General Election 2019: Farage digs in for Brexit battle
The bitter Brexit battle continues on the Leave side. Nigel Farage has dug in against demands from those within his party and the Conservatives that his party stand down further candidates in Labour marginals that are being targeted by Boris Johnson. It was reported this week that the Conservatives offered the Brexit Party an informal arrangement that would have Farage targeting just 40 key seats, rather than the 300 they are planning to contest.
The talks broke down. Farage announced today at a Brexit party rally in Hull that he had no intention of standing down further candidates before the 4pm registration deadline earlier today. When questioned by the Telegraph, Farage said that he would have been willing to stand down in more constituencies if the Conservatives had offered to do the same in certain areas.
Speaking today in what he described as “the heart of Leave country”, Farage criticised the Conservative party for “their refusal to give an inch in terms of cooperation”. He added that “I think the odds are there will be a small Conservative majority… just because Labour are in so much trouble everywhere.” He also questioned the Conservatives’ true commitment to Brexit, and stated his belief that if the Brexit party were to have no presence “in the House of Commons” in order “to challenge” Johnson, then “I fear we will end up with something that is Brexit in name only.”
One of Farage’s main gripes is that he sees the Conservatives, whatever their desire to win over Workington man, as being unable to win over enough former Labour voters in areas where the Tories have not won in the last one hundred years. He believes that only his party can carry seats in the English midlands and the North because the Tories have an inherent and ineradicable image problem. Having made this judgment, he is sticking to his guns and preparing for a fight on all fronts in these English constituencies.
Is Farage’s caricature of the Conservatives accurate? The UK’s leading polling guru, Sir John Curtice of the University of Strathclyde, has complicated this assumption. Earlier today, he said to the Telegraph: “What’s the evidence that Nigel Farage can win a seat anywhere in Labour territory? Please tell me – I do not know where it exists.”
Furthermore, in an overview of the voting landscape given to political journalists in Westminster today, Curtice said that the “red wall” of Labour-held seats in the north of England are not quite what they seem. He notes that in the last election, in 2017, there was already a big swing by leave voters towards the Conservatives in many of these key target seats, such as Workington, based upon their stance on Brexit.
In other words, the Conservatives already have Labour’s leave voters in these seats, but 60% of Labour voters in these seats voted to Remain in the 2016 referendum. In Curtice’s view, “The battle in the north is: can the Tories hold on to what they had last time? And will enough Remain Labour voters switch to the Lib Dems.”
There are some signs that the rub of the green when it comes to divisions within the Remain and Leave votes is in favour of the Conservatives. Indeed, Nicholas Watt, Political Editor of Newsnight, believes that, while we should be wary of the polls, there are signs that a significant proportion of the Leave vote is rallying behind Johnson while the Remain vote is fragmented by the ongoing fight between the Liberal Democrats and Labour. The Brexit Party is now down to around 8% while the Liberal Democrats seem to have found a plateau at around 16%.
Such readings are of course a snapshot of a particular sample at this point in time – a brief check of the nation’s political pulse, and not a foregone conclusion. Nonetheless, what looks to be important at the moment is that one of the key factors that allowed Corbyn to enjoy a late surge in 2017, a weak Liberal Democrat performance, cannot be taken for granted this time round. An analysis of voter intentions conducted by YouGov on 7th-8th November suggests that, at the present, 17 per cent of those who consider themselves to be Labour voters intend to vote Liberal Democrat on 12th December. A month before the 2017 election, this figure was at just nine per cent.
Even more crucially, from this perspective, while Farage’s concessions to Johnson on Monday have provided a potential political boost to the Tories, yesterday Jo Swinson categorically ruled out that the Liberal Democrats would help Corbyn form a government in the event of a hung parliament.
This means that the crucial question from the Conservative perspective becomes whether even a small swing to the Brexit party candidates could have just enough of an impact in the top fifty marginal seats targeted by the Conservatives to cancel out any potential Lib Dem factor.
Reaction Deputy Editor Alastair Benn has produced a list of the top ten seats targeted by the Conservatives in the election, where the dynamics of the Brexit party vote could be very significant. You can read it here.
In light of this, the Conservatives will have been delighted this afternoon, when Brexit Party candidate Rupert Lowe announced that he would not be standing in Dudley North. Lowe, who has been consistently supportive of Farage and a WTO Brexit, announced in a statement released on Twitter that he would “not contest Dudley North as a Brexit Party candidate” for fear that “my candidacy could allow Corbyn’s Momentum candidate to win.” Just yesterday, Lowe was tweeting that “the Tories can expect a proper fight”.
A thumping 67.6% of constituents in Dudley North voted to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum. At the 2017 general election, Labour’s Ian Austin (who has now stepped down from the seat), held the seat by a majority of just 22 votes. Meanwhile, UKIP’s candidate, Bill Ethridge, won 2,144 votes. The Swing required for the Tories to win here is just 0.03%. It is one of the Tories’ top target constituencies, one that they will need to take if they wish to win a majority.
Andy Wood, who was due to stand for the Brexit party in Hove, has also announced his resignation. This will be more of a symbolic gesture rather than a game changer, however – Labour won 64% of the vote here in 2017.
The Tories will probably hope for more. We will have to see whether or not more Brexit party candidates in these key marginals will go the way of Lowe and Wood, or whether they will hold fast and contest the election all the way to the polls. It is plausible that further resignations would stir up a sense of a rout in the Brexit party ranks. Then again, it could further stiffen their resolve to fight on until the end.