It is not yet clear how Farage-gate will affect Reform in the polls. The party faithful are holding the line, which is about what you’d expect from a cult of personality, and many will still vote Reform just because they see it as the only means to break the “uni-party”. Loyalties have been entrenched for years.
What we do know is that Reform’s headline numbers have been fairly static for a while now, and the party has suffered a slow bleed. Their shtick is wearing thin and this latest debacle is only just heating up. The media will not let this one go.
That is a problem for Reform because when polls are deadlocked, the fight in politics is for every last floating voter and a major sleaze scandal has pretty much capped any future growth. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them backsliding by an average of two percent over the next week or so, falling into third place.
That’s bloody serious. Look at Reform’s vote distribution and a two percent backslide wipes out their chances in several seats, killing any chance of becoming the official opposition, and terminating any hope of one day forming a government.
Worse still, the worst of the media storm hasn’t even begun for Reform MPs. They are all in the shit because now they’re all complicit in the excuses. They’ve all said things on camera that they’ll have to row back on. From here on in, the only questions Farage and Reform will be asked are about this mess. Tice will also be under very close scrutiny. This simply will not go away until Farage resigns. That’s the price. And now Reform is utterly screwed.
It is then further screwed because only Tice or Yusuf can replace Farage, and Tice is a joke of a man. A game-show host without a game show. And then there’s Yusuf. He goes over well with the party base, but he’s antagonistic and prickly, and he’s an intellectual lightweight. He believes his own bullshit. The public will not warm to him. He doesn’t have Farage’s cad factor.
There’s only one real beneficiary of this, and it’s Kemi Badenoch, because any remotely sensible Reform supporter will conclude that you simply cannot rebuild anything viable out of what’s left of the party. It might not show up in the polls for a while, but as an organisation, it’s done for. Anyone in the ranks who’s been close to Farage during this time will have to step down — then it will start leaking like a sieve, and then they’ll be fighting like rats in a sack. McMurdock might even bail to Restore. I wouldn’t blame him, and I recommend that he does.
I can’t say when Farage will go, but he’s already doing the preparatory briefing. It could be three months from now, or it could be tomorrow. But his political life is coming to an end. He was already on the ropes over the crypto donations, and that investigation hasn’t even concluded yet. More than likely there will be a criminal investigation into this latest scandal. Farage might worm his way out from under, but Orr and Jukes are in very deep shit.
Ironically, Reform might have survived this were Starmer still in charge, given his massive unpopularity. But Burnham is still enjoying his honeymoon bounce, and Reform was already losing ground to the Tories. Detestation of “the uni-party” might keep them in the game for a while, but not to any useful purpose. Jenrick might not even keep his seat, and it smells to me like Braverman’s career is already over. As for Kruger, he just looks bewildered and out on his own, quietly regretting the mess he’s waded into. He’s done too - not least because he’s been found out. He is not the intellectual pillar he’s billed as. On that basis, Reform goes out with a quiet whimper.
This may be to Restore’s advantage, but not by much. At best, it will put them at 12% in the polls, and they will quietly recede from there. I don’t think Restore has it in them to salvage their public image. Lowe is out of his depth and Downes is an intellectual thug. There are no other big guns they can bring to bear. Thirty years of movement building, all destroyed in a single weekend — and all thanks to Farage. It was never going to play.
This, of course, will be cause for much celebration on the left, but I don’t think they understand the implications. Leaving aside for a moment that this sting operation was an ambush Reform walked into entirely of their own volition, more than likely dealing a crippling blow to the party from which it may never recover, it was still an establishment media hit-job. It was a level of scrutiny that will never be applied to Labour.
There should be no doubt that Channel 4 was acting on behalf of the establishment to take out a threat to the status quo and to protect the power of the incumbent regime. It was a very professionally executed political assassination.
While the blame still lies squarely on Farage’s shoulders, Channel 4 have gone to extraordinary lengths to do this. Investigations like this are not done on the cheap, and a transnational “civil society” blob organisation is bankrolling it: powerful vested interests who have gone all out to eliminate the preferred vehicle of the disenfranchised working class.
If they’ve succeeded in taking out Reform (and I really think they have this time) they’ve sent a not-so-subtle message that they have the power, which they will not hesitate to use, to ensure a right-wing populist party does not have a legitimate path to power. That is something of a game-changer. It puts us in uncharted waters. It tells us that party politics, as a means of achieving change, is over.
Many of us have understood this for years, not least because of the right’s inherent inability to organise itself into something cohesive and competent (one of the chief barriers being Farage himself). But this is the final nail in the coffin of the democratic process.
They cannot stop the change that’s coming, but now they’ve just ensured it will not be done through the ballot box. It will be done in the streets, and it will not be pretty. What we saw in Dover yesterday was just a taster. For the last few years we’ve seen disparate ad hoc protests at migrant camps and in the town squares, all easily corralled and contained, but eventually it will be happening everywhere, all at once.
Moreover, an ineffectual lightweight like Andy Burnham will be no more equipped to handle it than Starmer was. This is so far outside his margin of expectation, and they have no answers except the same clumsy tone-deaf rhetoric and the same corrosive two-tier policing. If they wanted an all-out war, they’ve certainly got one now.
That is where the party collapse and the street politics meet. From here, you’re going to see a lot more manifestations of what we saw in Dover yesterday, and if you’re a middle-of-the-road conservative, you’re not going to like the politics it represents. It’s an ugly side of politics.
Among their number are radicalised fanatics, Christian nationalists and outright fascists - and while generally well-behaved right now, it is going to attract thugs. I’m not talking about Tommy Robinson supporters and the Reform-adjacent. I’m talking about proper grotbags. This is something most of you haven’t seen before, and never at this scale. Get used to it.
What you’re seeing is the consequence of political failure. You’re seeing young and angry men with uncertain futures who can see that the party system is a dead end. The mainstream right has shunned them for the sake of optics and playing “the game”, but it’s a game that does not yield results. Patience goes unrewarded. The game is rigged and time is short. This is a gear-shift in politics, because the political process does not work.
These are not people with whom I have much in common. The ones I know of are pretty shitty people, and quite a few of them are belligerent and quite a bit thick — who cannot be reasoned with, and who could very easily become quite dangerous. But there’s also a shrewdness to them and how they operate. This is proto-IRA territory, albeit in the very early stages.
This will follow a similar dynamic, where there’ll be mealy-mouthed condemnations, but even quite well-off and middle-class normies will tacitly approve of what they do. I don’t much like them or their politics, but I’m not going to condemn it for as long as it remains peaceful. I’m content to let them take a run at it and see what they can do, because I don’t see a normal political avenue that will work. We’re past all that.
We’ve now reached a point where there simply has to be a response to the sheer arrogance of the British state. It is one thing for them to take their time in finding operational solutions to the dinghy crisis, and God knows, we have waited long enough — but to move them out of hotels and into our neighbourhoods, at our expense, knowing the danger they pose, despite very clear warnings, is an act of absolute contempt that requires an equal and opposite reply. Britain is being radically changed without consultation or consent, while our votes are meaningless — and the ruling class rubs our noses in it, even dispatching the plod if we complain too loudly.
That is why it’s time to take this to the streets. You don’t have to like it, or even approve of it, but this is how it has to be now. There is no other way. Civilised means have failed.
I’ve always said Farage doesn’t want to be PM. It’s all game to him. Being PM is too much like hard work and he’d hate the responsibility. A Faragist party without Farage would soon hit the buffers.Tice and Yusef are just too unlikeable to appeal to enough voters . Though the same applies to Farage. Also the left and the liberals have developed a sophisticated tactical voting operation that will severely limit the amount of seats Reform can win.We’re going to get another labour government as we have effectively 2 Tory parties.Though I suspect as the election gets closer the donors and the press barons will pressurise Farage and Badenoch to agree some sort of merger. That would suit Farage and give him an exit strategy.
From here, you’re going to see a lot more manifestations of what we saw in Dover yesterday, and if you’re a middle-of-the-road conservative, you’re not going to like the politics it represents. It’s an ugly side of politics......................
This is where Dover becomes particularly uncomfortable for the political establishment, because the people angry about immigration can make an argument which some of the more fashionable practitioners of direct action cannot: we tried voting. They voted for governments promising lower immigration. They voted for control of Britain’s borders. Many voted for Brexit partly for that reason. They have petitioned, marched, written to MPs, complained and watched governments of different colours acknowledge their concerns before pursuing policies which, from the perspective of those voters, have repeatedly failed to deliver what was promised. None of this creates an unlimited licence to break the law, but it does explain why the spectacle of the British state patiently accommodating disruptive protest by causes fashionable within progressive culture was eventually going to produce a fairly obvious question: if disrupting roads is how a political movement makes itself impossible to ignore, why are we still standing politely behind the barriers?
Dover is one answer to that question, and this is the precedent successive governments should have worried about long before Saturday morning. A state cannot indefinitely operate two conceptions of political legitimacy: one formal, in which citizens vote and Parliament governs, and another informal system in which sufficiently determined activists can acquire additional political leverage through disruption. Once the second system exists, access to it cannot sensibly depend upon ideology, nor can government expect one section of the population to remain permanently more restrained than another simply because its grievances have been classified as less respectable by the people who dominate cultural institutions.