I am not an expert in astro-physics, but I believe there is something important in the universe called Dark Matter. Dark Matter is stuff that has not actually been detected, but its presence has been inferred by observing the behaviour of other things. 

There is, perhaps, an analogy to be drawn here with politics in this country at the moment. The political equivalent of Dark Matter is that very large group of voters whose endorsement is necessary in order to win a first past the post election. Like Dark Matter, these people are definitely out there, because their floating gravitational pull is manifest every election time. But also, as with Dark Matter, political strategists seem to struggle to define a theory about exactly who they are and where they are and are maybe looking in the wrong places to find them.

At the moment these people have, rather sketchily, been defined as the disillusioned, the disenfranchised, the young (who apparently are not interested in politics), the let down, the left behind etc. In days gone by, when people could still aspire to afford Ford Mondeos, they/he/him were called Mondeo Man or, somewhat bizarrely, Worcester Woman – I never did quite comprehend that confection. And it is commonly thought that Reform is the only party that is making a decent effort at winning these people over. Thus we should therefore either learn from, be worried about, or imitate what Reform is doing. It is as though we are inferring something about the gravity of British politics by looking at the behaviour of Reform.

So what are the theories?

First of all – let’s remove the Tories from the equation. The Tories don’t have a theory of anything at the moment. Goodbye Tories. It wasn’t fun.

Next up – Labour. I have recently finally finished ‘Get In’ – the forensically exhaustive and frankly quite depressing account, by Patrick Macquire and Gabriel Pogrund, of the McSweeney/Starmer project that dumped a new government on our doorsteps a year ago. McSweeney – now Starmer’s chief of staff – was given a load of money by two very rich men to set up an outfit misleadingly called Labour Together. A lot of this cash was then spent commissioning acres of research from YouGov. But there can be a problem with research. If research is tasked to find a certain thing, it has a habit of doing just that, especially if you do enough of it. It’s a bit like national security intelligence really – except focus groups last longer than 45 minutes.

The key to effective research is to be very careful with your initial assumptions. The assumption that McSweeney made was that Labour was defeated because it lost in what it thought were its heartlands. It lost the votes of traditional, so-called working class, socially conservative voters. Votes that back in the day had been delivered in bulk by the Unions. It lost the Red Wall. So he focused his research on these people and places in order to craft and target the messages required to win them back. As a significant side project he also decided he needed to kill-off the people within the party who up until this point believed they understood and spoke for the Red Wall, but actually lived in Islington and Hackney aka The Corbynite Left. This Red Wall / anti-Islington focus went on to shape almost everything the Labour government has subsequently done. I won’t stoop to describe this as policy – because something else ‘Get In’ demonstrated, and also Anushka Asthana’s excellent ‘Taken as Red’, is just how relentlessly tactical the whole Starmer project is. It’s all messages and soundbites. There is no policy, no vision, no strategy – other than winning. 

This has inevitably led Labour into Reform territory and also caused it to fall on its face so spectacularly once in office. Because there was no plan (other than winning). The famous growth strategy turned out to be nothing more than a soundbite designed to differentiate McStarmer Labour from Corbynite Labour. (So – what is the growth strategy Rachel? Err – stability).  McSweeney might be good at running a campaign but he is a bit McUseless when it comes to running a country. 

Mental box-out here. If I were to characterise the current Labour government I would call to mind a white, sterile, windowless room in a gallery. Empty but for a central plinth upon which now rests the mythical Ming vase, etched onto it a tableau: ‘The slaying of the Corbynites’. And upon the wall there hangs a single, all-seeing picture of Big Starmer, beneath which is writ the holy words “we have to change the Party before we change the country”. And at the entrance stands McSweeney, body-searching all entrants to ensure they are not carrying any policies or visions. And at the exit there stands McFadden (Chancellor of the Dungeon of Lancaster) with a mace. 

But what if McSweeney was wrong in his initial assumptions. No-one can doubt that Labour did lose in its heartlands – but what if it lost (or at the very least was in the process of losing) almost everywhere. I’m a middle class, middle aged, public school educated, privileged, white man. And you lost me a long, long time ago. Jolly good too I can hear some saying. But since McSweeney wasn’t really looking for people like me, he didn’t find me. Or, more importantly, he didn’t find anyone else that might be out there. And what if, collectively, these people are indeed a very large – albeit demographically disparate – group. These people are very inconvenient of course. For someone as tactical as McSweeney, who can only operate on the basis of highly targeted messaging and profiling, how do you stitch together a campaign based on such a seemingly diverse group of people? Hint: you do that by having a vision and a narrative – something McSweeney and McLabour conspicuously lack.

And what of the Labour left. 

You would indeed have a cold, blue, heart not to have its cockles warmed by the spectacle of Grace Blakely on LBC dismembering some unfortunate Tory or Reformer that has strayed too far from the UnHerd. But the Labour left suffers from the Enough Problem. You can circle the wagons and coral together a decent-sized group of people in support of what they might like to call socialist populism. But you are never really going to be able to push that circle wide enough to capture the numbers you need to win an election. 

The idea of the Labour left seems to be that first you mobilise the enthusiasm of that group of young, politically engaged, social activists and then drop them like a sugar lump into the flat white of similarly young, metropolitain, professional but economically insecure, Labour disappointists. This group seems to be their equivalent of McSweeny’s Red Wallers. You then, so their theory goes, build outwards from this group (Islington and Hackney), recruiting more and more support, creating an unstoppable momentum (or should this be Momentum) which will then sweep you into Downing Street. 

I guess, back in the day, this sort of worked because you had the gear-box of the Union movement which was able to connect the engine of the flat-whiters with the wheels of the tea-drinkers. 

You can look at the Grace Blakelys and the Bernie Sanders, and the AOCs – and get very excited about their takedown of The Establishment. The problem starts when you then get to the chapter at the end of their books which deals with So What Are We Going To Do About It. And you find yourself looking at a re-heated version of a dish that was first served up in the 19th century. The problem with socialism is that it is now just another dead, white man’s ideology. Get over it guys – everyone else has. Come up with something new, that addresses the problems of now. 

I reckon there is a decent chance that Jeremy Corbyn could have won an election if he hadn’t been so desperate to wrap himself in the cosy cloak of socialism. After 20 years in the  doghouse of irrelevance he wanted to prove to the Labour right that socialism was electable, and this was probably more important to him than actually getting elected. Any strategy that looks to push out from an overtly socialist base will always quickly degrade the further away from that base you push it. 

The left also has another problem. It’s hard to circle the wagons when you don’t have any wagons. Which is why they appear to be lasciviously eyeing up the wagon of the Green Party as it trundles its way across the increasingly dusty plains. Now the Green party might be a wagon, but it is not a bandwagon, and you shouldn’t treat it as such. Under the current electoral system there is no way the Greens will ever form the party of government. However, it does currently stand a decent chance of growing its base of MPs sufficient to pack a punch if we get to a hung parliament at the next election – provided you leave it alone. 

The Greens, curiously enough, have shown that they are very effective at beating the Tories in rural areas as well as beating Labour in certain flat-white drinking urban areas. Greens are not flash, they are not showy, they are stubbornly resistant to the idea of lining up behind a single, populist leader. But they are getting the job done. This is just the personal opinion of someone who has been supporting a local Green party in a rural area for the last 15 years, but I think that whatever electoral system we have – right now we really need a clear and distinct Green voice at all levels in politics going forwards. And by-the-way, two years ago my local Green party took overall control of its local authority, under a first-past-the-post vote, and is currently the only majority controlled Green authority anywhere in the World. 

And, of course, we have to mention Reform. Unlike the Labour left, Farage has realised that you don’t build an electorally sufficient group of people from your core support base. Nigel has spent all his time in politics creating – and then running away from – his base. That’s because his base reeks of racism and bigotry. But he understands how to capture enough of the Dark Matter to bend the political universe to his will.

I think you take on Nigel and his pack of cronies by calling him out as a liar and a scumbag. Anyone who deliberately seeds and spreads a false narrative, designed to create divisions in society, that you then use for political advantage is a scumbag in my books. We are not a nation of Little Nigels. Stick that on a baseball cap. Make the merch. With us today in the studio is the Leader of the Reform Party and Serial Deceiver, Nigel Farage. Them’s the facts Laura.

Merchandising opportunities aside, the lesson from Reform is that you don’t counter it with a left wing populist version. Neither do you jealously covet its popularity with people you thought you had a relationship with. Instead you seek out your own version of Dark Matter – perhaps we should now call it Light Matter. I believe there is a very large group of people out there who: accept that we need to raise taxes to fix our public services, recognise that we need to take climate change and the collapse in biodiversity seriously, realise that the old free-market approaches don’t work (except for the wealthiest in our society), believe that civil servants should not be dismissed as bureaucrats or manifestations of a Big State, understand that government responsibilities should not regarded as simply profit making opportunities and totally reject the poisonous scaremongering of Reform. 

Am I wrong? So step-up the wealthy donors who are prepared to YouGov the bejesus out of these people. Step up the political party that is prepared to create the vision and narrative you need to capture these voters (other than the Greens).  That’s how you counter Reform.

P.S. The Lib Dems. Oh shit. I forgot about them. But can I really be bothered? Can anyone really be bothered? Are there ever enough hours in the day to think about the Lib Dems?