The recent English, Scottish and Welsh election results did not come from nowhere, Josh Simons argues. They were the product of years in which too many working people felt the system was not on their side, and too many voters came to believe that hard work in Britain no longer guaranteed stability.
Simons says the lesson is blunt. “The first duty of any government is to provide security.” That means military security, economic security, energy security, border security, community security and the basic security that working hard in the UK should not make life feel fragile. “If families are one bill away from trouble, the country is not stable,” he writes, and that line captures the central complaint behind the results: people do not feel protected.
He grounds that argument in experience. Simons says he grew up in Aberdeen in a working-class family with a single mum, and has seen what happens to communities like his in Birmingham when work, opportunities and purpose disappear and never return. Empty high streets, he writes, can make people feel Britain is broken. Too many communities have been hollowed out by decades of economic insecurity, and voters have lived with the consequences for years.
The political case he makes is not just about hardship in the abstract. It is about the way that insecurity has seeped into daily life, from the state of the NHS to the feeling that a household can be tipped into crisis by one unexpected bill. Simons says that if the NHS is not working, people cannot work, which ties public services directly to economic life rather than treating them as separate debates.
That backdrop matters because it helps explain the ground on which Nigel Farage has been able to operate. Simons says Farage has found space created by long-term vulnerability and insecurity. Farage told people Brexit would solve immigration, increase prosperity and restore stability, but Brexit did not solve those problems. Instead, Simons argues, Farage is now offering the same politics again, only with more anger, more division and more slogans.
Here is the tension at the heart of the argument: the frustration is real, but the answer being offered is not. Simons says Farage offers no serious plan for rebuilding the country and no coherent policy programme. That matters because the anger that shaped the election results is not being manufactured out of thin air; it is being channelled through politics that promises release without repair.
The warning for Labour is direct. Simons writes that working-class voters did not abandon the party — “we have forced them to leave” — a formulation that turns electoral blame back on the political system itself. If that is right, then the task now is not simply to argue with Nigel Farage. It is to make security real again in places that have spent decades learning not to expect it.
That is the only way the party can answer the message sent by the latest results: not by mourning lost voters, but by proving that government can make ordinary life feel stable again.
