote at the July 2024 general election and then building upon that to lead the polls, at one point touching 35 per cent. It is an astonishing success for one of our most able and gifted politicians. But something has been happening these past six months or so, and the Reform popular vote in the polls has shrunk and shrunk until it now stands at 23 per cent, with Labour and the Tories not terribly far behind. This decline has gone almost unmentioned, incidentally. So what exactly has happened?
The main lesson from Caerphilly and Gorton and Denton was that while Farage is capable of inspiring a good 20 per cent of the voters to put their crosses beside Reform, he is also hugely unpopular with a vast tranche of the electorate – and so, at election times, the massive majority who would vote for anybody but Farage easily trumps the number who support him. In Caerphilly that was the lunatics from Plaid, look you; in Gorton and Denton the berserk Greens. For the anti-Farage voter, it doesn’t matter who it is. If the Lib Dems or Labour were best placed to beat Farage’s lot, they’d vote for them too. This is an almost intractable problem for Reform, which seemingly can’t do without Farage but is hamstrung nonetheless by his unpopularity.
But that kind of tactical voting didn’t happen in Murton – something else is at play. There are a few more factors working against Reform. One, undoubtedly, is the revival of the Conservatives under an energised and highly competent Kemi Badenoch, which may have tempted quite a few former Tories back to the fold. Reform’s importation of a series of former Conservative party recusants has not been popular either within Reform nor among Red-Wall voters (who do not like the Tories for good reason).
Then there is the fact that having taken control of so many councils last May, Reform now has to run them – and in many cases (Durham excepted) isn’t making a terribly good fist of things. A 9 per cent council tax rise in Worcestershire!
Further, there is some evidence Reform is being hurt by the rival right-wing parties set up by people who find Farage just as odious as do the Green voters of Gorton and Denton. Ominously, one of those council seats in Durham is now held by Advance UK.
So all that stuff counts. But I think there is a more profound reason for Reform’s recent, gradual, slump. The general narrative has changed and Britain is tilting a little to the left once again – and this is because a growing proportion of the electorate think the wars have been won. Take immigration, the most important vote-driver for the right: net immigration is down by two-thirds under Labour and 58,000 illegal immigrants have been deported. It may be that 200,000 people per year coming in is still way too much – but the trend suggests the problem is under control.
Then there are the culture wars. That Supreme Court decision last April has effectively finished the madness we all endured regarding ‘trans rights’: the issue is now a dead duck. Further, the political posturing by police forces has been roundly criticised by our own Home Secretary. And the obnoxious BLM is all but invisible.
You may think it ironic that a comprehensive victory in the culture wars should be expressed politically as a vote for Labour. But that is roughly what has happened. There is still time for Sir Keir Starmer to snatch defeat from victory by ludicrous legislation such as the creation of an ‘Anti-Muslim-hostility tsar’ and expanding the Equality Act. But the narrative is, for the first time in a while, rather in the left’s favour. Yikes, huh.
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