In Pontypool, I saw the looming threat of Nigel Farage – and how Labour is playing into his hands | John Harris

16 hours ago 3

The south Welsh town of Pontypool doesn’t quite suggest a crucial political frontline. The town centre is full of imposing 19th- and 20th-century buildings that were created in a spirit of pride and optimism but have long since lain empty; local people talk about the shadow of the old iron and coal industries, and the fact that precious little ever came along to take their place. On the Monday afternoon I visited, the most forlorn sight was a huge mural of a local rugby crowd, lovingly sprayed on the exterior of a former discount store: a two-dimensional throng, put there to “inspire people to remember what Pontypool could be like as a thriving community”.

Despite appearances, a significant watershed moment happened here recently. Like so much of south Wales, Pontypool has long been seen as a loyal Labour redoubt – but on 13 February, Reform UK gained its first Welsh councillor in a byelection for the local borough council. The victor was a former army major who won 457 votes to Labour’s anaemic 259, and claimed, when greeting his win, that there would now be no Labour councillors, MPs or members of the Senedd, the Welsh parliament, who could confidently think they represented safe seats. Reform UK is set on banishing the lingering idea of south Wales as a staunch socialist heartland: Nigel Farage intends to make the 2026 devolved Welsh elections “by far our biggest priority”.

In London, meanwhile, the mounting threat from Farage and his comrades and Donald Trump’s return to the White House have triggered a striking political shift, led by Keir Starmer’s chief of staff and supposed strategic super-brain Morgan McSweeney. The government’s stance on immigration has turned sour and punitive: witness those awful videos of illegal migrants being deported, and the Kafkaesque new move to permanently deny UK citizenship to anyone who travelled here via a supposedly illegal and dangerous route. Amid support for a third Heathrow runway and talk of new drilling in the North Sea, the greenery that was once held up to be Starmer’s core idea is withering away. Cuts of up to £5bn in sickness and disability benefits loom.

This was the grim context for Starmer’s announcements of drastic reductions in foreign aid to open the way to an increase in defence spending. While charities and NGOs expressed alarm at what the move would mean for everything from violence against women and girls to the impacts of a heating planet, he said that making the decision had been “extremely difficult and painful”, but it was a choice that snugly fitted the reinvention project known in some circles as Starmer’s “Reformation” (think about it). Such a move, after all, has long been demanded by the rightwing press. Most damningly of all, it is of a piece with Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s summary shut-down of the US Agency for International Development (USAid), and all the chaos it has spawned (in her resignation letter last week, the outgoing international development minister, Anneliese Dodds, pointedly said that the cut was “already being portrayed as following in President Trump’s slipstream of cuts to USAid.”)

A lot of the government’s surrounding mood music fits the same picture. One of McSweeney’s sources of continuing inspiration is the Blue Labour peer Maurice Glasman: the only Labour parliamentarian invited to Trump’s inauguration, and a recent guest on the podcast hosted by the former Trump insider Steve Bannon, the man who recently denied that he had enlivened his speech at the CPAC convention in Washington DC with one of those Hitler salutes. Glasman level-headedly assured his host that “progressives” are his political enemy, “because they actually despise faith, they despise family, they despise love, and they don’t even want you to enjoy sexual intercourse with your wife”. LOL!! He also reckons that “the only place to build a house now is on the left side of Maga Square”, wherever that is. Among the other intellectual freewheelers who have recently been talking to senior Starmer aides is Munira Mirza, the former adviser to Boris Johnson, who is said to be helping with “a sort of critique of liberal multiculturalism”.

While such conversations happen behind the scenes, other signs of the leadership’s new faux-populist mindset are out in the open. Josh Simons is a newly elected Labour MP and trusted ally of McSweeney who I have heard being tipped for quick promotion to the cabinet. During the second parliamentary reading of the government’s border security, asylum and immigration bill, he gave a quite remarkable speech based on his admiration for the ancient Greeks – and specifically their categorisation of migrants as “metics”. Such people, he told the Commons, “were subject to different rules; who joined the city was controlled and the bar was set high for who could become a citizen and vote”. If metics broke Athenian laws, moreover, “they were expelled from the city, and sometimes thrust into the blazing Greek sun.”

Lest anyone think he was getting a bit carried away, this was merely an object lesson in the principle whereby “people who govern themselves control who they are and who becomes a member of the demos”. He had been elected by his constituents in Greater Manchester on the basis that he would not rest “until we gripped our borders, restored control, and … brought down the number of legal migrants entering this country each year – and I meant it”. And he finished with a pithy authoritarian flourish: “We in the Labour party believe in control and order. The opposition do not.”

With or without the classical references, will this kind of talk pull back the people Labour fears it is losing? In Pontypool, it wasn’t hard to find people who were very taken with Farage and his party. One man told me that Farage “gets on with Trump, and we’ve got to stay on their side”. Another said that successive governments had “let too many people across the border … It just seems to me that they’re eating up all the work and taking everything.” What everyone said was woven through with an equally familiar theme: the constant grind of rising food bills and energy prices, and life in a place that had turned into a “ghost town”.

There are two possible approaches to all that. In keeping with their support for Ukraine, the PM and his colleagues are now set on attacking Reform UK over its soft stances on Russia, but there is a queasy contradiction at work: in other areas of policy, the Starmer/McSweeney Reformation looks set to deepen. That will not just bend centre-left politics into impossible shapes, but comes with a profound danger: that it is already making Farage and his ilk sound not just as if they control a huge chunk of the national conversation, but are preferable to whatever semi-skimmed version of populist politics Labour comes up with. Worse still, it is sure to alienate voters who may prefer the Greens, Plaid Cymru, the SNP, or the Lib Dems: over the weekend, the UCL Policy Lab published polling showing that over 40% of 2024 Labour supporters say that if safe routes for refugees were prevented or climate action slowed down, it would stop them voting Labour next time.

Or there might be a plan B. Labour politicians might try their best to rebuild towns such as Pontypool, answer their call for esteem and security, and help them acquire the things whose scarcity informs all those conversations about outsiders: jobs and homes, chiefly, along with the sense that they are no less valued than people who live in more affluent places. They could do that while holding on to what is left of the party’s liberal values, and finally coming up with a convincing response to an increasingly urgent question. If the world is being wrecked by bigoted, climate-denying authoritarians, is leaning into their politics really any kind of answer?