Nigel Farage has been a threat to every recent UK prime minister. But this is something new

2 days ago

Nigel Farage is making trouble again,Reform, his latest political vehicle, has surged in the polls, moving into first place with some pollsters, and ruffling feathers on Labour back benches,While Farage has caused headaches for every prime minister since David Cameron, his recent rise is something new,Reform scored an average of almost 25% in January polls, past the peaks achieved by Ukip or the Brexit party in earlier parliaments,And while past Farage surges were spikes driven by circumstances – European parliament elections, the EU referendum, the collapse of Theresa May’s government – the current rise is more sustained.

This Farage boom is no bubble.Something else is new.While earlier Farage parties lagged well behind the traditional parties of government, the current polls show a three-way tie between Reform, Labour and the Conservatives, all on roughly 25%, with the final quarter of the vote going to smaller left and liberal parties.The electoral scene is more fragmented than ever, and this fragmentation has dramatically increased Reform’s disruptive capacity.Neither Ukip nor the Brexit party were credible local threats in many seats, but the current splintered polling takes us into the zone of maximum electoral chaos where Farage is one threat among many, and even small fluctuations in support could have dramatic effects.

The Farage threat is strategic for Labour, but for the Conservatives it is existential.Seven months on from their worst-ever general election result, the Tories are still going backwards.In the latest Opinium poll, the Conservatives lose one in six of their 2024 voters to Reform, while one in three of their 2019 supporters now back Farage’s party.Recovery in opposition will depend on convincing unhappy voters that the Conservatives are the only credible alternative.But every Reform poll lead brings us closer to the point where Farage can turn the tables, convincing discontented voters that Reform UK is the most viable opposition contender, and engineering a further, and perhaps terminal, Tory decline.

While Reform clearly hit the Tories hardest nationally, Farage’s overall impact on the electoral map is messier and harder to gauge.With voters more splintered than ever, national polling becomes unreliable as even a rough guide to first-past-the-post contests where local dynamics could tip the balance in hundreds of seats.As Labour showed us last July, where you win matters more than how many you win.If patterns of support remain constant, then geography still favours Labour and the Conservatives, and hampers Reform, when all three parties are polling in the 20s.But it would be a brave strategist indeed who assumed such stability in today’s volatile context.

How voters understand and respond to changing local conditions is now the central question for every party.Tactical co-ordination among Conservative and Reform voters would drastically amplify the electoral threat to Labour and the Liberal Democrats.But a Tory push into radical right terrain could make them unacceptable to otherwise winnable liberal professional voters, with the spectre of Farage boosting anti-Conservative local campaigns.If Reform’s rise continues, incumbents from all the mainstream parties could make gains if the large cohort of voters who strongly oppose Farage become willing to back whoever can stop his local candidate.Such local dynamics are hard to predict from national polls, because they involve changes which only emerge once an election is close and voters’ minds turn to the local contest.

Election day is a long way off yet, but the Labour MPs representing the 89 seats where Farage’s party came second last July are already worried about how that local dynamic is going to play out.And it is these MPs who are, understandably, making the most noise about the need for a Labour response to the threat posed by Farage and Reform.Sign up to ObservedAnalysis and opinion on the week's news and culture brought to you by the best Observer writers after newsletter promotionBut wooing back Reform voters with red meat on Farage’s favourite issues is a strategy with low prospects of success and high risks.This is an alienated voter group, with little affection and less trust for the Labour government, and a strong preference for Reform on issues such as immigration.A knee-jerk response to Reform also squanders one of the great advantages of government: the power to set the agenda.

Labour won last summer with a ruthless focus on issues which united a broad coalition – growth, public services and the cost of living,Focusing instead on issues which divide Labour and play to Farage’s strengths is not a great strategy,Chasing Reform also puts at risk the large cohort of voters floating between Labour and the cluster of parties – Liberal Democrats, the SNP, the Greens – on its liberal left flank,Starmer’s relentless focus on socially conservative, Brexit-friendly “hero voters” eroded Labour’s appeal with this group, but the overriding urge to evict the Tories kept them on board last July,Now Labour’s hold on its progressive flank is slipping: while three in 10 Labour voters would consider a Reform vote, over four in 10 are thinking about the Lib Dems or Greens.

A populist Labour campaign for Reform votes may be the last straw for many in this socially liberal, viscerally anti-Farage group, putting at risk hundreds of marginal seats where Reform is out of the running, but where Labour needs a united progressive front to prevail next time.Labour’s electoral Jenga tower is already wobbling.A firm push to the right could instead bring it crashing down on the left.

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From Dogecoin to $Trump: everything you need know about the wild world of meme coins

Are they the same as crypto, why has the US president launched one, and who’s really coining it in? Here’s a complete guide to the latest digital money maniaThree days before his inauguration as US president, Donald Trump made an unusual move. He launched $Trump, a so-called meme coin that fans and speculators could buy in the hopes it would gain value. Initially, $Trump soared from a value of $7 to $75 per coin in a day, according to crypto price-tracking website CoinMarketCap. Two days later, it dropped to about $40 – just as incoming first lady Melania Trump launched her own meme coin, $Melania. Even the pastor at Trump’s inauguration ceremony, Lorenzo Sewell, got swept up in the meme coin frenzy, promoting a $Lorenzo version the same afternoon

1 day ago

We didn’t click ‘consent’ on any gambling website. So how did Facebook know where we’d been?

A Facebook user logs into their account and is bombarded with dozens of gambling ads. The promotions for online casinos and betting sites offer free spins, “bet boosts”, discounts and bonuses.But the person has never placed a bet or played a game on a gambling site before – let alone consented to being targeted. How can that happen?The Observer conducted an experiment to find out how potential gambling customers are being tracked, profiled and targeted online.To do this, we visited 150 gambling websites run by companies with licences to operate in the UK

2 days ago

AI is developing fast, but regulators must be faster | Letters

The recent open letter regarding AI consciousness on which you report (AI systems could be ‘caused to suffer’ if consciousness achieved, says research, 3 February) highlights a genuine moral problem: if we create conscious AI (whether deliberately or inadvertently) then we would have a duty not to cause it to suffer. What the letter fails to do, however, is to capture what a big “if” this is.Some promising theories of consciousness do indeed open the door to AI consciousness. But other equally promising theories suggest that being conscious requires being an organism. Although we can look for indicators of consciousness in AI, it is very difficult – perhaps impossible – to know whether an AI is actually conscious or merely presenting the outward signs of consciousness

3 days ago

How some objects can have a mind of their own | Brief letters

I have great empathy with Adrian Chiles’ protectiveness of inanimate objects (Why am I so sad about seeing a robot get beaten up?, 5 February), but these objects can exercise tyranny, so we should beware the jacket that won’t let you put it on, the paper serviette that it is impervious to fluid and, of course, any self-hiding object.Jonathan HauxwellCrosshills, North Yorkshire If President Trump thinks that it is reasonable to relocate 2 million people from the Gaza Strip in the interests of peace (Report, 6 February), presumably the same logic should apply to the 500,000 Jewish settlers illegally occupying lands in the Palestinian West Bank.Ian MartinFalmouth, Cornwall If Donald Trump Jr decided to eat the rare duck he’s alleged to have shot in the Venice lagoon (Report, 5 February), would he get the orange sauce from his dad?David ProtheroHarlington, Bedfordshire When did laundry become the word for getting clothes at home clean (Pass notes, 5 February)? I still do the washing.Janet MansfieldAspatria, Cumbria A case of cutting his nose off despite his face (Makeup artist tried to remove Adrien Brody’s nose by mistake on set of The Brutalist, 6 February).Steve BarnesLondon Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section

3 days ago

Trump’s meme coin sparks more than 700 copycats posing as official crypto

Despite once calling cryptocurrency “a scam”, Donald Trump made a theoretical fortune of billions after launching a self-named and highly controversial meme coin immediately before his second inauguration in January.Now an army of digital imposters is trying to cash in on the president’s name and online presence to make their own crypto killing, according to a report in the Financial Times that details hundreds of “copycat and spam coins” uploaded to Trump’s official wallet in cyberspace.Creators sent more than 700 new meme coins to the wallet in recent weeks, many named after Trump or his family members – but none of them have any formal connection.Experts say speculators can be easily duped by names that make it seem the fake coins are allied to the real $Trump cryptocurrency – which itself has seen a precipitous collapse in value – and risk the digital equivalent of being taken to the cleaners.Eswar Prasad, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an economics professor at Cornell University, told the FT that by launching his own coin, Trump had “opened the floodgates to deception … and at a minimum to rampant speculation”

3 days ago

Parents sue TikTok over child deaths allegedly caused by ‘blackout challenge’

The parents of four British teenagers have sued TikTok over the deaths of their children, which they claim were the result of the viral “blackout challenge”.The lawsuit claims Isaac Kenevan, 13, Archie Battersbee, 12, Julian “Jools” Sweeney, 14, and Maia Walsh, 13, died in 2022 while attempting the “blackout challenge”, which became popular on social media in 2021.The US-based Social Media Victims Law Center filed the wrongful death lawsuit against the social media platform TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, on behalf of the children’s parents on Thursday.Matthew Bergman, the founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center, said: “It’s no coincidence that three of the four children who died from self-suffocation after being exposed to the dangerous and deadly TikTok blackout challenge lived in the same city and that they all fit a similar demographic.“TikTok’s algorithm purposely targeted these children with dangerous content to increase their engagement time on the platform and drive revenue

3 days ago

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