LONDON — Keir Starmer is years away from having to fight Britain’s next election — but he’s already aiming his crosshairs at just one man: Nigel Farage.
Starmer has in recent weeks declared the right-wing populist his main competitor for No. 10 Downing Street, attacking Farage’s emerging policy platform with relish — and framing the fight as a battle for Britain’s soul.
But there are big potential pitfalls in trying to build an anti-Farage electoral coalition.
The center-left Labour leader is anything but popular — and his nemesis appears to be detoxifying in the eyes of the electorate.
“It’s true Farage has high negatives, but so does Starmer — after a term in office and an incumbency drag, a one-on-one fight might not be to his benefit,” said Luke Tryl, of the More in Common think tank.
“The Democrats thought this about Trump in 2016, and a little in 2024, that he was the easier opponent — well, look how that worked out.”
Throwing stones in glass factories
Sleeves rolled up, tie off, Keir Starmer chose a glass factory in the northwestern English town of St Helens to hurl his sharpest attacks at Farage late last week — painting him as a phony friend of the working class.
In Starmer’s vision, he is the one who grew up in a financially unstable household where his dad trudged off to a factory to work long hours to make ends meet. Farage, by contrast, is painted as a privately educated former financial trader who would rather wage culture wars than truly stand up for the working class.
Farage used his own pitch last week to set out billions of increased spending to be paid for by some shaky calculations on cutting climate initiatives. This presented Starmer with the opportunity to brand Farage “Liz Truss 2.0,” tying him to the former prime minister’s infamous tax-slashing mini-budget that sent the markets into a spin and took the Conservatives’ economic credibility down with it.
Starmer challenged the Reform boss to go and face Jaguar Land Rover workers, after Farage once said the icon of British engineering deserves to go bust for a “woke” rebrand.
“Can you trust him? Can you trust him with your future? Could you trust him with your job? Can you trust him with your mortgages, your pensions, your bills?” Starmer asked.
It’s all part of a long-range effort to build an anti-Farage coalition and prevent the Reform UK boss from storming Downing Street at the next opportunity.
“To win elections you need to be seen as a credible PM and be trusted on the economy,” explained one senior government official, who, like others in this piece, was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “Nigel Farage is toxic to many voters.”
A Labour MP who’s well connected in No. 10 sees it similarly to the 2017 election when the Conservatives fended off the “completely Marmite” hard-left candidate Jeremy Corbyn.
Back then, Corbyn may have fired up a base, the MP said, but was “terrifying everyone else and enabling a competent and not very charismatic prime minister to win by people going, ‘We’ll stick with this guy because he’s not scary.’” They now see helpful — if unflattering — comparisons with Starmer.
Labour officials hope Farage is reaching the ceiling of his support — though in national voting intention polling Reform is currently at 31 percent, to Labour’s 23, according to POLITICO’s poll of polls.
This month, Starmer fell to his lowest net favorability rating on record, furthering a trend that’s been in place ever since he won a landslide victory in July’s general election. He currently stands on a dismal -46 percent, with Farage creeping up to a still-unpopular -27.
Polling by Merlin Strategy also puts Farage far ahead of Starmer on a series of favorable metrics. Fun, brave, tells the truth — Farage wins them all. Even when it comes to making “radical decisions” and being “for working people,” Farage comes out on top.
Starmer, instead, triumphs when people are asked who fits the description best on pointless and corrupt.
“It’s not just Starmer is becoming more unpopular, Nigel Farage is becoming less toxic,” Merlin’s founder Scarlett Maguire said. “He’s still polarizing and there’s a lot of the public that really don’t like him but actually he’s the most popular he’s ever been.”
Farage has been on a long road of trying to professionalize Reform UK and to root out the outright racists from their ranks. He’s also trying to upend his long-held Thatcherite, low-tax, small-state politics by embracing typically left-wing causes of nationalization, reindustrialization and less prohibitive welfare measures.
“The combination of those factors means that the prospect of Farage is less existentially scary to voters and that means it is harder to unite them behind a referendum against him and his character,” Maguire said. Like Tryl at More in Common, Maguire points out that this strategy didn’t work in the U.S. when Democrats pinned their hopes on Trump being too toxic to elect
‘Fear has more than often trumped hope’
The research that Labour officials are clinging to dearly is a poll from YouGov showing Farage falls far short when Britons are asked who would make the best PM. Starmer beats him 44 percent to 29.
“When people are asked who they would prefer in No. 10, the answer is clear — Keir Starmer,” the senior No. 10 official said.
Another adviser to the party hinted that Labour is readying to “hammer” Farage on his refusal to commit to the U.K.’s long-held triple lock on pensions, which sees state payments rise by either inflation, earnings growth or 2.5 percent a year, whichever is highest. The policy is incredibly costly, but tinkering with it would prompt a backlash from the powerful grey lobby.
“Historically, fear has more than often trumped hope in British elections,” said the well-connected Labour MP.
To Reform, it looks like the reprisal of the “Project Fear” strategy that the supporters of remaining in the EU in the 2016 referendum waged.
Back then, voters stuck two fingers up at the establishment and backed Farage’s Brexit project instead. There’s nothing to say they won’t do the same again.
“That strategy is wishful thinking and a comfort blanket,” said one ally of Farage of Labour’s new offensive. “The British public would rather vote for something positive than against what they are told is a negative.”
Pressure on the left
Starmer’s focus on Farage can already be seen in moves to tighten immigration, slash foreign aid spending and reduce the welfare budget. But these have been angering his left-leaning base.
Wary of losing votes from progressives too, Starmer has started to shift his tone in recent weeks from a stark “island of strangers” warning about the possible impact of unfettered migration, to telling his MPs he will “fight as Labour” and not try to “out-Reform Reform.”
That, along with hints he could reverse his unpopular cut to winter fuel payments to pensioners and undo a Conservative-era cap on benefits to families with more than two children, has been interpreted as a shift by the PM back towards Labour principles.
Tom Baldwin, a former communications chief to Labour who remains close to the leadership, having written Starmer’s biography, reckons the PM can find a winning way on both flanks — fending off Reform while sticking to Labour values.
“To tell that story with confidence is a far better pace than appearing to dance to Farage’s tune,” Baldwin said.
“There is a reason why the vast majority of people in this country do not want that populist far-right virus here. It’s important this Labour government is seen as the bulwark against that.”
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