Reform: the penny drops

Rupert Lowe has made a statement on X.

I have received countless questions on my recommendation for who to vote for this Thursday, and I have thought long and hard about the answer. Here is my honest assessment:

For months, I pushed Reform to propose radical, but credible policies. To detail it, with substance and costings. Write it down, produce policy documents. I was mocked and ignored. I hoped that there might be some form of plan for these elections, maybe a well-thought out policy or two? To even go as far to write a proposal - not thrown together on a flashy social media graphic, but in properly constructed sentences on an actual document. None came. Nothing.

All we get, day after day after day, is glossy pictures of Nigel Farage. No manifesto, just an empty promise that ‘Reform will fix it’. HOW? Please, tell me how? If I have to watch another overproduced video of Farage, I’ll vomit turquoise coloured confetti. Sweeping shots, backed by booming dramatic music, of the man going about mundane campaigning activities. It’s a parody. Where is the policy?! All we get is vacuous bull, piled on top of more vacuous bull - purely designed to pump up Farage’s ego at a time when British airspace is already dangerously full.

I’m not interested. I want numbers, detail, substance. A plan.

When even vague policy has been discussed by Reform, what happened?

In January, when Farage announced that Reform would hold an inquiry into the rape gangs - I was so proud to be a Reform MP. Using our parliamentary platform in order to deliver justice. Launching a campaign that would bring real change for thousands of victims. We gave those women and their families genuine hope. What did Farage do? He took the credit, did the media rounds, got his social media views and then dumped the idea. With no explanation, and with no apology. It makes my skin crawl.

I felt so ashamed to have been a part of that vile circus act. I still do. It’s just not how I operate. I am sorry for my role in it. As you know, I have worked so hard over the last month attempting to repair that mistake through launching our own inquiry. What was Farage’s response to that fundraising effort from almost 20,000 supporters? He said there’s ‘no point’. Class, he certainly lacks.

Then on deportations, amazingly Farage won’t commit to deporting all illegal migrants - he still refers to those ‘that enter’, future tense. Every illegal migrant living in the country must go. We don’t need clever word play, we need categorical commitments. As you know, Farage personally instructed me to remove the term ‘mass deportations’ of illegal migrants from my speech. He calls it a ‘political impossibility’, and ‘a very grave, dark and dangerous use of language.’

Reform even blocked me on their social media channels for quoting Farage’s own words on this. A party of supposed ‘free speech’ should be willing to take some mild criticism from an independent MP, surely?

I tabled a motion in the Commons calling exactly for the mass deportation of all illegal migrants.

Has Farage signed it? Tice? Anderson? No. None. More Conservative MPs have supported my mass deportation motion than Reform.

Please listen to me when I say this - Reform’s leadership does not share the opinions of the membership on so much of such importance. Perhaps most concerningly? Farage alarmingly states if we ‘politically alienate’ the whole of Islam, we ‘will lose’. Think very carefully about what he is saying here.

My view? There needs to be an honest national debate around the influence of Islam, and how it is shaping our way of life against the wishes of the vast majority. Farage does not share that opinion, and pushes the same crippling cowardice that has allowed our civilisation to be held hostage out of fear of offending one religion - Islam.

British values need to be robustly and courageously defended, even if that results in unpleasant insults of racism and ‘islamophobia’ from an establishment that will always hate us. I don’t care about that. Sadly, Farage does and that fear shapes him.

The Reform suggestion of ‘Net Zero’ immigration is entirely inadequate - that would still be accepting hundreds of thousands of migrants into the country every year. For the foreseeable future, there needs to be significantly more people leaving the UK than entering. Not just including the removal of illegal migrants, but also those who came legally yet have failed to uphold their end of the deal.

Again, just more Reform pandering to the ‘middle’ ground of politics. We don’t need additional centrist rot. We need radical change. Reform does not offer that, and it’s getting softer every day.

I won’t dwell on my own experience with the exit from Reform - you all know what happened. I want to focus on policy and substance.

So please tell me, where are the comprehensive local election policies? On potholes, social care, high street renewal, bins, public transport, housing policies, education, SEND support, children’s care, planning, business rates, parking. I could go on. Can you name one proper detailed local election policy? I can’t.

These local councils really matter - they play a huge part in all of our lives.

I simply cannot endorse a party that has put so frighteningly little thought into what it would actually do with power. Reform’s plan is to ride the protest wave, faced with two obscenely unpopular mainstream parties, but offer absolutely nothing constructive - chasing power for the sake of power. To ‘win’ the game, and it is a game to them.

Reform leadership has treated its own membership like dirt - dictated to them, ignored them, used them. Central planning doesn't work in politics any more than it worked in the Soviet Union. Real movements trust their people. Reform does not. Members cast aside, failing ‘vetting’ for no good reason, woeful delegation. The branches are what makes a political party. The work is done on the streets, not in some flashy London office. Reform members are good, honest people - they deserve better.

Great leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders.

In Reform, there is space for one, and only one. There can only ever be one.

For years, people on our side of politics voted for the ‘least worst option’. It got us nowhere. I don’t see any point doing it again - principles matter. Would I vote for Reform? No, is the honest answer. Britain doesn’t need a protest, it needs a plan - Reform has not presented anything near one. A vote for Reform on Thursday is an endorsement of their condescending electoral strategy, fuelled by arrogance, rage and ego - not a genuine passion for any radical change.

Reform is not the answer.

This is not a General Election. Vote for a candidate who cares about your local community, and has considered/presented credible policies on how they can actually benefit your area. I wouldn’t worry too much about the colour of the rosette this time - do what is right for your community. It’s not ‘letting Labour in’. Labour is in. And will be firmly ‘in’ until 2029. Nothing that happens this week will change that.

At the time of these elections, I will be an independent MP - it will not remain that way forever.

There will be an alternative to Reform, I promise you that.

There’s very little to disagree with here. Some of it looks close to something I might have written on this very Substack. To see it coming from someone near the top of the political food chain is something of a vindication. Or at least it would be if I still had skin in the game. My interest in this lot has evaporated.

Had my thinking not evolved I would now be backing Lowe to the hilt, and would be excited by a new venture with him at the helm. He’s slowly getting it. On Saturday, Lowe remarked that “It’s not just illegal migrants who need to leave - it’s also those who came legally, but have failed to uphold their end of the deal”. He has, in effect, come out for remigration.

The thing is, though, I just don’t see this translating into serious policy. Lowe is right to talk about the need for policy, but I know of absolutely no-one on that end of the political spectrum who’s capable of the joined-up thinking it requires to develop a coherent policy platform. Amateurism is in the DNA and it is not solved by cutting up their Reform membership cards. Lowe is no exception.

Lowe himself reveals the faultline when he says "British values need to be robustly and courageously defended". But "British values" are a confected Blairite nonsense, and as a concept, it means nothing at all. My country, my people, are not a nebulous set of values. The civnats will go into a torturous tailspin to avoid conceding this obvious fact - and it taints all their subsequent output, basing their policy and rhetoric on something that nobody can actually define - which leads to the same witless bleating about "integration" - an even greater fiction than "British values".

As I’ve outlined before, Reform’s basic problem was the lack of an intellectual foundation, without which it was never going to develop a coherent policy platform. Any new party is going to need a philosophical anchor, and if it’s based on “please don’t call us racist” civic nationalism then it produces more or less the same results. It could even be worse, in that the civnat right wants to pick a fight specifically with Islam rather than dealing with garbage immigration as a whole.

I could perhaps give Lowe more credit though. I have previously outlined a “muscular civic nationalist” approach to immigration, which is not that dissimilar to that of the Homeland Party remigration policy, and it recently became the Ukip manifesto. It is possible Lowe could surprise us. He could get close enough to the mark that he deserves a free pass from me. But it takes more than that. Policy must also inform communications and give direction to activists. They could produce a decent manifesto, but I’m not sure they’d know precisely what to do with it. Ukip didn’t.

Whether you agree with the Homeland Party or not, it's proving my point about all the things I said about Reform. Because, as a party, we have certain foundational principles, there is a structure and a common lexicon to our messaging, we're singing from the same hymn sheet, and we have detailed policy. Consequently, whenever I'm asked any questions, or need to write about an event in the news, I have plenty of reference material to hand that I can copy and paste, and I can respond in an instant. I have more to go on than a loose collection of slogans and bullet points. As a result, there is message discipline, coherence, clarity and uniformity.

When I said Reform needed policy, people told me nobody would ever read it. That was never the point. It is there to provide a frame of reference for your activists, talking points and arguments. If you have policy, it is multifunctional resource. The more credible it is, the better you’re able to establish a reputation for credibility - which Reform has failed to establish. Today, Rupert Lowe said "I simply cannot endorse a party that has put so frighteningly little thought into what it would actually do with power". He's not wrong about that. No serious person can recommend or endorse Reform because of it. They are not subject experts in anything at all. They are amateurs to the core.

This is why, when I joined Homeland, I insisted that we must have comprehensive policy. Best of all, I was kicking at an open door. Ant Burrows and Kenny Smith did not disagree. We've been developing policy ever since. Now we are beginning to enjoy the fruits of that work.

Because we have foundational principles, our subsequent policies will guided and informed by them, and by the time we have a full manifesto, we will have comprehensive, detailed, and consistent platform which new activists can learn and disseminate. This avoids embarrassing situations where we have spokesmen making things up on the fly, and contradicting the party. This is the model. This is what works. And this is how any serious party should be going about their business. As a thought exercise alone, Homeland is worth the effort.