WE HAVE been predicting it for a long time. Laura Perrins made her warning in October 2017 when Theresa May announced her race audits. A party that conserves nothing and uses the State as its ideological enforcement arm deserves to die. Far from renouncing May’s identity politics and state interventionism, Boris Johnson made matters worse. He doubled down on Net Zero, opened our post-Brexit borders to mass migration and a rising tide of asylum exploitation, closed the country down and forced barely tested vaccines on an unsuspecting public. Sunak was party to all that, and Badenoch too.
Well, we heard the death knell sound for the Conservatives this week. Kemi, like her predecessors, failed to heed our warning. She neither apologised for nor promised retraction of the party’s failed policies, notably its ‘left progressive’ and Statist approach to government. Her only concessions to the conservative critics – on Net Zero – came across as initially reluctant and less forceful thanTony Blair’s. Kemi was part of these disastrous administrations.
All the more stupid then were the Tory MPs and party members who voted her in as their next doomed leader. Without someone untarnished or who at least had indicated some understanding of the extent of change needed, they had no hope. Suella Braverman was the only one to come anywhere close. The man of course who shouldered none of this toxic burden was Nigel Farage. As he’s said more than once in recent weeks, he has much to be grateful to Kemi for. Indeed, he has.
Yesterday, The Telegraph published eight charts that showed the scale of Tory defeat and Reform victory in the local elections, ones that will go down in history as the day the Conservatives became a third party. Just 15 per cent of the vote went to them. It was by far their worst result, previously only having dropped as low as 25 per cent in 1995.
Reform UK now has control of ten local authorities, two mayoralties and a new 5th MP. No one can deny the formidable nature of Farage’s victory. Its significance, as the veteran pollster Sir John Curtice pointed out, was that it was a win not just of the vote share but of the (council) seats reflecting it; unlike the General Election, when despite winning over 14 percent of the vote, the new party took only five seats.
No wonder there is much chat about this being the end of two-party politics and the long-predicted extinction of the Tories.
But there’s another possibility the MSM doesn’t consider. Are we only witnessing Reform rising like a phoenix from the Tory ashes, only in a different guise? Vote Reform and get Conservative was a popular social media meme. Time will tell on the extent and rapidity of Tory defection to Reform, or which MPs and councillors will Nigel approach and select. My guess is, seeing the writing on the wall, it will be Tories not Nigel making the move. One woman, if he has any sense, he make overtures too, is Suella Braverman. He needs her. The only really radical Tory and importantly the only politician yet brave enough to call for the repeal of the oh so damaging Equality Act – conceived by Harriet Harman and birthed by the Tory-detoxifying but toxic Theresa May.
There’s no doubt that Farage has succeeded in what he set out to do and has played his hand brilliantly. It was never to create a radical dissenting force in British politics comparable to RN in France or the AfD in Germany. All now banned or threatened with banning. It was always to do a reverse takeover of the Conservative Party. He has always wanted respectability, something the Establishment Tory elite has consistently denied him. Yet he spent his political career ruthlessly purging first UKIP, and this year, Reform UK, of anyone who might upset this much desired image. Even if it meant dispensing people with talent, energy and ability to change things – movers and shakers from the Nigel Jacklins of local politics to Rupert Lowe nationally, so be it. Even if it meant distancing himself from his once best friend, Donald Trump.
It has dismayed me, along with many TCW readers, and tempered my enthusiasm for him. Excluding seriously competent and principled men (unquelled by woke niceties) has been disturbing to say the least. I don’t believe they would have compromised his victory. In fact, many now disenchanted Farage fans voted for Reform UK despite this not because of it, like Gillian Dymond who set out her growing doubts for us here last week.
Voters will be looking hard at just how radical the people they have voted in will prove to be. The first test for the two new mayors, I tweeted yesterday, will be whether they rein in their two-tier ‘thought police’ forces that Niall McCrae reported on last week. We will be watching.
However, it would be churlish to deny the level of Farage’s achievement. The vote he won has forced a breakthrough in the atrocious and unjustified ‘age old’ MSM bias against him and his latest party, Reform UK. No longer can it be diminished as ‘just another party’.
TCW never fell into that trap. We have been behind the movement and tidal wave Farage drove with Reform – all down to Farage’s extraordinary talent and qualities as a political speaker and communicator. I wrote at the time of the General Election, that it revolved around Farage despite the MSM conspiracy of silence. And so it has proven.
No the MSM can’t deny the electorate’s voice. For once, for this moment, they are in control, not the MSM. It marks loud and clear the change the public wants and voted for. It can’t be denied; nor the fact they want neither Tory or Labour.
The million-dollar question we are left with is what Farage do now. With the confidence this must have given him, will he listen to and act on the anger of the average citizen about ‘uni-party globalism’, unfettered migration, population replacement, Islamism, sectarianism, repression of free speech. Will he be big enough to let some other political big beasts into the ‘cabinet for change’ he needs to build? It’s essential. He needs more than Matt Goodwin. The social media commentator and author Daniel Jupp is not just doubtful about this but downright sceptical if not cynical – as many other disillusioned dissenters will be. Reform UK have ridden a wave that they have already betrayed, he wrote yesterday.
So, after all could it be just a matter of ‘the King is dead, long live the King’? Or does the historic vote herald real change, with Farage as the gatekeeper of that? The jury is out.
In the meantime, no change for us. Our ability to advertise to make money to help pay for TCW’s pursuit of the truth remains curtailed. Last week, as two pop up ads appeared out of the blue on the site, I wondered if the era of overt Google Ads censorship was over. We approached them to request a formal reinstatement. It turned out to be a false dawn. Their reply was a startlingly emphatic NO. Google Tech billionaire CEO Sundar Pichai might have attended President Trump’s inauguration, I thought, but for sure he is not on board with the President’s attack on woke ideology. Their reply to us on our list of thought crimes was in a masterclass all of its own. Line after line of defamation, but we are powerless. Once Google ‘blacks’ you for running ads, so do all other advertisers. So we continue to be demonetised, and struggle to survive. The only thing that cheered me was a very different message from a Czech scientist who reads the site. He told one of our writers, Sally Beck, that TCW has been one of the very few sane voices during the past years. I think he speaks for many.
