@nprofile1q... What annoys the hell out of me is that polling has been consistently saying this *for a long time*. Voters picked up by the Farage parties did contain a large proportion of ex-Labour voters in the past, especially in the middle of the last decade, but that has long since reduced to the merest trickle (one could reasonably argue that every traditional Labour voter who was inclined to move that way has already done so and there's nobody left of that mindset).
What polling in the past two years has shown overwhelmingly and unequivocally is that new Reform supporters are Tories, and moreover, the kind of Tories who are never going to vote Labour (or any left party) under any circumstances.
Pursuing Reform votes now makes as much sense as if Harold Wilson had decided that his key target voters were wealthy farmers in the home counties.
I'm inclined to blame the leadership's focus being within a narrow media bubble, where what's on the front pages matters more than what voters actually think. And of course the Mandelson circle who seem to believe that the kind of disenchanted Tory voters they could attract in 1997 are still a constituency that exists in any sense.
