Reform's ticket to nowhere

I know I’m not meant to criticise Nigel Farage (PBUH) but he sure does have a knack of making my point for me. Having publicly dropped Reform’s policy of offshore detention for dinghy migrants in a TV interview, he’s gone and done it again. Not once, but twice. Farage has personally endorsed two DUP candidates despite an alliance with TUV.

This is classic bull-in-a-China-shop Farage. Reform’s pact with the TUV was announced by the party’s then-leader Richard Tice in March this year. Tice will have done this on the recommendation of Ben Habib who has been plugging away at NI politics for a while. But predictably, Reform's strategy and values are all based on the whim of Farage depending on what side of the bed he falls out of on any given day.

We then find he has contradicted Reform’s health policy as written by Dr David Bull. Dr Bull then has to account for the disparity on Times Radio. That's why Farage is an absolute liability, and that's why there is zero point investing any intellectual energy in Reform. The diligent work of other party members gets binned with one careless Farage outburst. You simply cannot build a movement based on the whims of a shambolic leader.

Ben Habib has previously described Farage as a “maverick”, but what he means by that is “loose cannon". Nothing is ever fixed or agreed, and the party position is subject to change at any moment.

To Farage worshippers, this doesn’t matter, but actually, reputation does matter in politics. I noticed. Times Radio noticed. And so will others. This party doesn’t stand for anything, and in all probability policy is going to be whatever the last person Farage spoke to said it should be.

This is described as “agility” by Farage’s apologists but it ultimately says Reform is a cult of personality, and its members have no more idea what the party stands for than anyone else. This just isn’t a sustainable way of working and it’s going to backfire.

As such, I see no reason to support Reform and I take the view that the party will do considerable damage, especially when you take into account all the other fundamental problems with it.

Yesterday I remarked on X that “I am hoping Reform gets zero seats because the absolute last thing we need is to be represented by whatever unvetted dregs the Reform party machine coughs up. There is no scenario where a Farage-led entity pays off. It's a ticket back to square one”.

I took a lot of flak for this, but I have something my readers on X evidently don't. (i.e. a long term memory). I remember well the ongoing friction between Carswell and Farage. Any time Farage has to share the limelight there's a big, public fall out. There's no reason to believe Farage has changed. History will repeat.

If, for example, Lee Anderson and Farage make it into parliament, they'll be fighting like rats in a sack within a month or so. Anderson will say something unwise, and the media (knowing how to game them) will go to Farage for clarification, who will softly disown the remarks, forcing Anderson either to retract, double-down or go quiet. Either way, the seeds of annoyance are then planted.

The Times will then run a hit piece about divisions within Reform, citing an anonymous source, and it will become its own self-fulfilling prophecy. Farage will keep Anderson on a tight leash and won't share the limelight, and Anderson will end up quitting the party seeing out his remaining term as an independent.

If it's not Anderson, it will be somebody else (one of the unvetted). Farage will be lumbered with colleagues he doesn't like and is quietly embarrassed by. Every time they open their mouths, Farage will be on damage control stand-by mode. He's doubly screwed if he ends up with a June Slater stereotype as a parliamentary colleague.

In fact, the better Reform does, the worse it will be for Farage, because his entourage will be intellectually subnormal. Reform can't then shake off the perception that they're thick as mince. You're then an object of ridicule (and not in a a recoverable way).

There's no outcome where a hastily cobbled together campaign with paper candidates results in a team of a high calibre MPs who can solidify Reform's gains and build a reputation for competence in office. They will be useless constituency MPs and they will lose whatever local support they had.

In all probability, Farage will be the only Reform MP left standing by the end of the term, cementing the view that Reform is a personality politics vehicle and not a serious contender for government. This is what happens when you sacrifice a long term growth strategy for short term (largely pointless) electoral gains. The lightbulb burns twice as bright, but for half as long.

I’m absolutely certain that Reform will crash and burn eventually. I am not wrong about this. There are two basic strategies available to an insurgent party. The first is to build a movement, which through its own political might, breaks into the mainstream and builds on it to become a serious contender for government.

To do that, though, you have to be more than just a flamboyant one-man-band operation. You need ideological roots and a sense of purpose. Without it there is no unity later down the line, and the moment you win power, it all falls apart.

You also need a national organisation with competent management. You can't win without an effective local ground game. You need a top team with credible people who can argue and defend policy. It cannot rest on one man, especially one without any self-discipline who makes it up on the fly. It can withstand a novelty act like Farage so long as there is some part of the leadership that knows how and when to get serious.

Reform has nothing like this, and is unlikely to acquire it under Farage. We know this from past experience. Farage likes to be surrounded by uncomplicated agreeable people who'll be compliant members of his entourage. He won't elevate talent from within the party because he feels threatened by it, so the top team is only ever going to be Farage and his gang, making it up on the fly.

Don't get me wrong, you can get pretty big as a populist protest party, but pretty big is no use if your goal is power and you can't expand beyond that. From there, there's nowhere to go but gradually down, then into oblivion. Generic populism as the basis of a movement simply cannot win. It gets dragged down by its own contradictions and lack of attention to detail - especially when there's no plan and no message discipline.

Put simply, you can't win as a clown show. The incumbents can, but outsiders have to prove they are comprehensively better by every measure if they want to get over the finish line. Credibility is key, which you can't obtain when your platform is a collection of simplistic and half-baked populist tropes. Worse still, if it ever did win power, the lack of realism and planning would cause it to fail inside a year, and it would accomplish nothing very much, and nothing that can't be reversed with ease by a successor.

So it seems we're going to end up investing a lot of time an energy in something that can't win, but prevents something better from emerging. The most it can do is "shift the dial" on political discourse, but we've been here before. The lesson you should have learned from Brexit is that the establishment has an unswerving ability to revert to business as usual when there is no serious threat to their incumbency.

The second strategy, is as a pressure group party, in which case, the party should not be contesting seats where there are sensible conservatives like Jenrick and Cates. You'd want to focus your campaigning resources on eliminating the worst of the wets. But there's no actual strategy in play. Farage seems to think Reform can break through into parliament and cause right wing Tories to defect, to then become a replacement party under his leadership.

But that's not going to happen. If Tory MPs survive this latest purge then they are safe as safe gets in politics. They are not going to risk their careers. The high water mark for Reform, at best, will be to perhaps double its parliamentary presence in 2029, but as a widely ridiculed band of boomer cranks, that even Farage himself will be quietly embarrassed of. They are then gradually picked off, until they're wiped off the board by a resurgent Tory party in 2034.

This would be a useful exercise if Reform/Farage was able to utilise the leverage, by insisting the Tories adopt some of their policies, but Reform doesn't have policies. The Tories will throw him a few scraps from the table, but it won't be comprehensive reform. At most, we might leave the ECHR and bring immigration down to 200k a year, but we won't get anything that addresses the dysfunction in our politics, and they'll replace the ECHR system with a domestic replica, where previous ECHR jurisprudence is the standard (applied by the exact same judges).

What we actually need is a (r)eform party with a major reform agenda to rebuild the state from the ground up, in its own image, along the lines of the party's own philosophical foundation. We need a movement with big ambitions, a blueprint for reform, and one that has already worked out the details, and anticipated the resistance tactics well in advance. That way, should it acquire serious leverage, it can propose something of lasting value.

That, though, is not going to happen under a Farage-led entity. He will march his troops into battle without rifles, just to be mercilessly cut down, and when the going gets tough, he will claim victory, bug out, and wash his hands of it, just like he did last time. The man doesn't learn, and he doesn't change, and for as long as the political territory is occupied by him, nothing of value can emerge - and then we're back at square one in 2034, with a deadbeat Tory party, replacement levels of immigration, an economy as broken as ever it was, and no hope of correcting it through the vote.

But then I’m asked, if not Reform, then what? I do appreciate this dilemma. But it must be stressed that the Tory party can destroy itself unaided, and the real work starts after the election. It’s the election after that concerns us. I happen to think it’s better if Reform fails and we can get the Farage show out of the way. Meanwhile, there's a lot that can be done outside of party politics.

Personally, I think it would be entertaining if the energy behind the Tommy Robinson marches was directed into starting a new trade union, impressing upon people that they need to ditch the old unions which are now run by wokesters and communists. That union would then hold the purse strings for a political party and be able to call the shots. The right needs to get better at political fundraising and stop relying on millionaires with politics for a hobby. That’s why we keep ending up in this current mess.

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By the way, if you read Sunday’s article, you’ll have noticed it was riddled with typos. I was using a borrowed antique laptop with no spell checker installed after a two hundred mile drive back from Cosford air show. I’ll wait til I’ve slept next time!