What Reform does is threaten the other parties about what might happen if they continue to ignore the wishes of the vast majority of the UK voting population,.
They know that they can not guarantee that they will be elected because their habitual voters will just vote for them anyway. Now they have an alternative who speaks THEIR language.
Labour had its 'Red Wall' moment in 2019 when swathes of traditional Labour heartland voters voted Tory. What did the party do? It moved decisively away from Cobyn's lunatic, leftism and Starmer, who used to stand behine Corbyn grinning and clapping, now has a different agenda, one shaped by what happened in 2019.
Those voters who trusted Johnson were BADLY let down by the ineptitude of the Johnson/Sunac government. Utter incompetence. The result? No party in recent memory has been punished so badly and that memory continues. They deserved every bit of pain. Now they will change, or they will die as an electoral force.
Starmer's government sees the writing on the wall right now. His voters went for Reform in the local elections, and the party is responding.
They have backtracked on the Pensioner's Winter Fuel Allowance, and have begun to tighten up on mass inward migration. More scam, asylum seekers, fleeing the danger of life in France are being deported, and Labour figures are also talking about sending failed asylum seekers to third countries - pretty much the Rwanda scheme. Does anybody really think that Labour as we knew it, without the barking dog of Reform at its backside, would be considering that?
Labour is also tackling the ballooning problem of young working age people applying for disability benefit when there is nothing wrong with them. Those numbers have exploded in the last couple of years a trend not seen anywhere else in the world.
I am all for this. The problem with conviction politicians is that they think that never changing their mind is a virtue. It is not. Changing policy is what any sensible person does whenever things aren't working .
I don't want any politician making laws to control my life thinking he or she mustn't deviate from some principle he used to believe in when the present circumstances indicate that it doesn't work and something else is needed.