The great Reform spending binge begins

I’m seeing reports that Reform intends to launch their own TV channel. This is entirely on brand for them. We can hazard a guess what it's going to look like. They just need to go one further and make it like one of those US televangelist channels with Richard Tice as a faith healer, and have Farage in robes baptising people in a large novelty beer barrel.

I'm not entirely sure what it achieves otherwise. All it can be is a Lotus Eaters for pensioners who spend half the year in Benidorm. I suppose it could have musical interludes with Andrea Jenkyns. They could make her the new Cilla Black and do a Blind Date but for divorced right wing boomers. Maybe they can hire Holly Valance as the TV weather girl.

What it does tell us is that they have more money than they know what to usefully do with. They already have GB News to churn out Reform friendly slop. If there was a serious market for it, GB News wouldn't be losing millions. Or maybe that's the plan as a tax write-off?

In my view, if Reform has money to spend then it should start building political infrastructure. Reform was recently stung because of its grubby dealings with foreign donors, but that’s because we don’t really have a culture of political fundraising in Britain.

Ideally, a political party should be majority funded by its own members and supporters. A party that is too reliant on millionaire donors is one that is always at risk of dancing to their tune.

But the reality is that politics is a pay to play game, and especially so for the right which has to compete with union funding.

The answer, then, is for the right to develop its own unions. The ones that exist are captured by subversives who no longer represent their values and aspirations of their own members. As a consequence, workers are unwittingly harming their own interests.

It was always the case that unions were the means for workers to fund their own political machinery, and was a way to keep its own representatives on a leash. Reform, though, isn’t accountable to its members, not least because it isn’t a membership organisation, but also because it owes its existence to millionaire political hobbyists.

I don’t think it would take all that much to usurp the existing unions. An advertising campaing to expose them for what they really are and what they actually believe would go a long way to depriving them of their income, and undermine the opposition in the process.

This should also inform party messaging. As an immigration focussed party, it need to press the message that mass immigration is a neoliberal policy, with a view to importing scab workers who will do the job cheaper.

One of the main reasons Reform cannot break the inherent electoral ceiling is its lack of authenticity. It is not an organic movement. That’s one thing Ben Habib was right about, and its the reason it could completely implode virtually overnight. It has no roots - and this is something that simply cannot be faked.

Of course, all of the above is entirely hypothetical writing, because we know what Reform will actually do with is money. It will piss more money away on gimmicks and sophisticated electioneering without developing grassroots infrastructure or building an intellectual foundation. It’s just going to carry on as before, making noise.

This is completely wasted money because more or less everyone has got their number now. It’s not a question of raising brand awareness. It’s now a matter of convincing people the party is capable of forming a competent and sustainable government. This is something it can barely persuade its own members of.

That, ultimately, is why Reform is a road to nowhere. Once you take Farage out of the picture (a day that will come very soon), there just isn’t much going for them. If it loses momentum, the millionaire donors will peel away, and there will be nobody left to stand firm for it, and no alternate source of income. Its longer term future is to be reabsorbed into the Tory party, making this entire enterprise the biggest waste of political time in all of British history.