A Tory government rules over a discontented nation: the polls show it is headed for catastrophic defeat. As the hapless Prime Minister stumbles into one public-relations blunder after another, commentators say that the race has been all but won by the centre-left opposition. Meanwhile, a maverick populist force under the banner of “Reform” emerges to challenge the Tories from the Right: its leader is a quirky character who nonetheless speaks compellingly about issues practically ignored by the political elite. The fledgling party’s sudden rise threatens not to just upend the dynamics of the race but to permanently realign the country’s politics in one way or another.
This may sound like the current general election campaign in the United Kingdom but it is, in fact, an account of another campaign in another country and in another decade: Canada’s historic 1993 federal election. The Tory government in question was that of prime minister Kim Campbell and her Progressive Conservative Party (or PCs); the centre-left opposition was the Canadian Liberal Party; and the Reform insurgency belonged to Preston Manning, who went on to achieve his ambition of displacing the PCs as Canada’s Right-wing alternative.
The government was reduced from 156 seats to two (a “mating pair”), having been devoured on all sides. It is this aspect of the 1993 campaign, the spectacle of near-total annihilation for the Tory establishment, that so entices Farage and his supporters.
Though the analogy is not exact by any means, Farage has repeatedly invoked the Canadian model of populist transformation in his campaign’s opening phase. As he told the Sunday Times: “Why do you think I called it Reform? Because of what happened in Canada — the 1992-93 precedent in Canada, where Reform comes from the outside, because the Canadian Conservatives had become social democrats like our mob here.”
But what exactly does following this model entail? The answer would depend on which standard of success Farage holds: if he wishes to influence political discourse by moving the Overton Window in the direction of certain ideas, such as dramatically curbing migration, then he could reprise the role he played as the leader of Ukip: as an ideological trendsetter rather than a wielder of power.
At the launch of yesterday’s Reform manifesto — or glibly labelled “contract with the people” — we saw glimpses of this. Pledging to “stop the boats” in 100 days is clearly not a political possibility, but suggesting you can will inevitably draw in voters’ attention. Similarly, Farage claimed his party would massively cut taxes for people on all incomes — a proposal which, when faced with the reality of public finances, is a fantasy. But for Farage and Reform who will never actually have their hands on the treasury pursestrings, it is an easy way to shift the conversation to the Right on taxes.
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