It's Reform vs. the world

The party is standing more candidates than either Labour or the Conservatives

This week was the publication of the Statement of Persons Nominated (SOPN). An obscure title, I concede. But it’s the exciting moment in advance of any local or national election when you can find out who you’re up against at the ballot box. How many candidates, really, are contesting this seat or that seat in the next few weeks?

I recall my moment in 2023, excitedly laying out how all the candidates would appear on the ballot paper in the ward I was contesting, and whether I - being a Walker, sited at the bottom of a very long and folded ballot sheet - might end up forgotten by the voters.¹

We are only a few weeks out from this year’s council elections. It will be Kemi Badenoch’s first as Conservative party leader. It will be Keir Starmer’s first at the head of an already beleaguered administration. And it is Nigel Farage’s first as the leader of an insurgent party polling one quarter of the national vote, neck-and-neck with Labour and an error margin ahead of the Conservatives.

Much of Shire England will be up for grabs on 1st May. These parts lean more Tory than the national average. And in 2021 - when most of them were last up - they went Tory by overwhelming margins.

The assumption that in a backlash to Labour this will happen again is wide off the mark. Reform are gunning for control of more than a select few locales, including Tory-run Lincolnshire and Kent; and Labour-run Doncaster and Durham. We’ll get to how feasible all that is in a later post. But I must comment on this. How organised Reform has become.

Ukip had an incapacity for organisation. A shoe-string, bubble-gum around the wire approach to campaigns dogged its rise all the way. However hard the party moved to professionalise, at one point employing a handful of bored kids in North Wales to sift through and reject (or not) racist candidates, it was still found to fall at the first hurdle.

Which makes the SOPN findings of the week just gone all the more stark.

Because Reform are standing more council candidates in this year’s slew of elections than Labour or the Conservatives.

There can be reasons for this. But before I play spin doctor, let’s look at the data.

The good people at the Vote UK forum have done the final tabulating - not me. And I owe them the debt of gratitude here. The findings are this. In the North, Reform are standing the second most number of candidates to Labour. And in the South, Reform are, likewise, standing the second most number of candidates to the Conservatives.

In essence, it’s Reform vs. the rest of them. A Reform candidate guaranteed on almost every ballot paper. Something neither Lab or the Cons can as confidently claim.

The Lib Dems are putting in an equally competitive performance in the South and East of England. Whereas the Greens aren’t doing quite so well at finding candidates as previous. In 2023 they could only stand in 55 per cent of the wards up. In 2024 that number had risen to an impressive 74 per cent. But this year it’s fallen back to 72 per cent.

The notable underperformance of the Cons putting up candidates in the North should arrest anyone of the view the local associations, still smarting from their defeat, are anywhere close to mounting a serious organised recovery.

But back to Reform. I cannot emphasise enough how a supposedly fringe party standing in almost every seat is not normal stuff. It’s impressive.

Now I recall the Ukip years when there was almost an article a day in the summer of 2013 outing this candidate or that for genuine views about gay people and their involvement in flash floods; or a little bit of “common sense” posted after a few pints on Facebook. Finding the numbers is a win for Reform. But not disowning them after they open their mouths will be the hard ask.

1. Spoiler: thankfully, the voters didn’t forget me. But I ended up winning with 93 fewer votes than my party colleague whose surname started with C! And I begrudge that difference of votes every waking day.