IT IS HARD to recapture the euphoria of Reform UK’s eruption on to the electoral scene last summer: the hope that, at last, we were being offered the chance of voting for a party that actually put the people of this nation first.
True, many of us had good reason to be wary of Nigel Farage’s record. We remembered the parties which he had previously led, only to abandon them at the point when he should have been clinching their breakthrough, but the UK was in such a parlous condition that it was hard to look a gift horse in the mouth. Farage, it seemed, offered a heaven-sent rallying point for the disenfranchised, and, with his undoubted charisma, could act as an effective figurehead in Parliament for all of us who ‘want our country back’. Weren’t those, after all, the very words which attendees at Reform’s pre-election rallies were being encouraged to sing, with a little musical assistance from Verdi?
The euphoria has now subsided.
For me, the first intimation that Reform was not the answer to our prayers was the party’s incomprehensible decision to field a candidate against Andrew Bridgen, arguably the best MP in the Commons: the one who had been active in revealing the scandal of hundreds of sub-postmasters wrongly accused and prosecuted by the Post Office and the Crown Prosecution Service, and who had doggedly spoken out in Parliament in support of the vaccine-injured, at the cost of being thrown out of his ungrateful party and cold-shouldered by craven fellow parliamentarians.
Since then my doubts about Reform have been reinforced again and again: by Farage’s declaration that mass deportations are impossible; by his evident unwillingness to stand up to militant Islamism and his failure to implement his promise to set up a national inquiry into the rape gangs; by his childish reaction when Ben Habib, a serious intellectual asset, left the party; by Richard Tice’s infamous dismissal of the (largely working-class) supporters of Tommy Robinson as ‘that lot’; by the own-goal of ousting of Rupert Lowe from the party and, outrageously, reporting him to the police, using the very ‘hurty-words’ mechanism so repellent to the common-law understanding of what constitutes a crime; by the false claims by party insiders that Lowe is suffering from dementia – claims which a grinning Richard Tice signally failed to contradict; by the wholesale sacking of the organisers of established local branches; by the nit-picking vetting of candidates, refusing to overlook the youthful peccadilloes of many who have since become upstanding citizens, while welcoming with open arms unrepentant Remainers and those whose views on, eg, slavery reparations reveal their lack not only of historical perspective and common-sense, but of attunement to the party’s voting base.
Apologists for Reform point out that it has to be extra careful not to appear ‘extreme’ if it is to succeed in gaining power at the next general election. The all-important voters to be captured, we are told, favour the centre ground. This is nonsense. Do they really believe that the 19,302,215 registered voters who failed to go to the polls last July abstained because they were unable to find a party supporting their centrist views? Do they really think that in the few traditional pubs that remain – you know, the ones that still serve a basic diet of beer and conversation – people are shaking their heads and saying how they wish there were less extreme candidates for them to vote for?
In the Brexit referendum, 33,577,342 turned out to vote; in last year’s General Election the turnout was 28,808,796. If the Remainer view that the referendum was won largely on the basis of a wish to limit immigration is correct, the close on five million gap between these two figures would appear to reflect widespread despair at successive governments’ failure to implement the will of the electorate.
However, it is not a mere five million votes which are up for grabs. As mentioned, in 2024 no fewer than 19,302,215 of those eligible to vote failed to go to the polls. If Brexit was able to achieve the highest turnout for years, how much more effective would a party be in incentivising the hitherto politically inactive, if it announced detailed and properly costed plans to enforce our borders, evicting both foreign and dual-national criminals, and illegal immigrants?
If Reform really wish to win the next General Election they need to look beyond the hard-core voting population to the millions of customary non-voters who, though they have little interest in politics, are outraged by the presence in our cities of no-go-area ghettos imposing their own laws, customs and languages, and by the take-over of our towns and villages, and of our welfare state, by economic migrants from incompatible cultures who are widely regarded as invaders. I do not think that those (including well-assimilated immigrants) who wish to preserve the character of this nation and a decent standard of living for its population are extremists; in fact, it is they who represent the centre of the bell curve, not the public servants and university professors who lecture them on their lack of ‘compassion’ for the thousands being lured dangerously out on to the Channel by the many goodies and, indeed, privileges promised them if they succeed in crossing.
Much may change in the four years until the next General Election. Before then there will be many local elections and by-elections, the first today. We will go to the polls without Reform having issued any overall manifesto, despite the fact that many controversial national policies, not least extreme Net Zero initiatives, are being imposed upon the public at a local level.
Here in North Tyneside we are being required to vote for a mayor we never asked for, and I cannot help being tempted by the Independent candidate who says that, if elected, she would ‘support a People’s Petition to force a referendum to scrap the mayoral position.’ However, since our Reform candidate is the only one outlining actual measures to tackle the mismanagement of public finances and the wasteful obsession with Net Zero and DEI (not to mention potholes), he will get my vote, despite my disillusionment with his leaders.
I can only hope that in 2029 the victorious party will be ready to implement a Great Repeal Act immediately on achieving power. Such an Act, as advocated by David Starkey and supported by, among others, Rupert Lowe, Robert Jenrick and Ben Habib, would return the nation to the constitutional position it enjoyed prior to 1997, scrapping Net Zero and human rights legislation, abolishing quangos, putting upstart judges in their place, and restoring the supremacy of Parliament. To date, nothing suggests that Reform is shaping up to be that party.
