How to stop Farage

We need a new leader who introduces Every Vote Counts, a new voting system

Poor Sir Keir. His latest reset speech was a sad reminder of his limitations. I get it, he said. Incremental change won’t cut it. We need bolder action, a faster pace of change. But his frame of reference is so cautious and unimaginative that what represents bold change for him is for most of us a barely perceptible variation from the status quo.

He’s like a chef in a hotel who promised an exciting new menu and then got complaints when he served chips every night. I get it, he said. So what will you be serving from now on. Well, still chips. But maybe crinkle-cut? On Fridays? You can’t blame the guests for yearning for the mouthwatering concoctions of TV chef Nigel Farage, though he’s never worked in a real restaurant and you never see him actually make a meal. Some guests are warning that if he came to the hotel the kitchen would close down in three months after he’s fired all the black people and stolen most of the supplies or sold them on the cheap to his mates. But the warnings may be drowned out by his vocal, gullible supporters.

So how do we stop Nigel? In the recent local elections the BBC's Projected National Vote put party support at Reform with 26%, Greens 18%, Labour 17%, Conservatives 17% and Liberal Democrats 16%. That would translate into 280 seats for Reform in Parliament in a general election – not enough for a majority but probably enough to make him the next prime minister, assuming the Tories form an alliance with him. They would, even though it may spell the demise of their party, because the alternative would be a “progressive” coalition of Labour, Lib Dem and Greens and possibly SNP and Plaid Cymru. Winter is coming.

The penny finally seems to have dropped for Labour MPs, if not for their hapless leader. There have been calls for Starmer to go from around a quarter of the backbenchers. A few ministers have resigned, most notably health secretary Wes Streeting. He was expected to mount a leadership bid but held back at the last minute – probably because he realised he did not have the support, although in his own words he was doing the principled and honourable thing by resigning when he had lost confidence in his leader.

Wes has come in for a lot of criticism from all quarters, blamed for destabilising the party for his own personal ambitions, but it is possible to take him at face value. His criticisms of Starmer were spot-on – the winter fuel allowance cut was clumsy, tin-eared and needlessly antagonistic; and the island of strangers speech was bafflingly ill-judged, instantly alienating a large section of his support. It was as if Starmer and his advisors and speechwriters had never actually met an ordinary British person, having just arrived on our shores from an obscure central Asian country armed only with transcripts of speeches by Margaret Thatcher and Enoch Powell.

Streeting also accurately described the core of the problem – where we need vision we have a vacuum and where we need direction we have drift. He’s right, and it’s pretty clear that the captain’s vision is severely impaired, despite all those expensive glasses for Free Gear Keir, and whether or not he has “a firm hand on the tiller” like he often says, he has absolutely no idea where he’s headed.

Farage hovers on the quarter-deck, hoovering up bribes from foreign right-wing businessmen. Not enough people care about the impending Trumpian/Russian oligarch mass kleptocracy about to occur. “They are all the same”. Trump and his family are $5 billion richer than last year. Farage makes and is gifted millions. Keir got new glasses, and a free Taylor Swift ticket. All the same. They are patently not. Starmer for all his faults genuinely wants to serve the country and make it better. He just lacks the skills to do it.

So is there anyone else?

The best bet in an unimpressive field looks like being the King of the North, Andy Burnham. Andy is a likable, ordinary bloke – not the best communicator, not the sharpest knife, but he does possess several important qualities, He has the common touch – he can talk approximately like a normal human, a skill Keir and most of his cabinet have never mastered. He has an instinctive sense of what Labour should be for, again something that Starmer never discovered on his odyssey in search of ideas and principles. And most importantly he has shown during his mayoralty of Manchester that he is consensual and practical – he is willing to work with people across parties to actually get things done. Starmer seems too brittle and controlling to be able to do that.

This cross-party approach gives a clue to how we can stop Farage. Change the electoral system. Burnham is a long-standing advocate of proportional representation, or PR – a terribly dull name. Every Vote Counts, or EVC, is much better.

What are the chances of EVC being introduced before the next election? A long-standing Goat reader and maths boffin puts the odds at 1000-1. There are plenty of hurdles.

No Idea Keir is not going to do it, so we need a new leader, and only Burnham has shown enthusiasm for it. He’s got to win a by-election to get into Parliament first of all, and Labour are dreadfully unpopular. The Manchester seat earmarked for him only had a 5,000 majority in 2024 but in the local elections there Reform hammered Labour. But I think he will manage it – the desire to get rid of Still Here Keir will be too irresistible a prize for voters of all parties in the constituency.

Then Burnham has to win a Labour leadership election, possibly challenging Drear Sir Keir, still clinging on, still serving his crinkle cut chips.

Then there needs to be approval of the new policy at the Labour conference, a white paper and an awful lot of pitch-rolling for an idea not in the manifesto. There will be outrage from the right wing press, Farage conveniently forgetting his previous strong support for EVC. There will be talk of a plot to stop Farage, dirty tricks and bad faith. Damn right. Lean into it. So what? Yes we want to screw Farage. Good.

But we also want a fair system, and the old one is not fit for purpose now there are five parties of roughly equal popularity. Under first past the post results have become shockingly arbitrary. Here’s a few examples from the Electoral Reform Society of the injustices in the recent local elections - parties grabbing most of the seats on many councils with a fraction of the vote, and Conservatives in Wandsworth getting the most seats even though Labour got most votes. And anyway why should a party with 26% of the vote form the government when it is hugely unpopular with the majority? It’s an unfair system that disproportionally favours one party that’s marginally ahead. Democracy should be about governing in the interests of all the people, or at least the majority, rather than in the interests of fewer than 30% who support a divisive extremist who has somehow got his snout slightly ahead of the others.

And don’t we want a parliament that’s representative of diverse groups and opinions and that reflects the view of the country? The FPTP system favours the most popular group to the exclusion of others. If voters of all parties were evenly distributed around the country the most popular party of the five, even if polling only around a quarter of the votes as Reform currently is, would win every single seat. It’s bonkers.

Having had the debate in the country, we’d need a referendum. Strictly speaking Labour could push it through without, but after a new prime minister, no new election and not a whisper about EVC in the 2024 Labour manifesto, the howls of protest over lack of legitimacy would be so loud and bitter that they would seriously disrupt the ability of the government to get anything done. This would be a major change to how our democracy functions, We had a referendum before on changing the voting system in 2011. We’d need another one.

I think EVC would win it. There are strong logical arguments in favour, grounded in fairness. If they are properly and patiently explained, over a decent period of time, they will resonate with the British people. And there’d be the added attraction of infuriating Farage. Perfect.

But wait a minute. Why would Farage not be PM under the new system? He will probably get the most votes and form the largest party?

It’s a risk of course. But current polling suggests Farage would be unlikely to be prime minister under EVC. In the recent elections, according to the BBC Projected National Vote Labour polled 17%, the Greens 18% and the Libdems 16%. That’s 51%. If you add SNP and Plaid you have a clear majority of voters preferring alternatives to Reform and the Tories. These parties could form a coalition with a majority of seats. Andy Burnham could well be prime minister of it.

He needs to understand quickly that he would have almost no hope of remaining as prime minister after the next election if it is fought under the existing system. He should not be seduced by the popularity bounce when he gets in, thinking he can sail into calmer waters once Keir’s fingers are finally prised from the wreckage. The country has too many problems. Farage’s siren song is too powerful. No, all we can do is change the system and make sure the majority stop the popular but deadly Farage from luring us onto the rocks and getting his thieving hands on our country.

So what are the chances of Burnham having the guts to do it, to have the patience, determination and persuasiveness to push it through before 2029? I think my maths boffin friend has got his calculations all wrong this time. I’d say it’s more like a 10-1 shot. There are plenty of hurdles. Its complicated, but achievable. There needs to be an intense and well-organised PR battle to persuade the public that it is now the right system for us. The whole process would likely take two years.

And then what? Let’s say Burnham remains prime minister after the 2029 election, under a new system heading a progressive coalition. Farage is out in the cold despite leading the largest party. Frustration and anger on the right will be through the roof. Unprecedented fury at an election stolen under a dodgy new system. Maybe. Let them froth, foam and fulminate. Let them moan and whinge. But Farage is getting on. He smokes and drinks too much. He has already grown rich with all the bribes, freebies and cushy jobs he’s trousered. I think we wait him out. There’s no one else remotely of his calibre in Reform. It’s a one man band.

Some might criticise the EVC solution as being form over substance. It is failing to counter Farage’s policies, either by convincing his voters that he’s a charlatan or by coming up with policies which address voters’ fundamental grievances about the quality of their lives and their prospects for the future. That’s another article, but it’s very hard to see how any government is going to achieve this before 2029. It’s going to take time, if it happens at all.

Locking Farage out of power won’t be the end of it of course. There will be new right wing populist ideologues in the future, left wing ones too, but that’s a peril most other European democracies have to contend with. But changing the system to EVC before 2029, and starting the process when Burnham gets in, is our only realistic hope of ensuring Farage ends up wearing the milkshake at the next election, rather than the rest of us.