Diane Abbott has issued a pertinent reminder to Labour about Nigel Farage and the risk of giving him too much “free publicity.”
This week, Labour’s conference has been taking place in Liverpool, and there’s been much discussion of Farage and how the government can fight the rise of Reform.
In fact, Reform and Farage have probably been the main topic of conversation at the conference.
There’s good reason for this of course, with the right-wing party having led the polls for months and clearly representing the biggest threat to Starmer’s government at this point in time.
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But during an appearance on Newsnight, veteran Labour MP Diane Abbott reminded her party that Reform do only have five MPs in parliament.
She warned that, whilst it’s important for Farage to be called out, Labour are at risk of turning him “into a bigger figure than he is” if they focus too much on him.
Abbott said: “He’s only got five MPs. I’m all for people giving him a good kicking, but the danger is if you give him too much free publicity you turn him into a bigger figure than he is.”
She pointed to the example of the Social Democratic Party in the 1990s as how support for a party can fall away almost as quickly as it arrived.
“I’m old enough to remember the SDP, at one point the SDP had massive polls, all the mainstream papers supporting them, they had all the stars of the era – and their polling lead collapsed,” Abbott explained.
“You’ve got to remember, this is Nigel Farage’s third party and I think people shouldn’t be too frightened of his polling lead because he can be beaten.”