Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Labour MPs have set up an internal group to focus on the rising threat from Reform UK as Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist party this week took the lead in a major national opinion poll for the first time.
The group is made up of MPs from the 89 Labour constituencies where Reform UK came second at the general election last year, according to members of the initiative.
The group also involves Matthew Faulding, a close ally of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney.
He ran Labour’s selection of Westminster candidates before the election, and is now secretary of the parliamentary Labour party.
The idea is to organise political messaging and strategy for MPs facing strong challenges from Reform UK, which has five seats in the House of Commons and appears to be surfing an increasingly anti-establishment mood among some voters.
A YouGov poll on Monday for The Times put Reform UK in the lead for the first time on 25 per cent, with Labour on 24 per cent and the Conservatives on 21 per cent.
The research firm stressed Reform UK’s lead of 1 percentage point over Labour was “within the margin of error”.
The Labour leadership believes Reform UK, which hopes to win hundreds of council seats at local elections in England in May, could be vulnerable to closer scrutiny of its policies and some of its candidates.
Downing Street has sent strategy and data experts to advise Labour MPs on the kind of messaging that could be potent against Reform UK, with incumbents encouraged to concentrate on what the party dubs “Nigel Farage’s plans to make people pay to access NHS services”.
Farage recently said he was “open to anything” when it came to reform of the NHS, adding he was interested in the model of the French healthcare system “where you pay in to effectively an insurance scheme”.
Reform UK’s 2024 election manifesto, which it described as a “contract”, called for tax relief of 20 per cent on all private healthcare.
Members of the new internal group of Labour MPs have held meetings with officials to discuss polling about “who votes Reform and why”, and to learn about best practice from recent council by-elections involving the two parties.
They have also discussed how to communicate more effectively and reach out to voters through face-to-face meetings.
Some content could not load. Check your internet connection or browser settings.
Several Labour MPs told the Financial Times they were concerned about rising hostility among many voters towards the “old parties” and a willingness to try something different.
“It’s a real ‘Two fingers up to the lot of you’. [Voters] don’t see much difference between the Tories or Labour, they say they are sick of conventional politicians,” said one Labour MP.
“There are a lot of people who have woken up to Reform breathing down their necks and starting to engage with the political challenge,” said another MP.
A caucus of “red wall” Labour MPs representing seats in the Midlands and northern England already exists, plus a smaller “blue Labour” group of socially conservative parliamentarians.
The new internal group includes many of these politicians but it is broader and centrally organised.
One Labour figure said it was a “relatively informal group” and that member MPs would still have a principal focus on delivering for their constituencies and on national issues.
“It’s quite natural for MPs to think about what their opponents will throw at them and discuss how they will take the fight to them,” the person added.
The YouGov poll found the strongest support for Reform UK among older, male, working-class voters who supported Brexit, particularly in the Midlands and northern England.
Separately a small group of Labour MPs will travel to Germany on Thursday as part of a trip organised by Progressive Britain, a campaign group and think-tank, to learn from the rise of Alternative for Germany.
The far-right party is polling ahead of Olaf Scholz’s centre-left Social Democrats before the German election due later this month.
Peter Hyman, a former adviser to Starmer, recently wrote in the New European that Labour could not survive if it offered “business-as-usual”.
“This is an anti-establishment age . . . and people simply don’t want to be shackled by the old ways of doing things,” he added.