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Nigel Farage has given in to Boris Johnson’s deal – and it might be a gift for Labour

Only days ago Farage was demanding a grandly named ‘non-aggression pact’ from the Tories; and that only if Conservative candidates ‘renounced’ the Johnson deal – ‘another EU treaty’ – would they be able to avoid the onslaught of the mighty Brexit Party army

Sean O'Grady
Monday 11 November 2019 15:33 GMT
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General Election: Nigel Farage says Brexit Party will not contest seats won by Conservatives in 2017

So much for the bad boy of Brexit then. So much for being Boris Johnson’s “worst enemy”, as he promised to be if the UK was not out of the EU for good on 31 October, and standing against every Tory he could find.

Nigel Farage has caved.

Superficially it seems like good news for the Tories – and it is for those in the 317 seats won in 2017 – where Farage is pulling out. Elsewhere, where the Tories dream of building a majority, the picture is much less clear, and Farage may even end up helping Labour and the Lib Dems.

Still, it is a bit of a climbdown. Only days ago Farage was demanding a grandly named “non-aggression pact” from the Tories; he insisted that Johnson tear up his own withdrawal agreement; and that only if Conservative candidates “renounced” the Johnson deal – “another EU treaty” – would they be able to avoid the onslaught of the mighty Brexit Party army. Now he is concentrating on trying to limit the scale of Johnson’s victory. If his strategy works, he will end up with another minority Johnson administration, but with the Brexit Party holding the balance of power in the Commons.

It is the best Farage can now hope for. His old time dream of a great Ukip-Brexit Party-Conservative-DUP alliance lies in ruins. He is more likely to attract Conservative Eurosceptic voters in Labour seats than Labour voters in those seats, and, ironically, help Labour to hang on to some of them, provided the Brexit push is not so unstoppable as to sweep the incumbent Labour MP away.

So now the “Leave alliance” Farage sought – demanded – by Farage has been enacted “unilaterally”, by him – a fine piece of soft spin. He says he will no longer fight 600 seats across Great Britain (even assuming his candidates actually stick with him). The 317 Tory seats won at the last election will not find any official Brexit Party challenge (though you’d imagine some independents and the rump Ukip might want to fill the modest space left). Instead he will target “London dominated” Labour in his heartlands, on behalf of the five million Leave voters who happened to be Labour voters too. That, by the way, is the “London dominated” Labour Party that has the distinctively northern voices of John McDonnell, Angela Rayner, Rebecca Long-Bailey and Jon Ashworth so prominent in is campaign.

The central truth about the Brexit Party, as enunciated by John Curtice, is that for every one vote they take from Labour they are capable of taking two from the Conservatives. This is the case irrespective of where those voters happen to live. The Brexit Party’s decision not to stand in Conservative-held seats may merely mean the Tories build up larger majorities in the seats they already hold; and to protect them, a bit, from any Labour incursions on Tory-held seats (so far such incursions are non-existent). Thus, Farage is indeed helping to keep the Conservatives in power – but not to help deliver any sort of Johnson landslide. To that extent – but to only that extent – he has signed up to the Johnson deal, which only a few days ago he was denouncing as a sell-out, not much different to the Theresa May deal. Farage is, to put a generous spin on things, trying to keep Johnson on a leash, depriving him of a big majority, but not allowing Corbyn into Downing Street either. In the outer reaches of the Farage fantasy there will be a solid bloc of Brexit Party MPs in the Commons to make him a kingmaker.

Expect, of course, there won’t. In reality these northern Labour seats will, at worst, suffer reduced majorities for their Labour incumbents. It is possible that some great Brexit Party surge will hand a few to the Conservatives, or to the Brexit Party itself, but it seems doubtful. There is as yet no sign of a mass defection to the Brexit Party in places such as Grimsby or Wigan, as, admittedly there has at times been in the past – and even if it does happen it is more likely to be the right-wing Tories defecting to the Brexit Party than ex-Labour voters. The disillusioned Labour voters had mostly all departed by 2017. People such as Richard Tice standing for the Brexit Party in Hartlepool have the best chance of getting in by attracting votes from both the larger parties and slipping in through the middle. This is also because Labour will also lose some votes to the Liberal Democrats/Greens/Plaid Remain alliance. On balance, Labour MPs ought to be more concerned about their middle-class professional pro-EU voters (and yes they do exist in the north) switching to the Liberal Democrats than the working classes turning either to the Brexit Party or the Tories.

In other words, Farage’s intervention in the 2019 election will either make little difference or he will attract Tory-Labour swing voters in Tory target seats in the north, the midlands and Wales – and may then deprive the Tories of winning a vital few seats that would make the difference between another hung parliament (which is what 317 Tory seats in the Commons actually means) and a decent working majority for Johnson.

On the whole, though, the Brexit Party is increasingly a paper tiger. It just hasn’t got the firepower to win many battles for anyone, let alone itself. It is on about 9 per cent of the polls, and has been on a long decline since the high point of the European elections in the summer. It is around half the size of the Lib Dems. It is being marginalised by the Tories. There is no great appetite among many voters – Labour, Tory, ex-Ukip/Brexit Party, or stay-homes – for the kind of ultra-hard Brexit advocated by Farage. For those who are actually that bothered about Brexit, what Johnson has brought back is “good enough”. For others, Brexit doesn’t matter as much as schools, the NHS, social care or benefits. As we now see, there isn’t even much appetite among those around Farage himself for a Farage-style hard Brexit, if it risks losing Brexit altogether.

One obvious weakness is that the Brexit Party vote is far too evenly distributed to make much progress in our first-past-the-post system. It was this way, even when it was running at double or treble its current levels, when there was a real belief in some places (eg David Cameron’s Downing Street) that Ukip could storm to power. Just recall the days when Farage and Ukip were in their pomp a few years ago. At the 2015 election they won just one parliamentary seat – Douglas Carswell in Clacton (and who has since left Ukip, and backed the Johnson deal). Farage, despite his sky-high profile, has failed time and again to get into the Commons. On 9 per cent, the Brexit Party cannot throw its weight around.

Of course the great irony, as let slip by minsters such as Michael Gove recently, is that the Johnson deal actually still allows for a no-deal Brexit at the end of the transition period in any case. If there is no free-trade agreement negotiated – it does not actually exist, you know – then the UK will have to revert to World Trade Organisation rules with the EU from 1 January 2021 or, if there’s an extension, 1 January 2022, or some other mutually agreed time. There will be chaos, Northern Ireland excepted. All that stuff about tariffs on car exports and food imports, about lorries queueing and shortages of loo roll and medicines, about having to get an international permit to drive in France, and all the other “scare” stories put about by both sides, will come true.

In other words Farage’s best Brexit is still “on the table”. Maybe Farage realises this, or not. It seems much of the rest of the country has still not woken up to the fact that the Johnson deal is a trap door to a no-deal Brexit. That, indeed, is the problem.

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