Greens Surge to First Place In Stunning New Poll; Farage's Lead Evaporates

Reform talks like a revolt, the old-right cruelty with a bigger megaphone, but now the Greens have taken the headline with a decent offer. Right, so Lord Ashcroft has published a new poll and Nigel Farage has finally been handed his backside, because Reform UK’s inexplicable months long lead has finally disappeared. Zack Polanski’s Greens have caught him up and just nudged ahead, Farage as a result has lost the clean stretch of road he had been driving on for months, and the man who has been selling himself as the only real home for anti-establishment anger now has to watch Zack Polanski’s party walk into the same space and say hold my beer to him and scat him into second place. Ashcroft’s own write-up calls it an unprecedented three-way tie, rounding off has the Greens, Reform and Kemi Badenoch’s Tories tied on 21%. Actually the figures read greens on 21.4%, Reform on 20.9% and the Tories on 20.5%. I wonder how concerned some of those Tory defectors to Reform might be at this point, it’s looking like less of a sure thing for them now isn’t it? But Ashcroft uses a different method from most pollsters, asking only people who are more than 50% likely to vote at all, how likely they are to end up voting for each party, instead of usual if there was an election tomorrow, who would you vote for? So we have a focus on people who will actually vote rather than weighting polls according to those who may not vote at all. But that caveat does not rescue Farage. A pollster who is not standard shall we say, has still produced a headline that is standard enough for everybody to understand and is certainly reflective of the Greens overall polling trend of the last several months: the Greens are now up where Reform expected to be standing alone with a clear lead. Labour incidentally is down in the teens on just 17%, the Liberal Democrats are miles off in single digits. Farage has sold himself and his party as the only anti-establishment option, but taking on all those Tories and coming out with some abhorrent policy, from ICE style deportation command plans, scrapping sick pay, parental leave, guaranteed work hours under their Employment Rights Act plans and slashing benefits to prop up the triple lock on pensions, the over 65’s the only demographic they currently have a lead with of course.