The rocky road of Reform

Strap yourselves in for a long one folks! Later today I’m speaking at the Traditional Britain Group Christmas Social, but rather than read out a speech, I thought it better to think on my feet, and use a blog post to set out my thoughts beforehand. Not least to kill two birds with one stone. You may want to skip this post if you’re attending. Here goes…

I don’t need to tell you that Britain is in a mess. It shouldn’t be this way. We should now be on our way to a better future. But the 2016 insurrection was thwarted. Not by the deep state, or by the blob, or by the establishment. But by Boris Johnson and the Conservative party.

Were it not for the Tory party’s abject betrayal, there would be no need for the Reform Party. The discontent now brewing is unfinished business.

Brexit was supposed to see a departure from the stagnation of EU rule and see a new dawn in politics. Instead we see more of the same.

But many of us expected as much. EU membership was only ever a symptom of our political dysfunction here at home.

Moreover, we are just as bound by international laws and treaties as we were EU rules and regulations. Namely: The Refugee Convention, the Paris Agreement, the EHCR – and by extension the Human Rights Act. These are what prevents coherent immigration and energy policy.

Religious adherence to these agreements is inherent to the political establishment. Lost is any notion of the national interest. The liberal internationalist (or should I say globalist?) believes that upholding the “international rules-based order” is the primary national interest.

As such, our moribund political establishment has become the fundamental barrier to prosperity and national security. Without energy, you don’t have an economy. Without borders, you don’t have a country.

The task now, is not only to reclaim the spirit of Brexit, but also to demolish the political consensus that occupies our politics so we can get Britain back on track.

So how are we doing?

There was only one political certainty this year, and it was that the Tories would be out on their ear. It didn’t take the return of Nigel Farage. This is something the Tory party could achieve all by themselves.

Most were shocked when Rishi Sunak called an early election. The Tory party wasn’t in any shape to fight one. But nobody else was either. Least of all Reform, who were circling the drain under Richard Tice’s leadership.

Early on in the year, I took to writing critiques of Reform, amid widespread discussions about the need for a new party. Rumours were circulating that Dominic Cummings had something cooking, and Matthew Goodwin was making noises about entering politics.

In the course of that debate, I concluded that Reform was going nowhere. It had no intellectual foundation, no philosophical anchor, no policies to speak of, no grassroots organisation, and nobody to rally the troops. All it had was some half-baked slogans and policy tropes.

Eventually, my writing caught the attention of Ben Habib, whom I did not regard all that kindly. But he offered to meet and discuss my ideas. I accepted his offer. I respect people who respond constructively to criticism.

I have to say I liked him. His passion and dedication are unarguable. He responded well to my points, and I like to think I influenced his one-man crusade to democratise Reform. That might have gone somewhere had it not been for the return of Nigel Farage. But we know how that ended.

I took the view that Reform was not in any shape to mount a major offensive this year, and that it should instead work on building its grassroots base, develop policy and work out an intellectual platform upon which to base its slogans. The party would need to build a strong foundation.

That all went out of the window the moment Farage returned.

To give Reform due credit, it put together an impressive media show. They surpassed my expectations when they scored five MPs. My central point, though, was vindicated. The party came second in ninety-eight seats. Had there been a grassroots organisation and a ground game, Reform might well have been the official opposition. If there was any lesson to be learned from this election it is that you cannot win without a ground game.

Shortly after, we heard from the man himself that Reform would take steps to professionalise. It went down well with supporters, but that was all contingent on what was meant by professionalisation.

We didn’t have long to wait to see that changes were only cosmetic. As Ben Habib noted in his resignation address, the party has not democratised, and there is still no intellectual foundation to speak of.

For much of this time, I was a lone voice in my critiques of Reform, but slowly the penny is dropping. It would appear that Farage’s idea of professionalising is to sanitise the party - and denounce or alienate many of its core supporters. Essentially Farage is attempting to de-Ukipise Reform.

There are several problems with this. It is not a coincidence that Farage-led enterprises are eccentric and amateurish. The eccentricity goes with the territory. In some places there’s a sign saying “You don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps”. In this game, you very much do have to be mad to work here.

The amateurism and unprofessionalism, however, starts and ends with Nigel Farage. It is the one consistent theme to each of his political endeavours.

Central to my thesis, is that manifestos matter. People tell me that nobody reads manifestos, not least because politicians never stick to them, but that’s besides the point. You take the time to develop a policy platform so you’re at least singing from the same hymn sheet.

The absence of such a common platform was obvious during the election, where Reform’s position depended on who was on the telly at the time, and it could change on an almost daily basis.

It’s also evident now in that nobody is exactly sure what Reform’s immigration policy is. In this, we are left to triangulate between the relatively hardline rhetoric of Rupert Lowe, and the whims of Nigel Farage.

This is more than just a PR problem. Building a grassroots organisation in politics is much like building a sales force. But you don’t hire your salesmen while your product is still in research and development. It’s like sending troops into battle without rifles.

I have consistently argued that every one of Reform’s problems is because there is no intellectual foundation. Without such, Reform is just a populist party that will say anything to anyone at any time. Like the Tories, it will drop core principles if it’s expedient. Farage is already softening his line on immigration, begging the question, why do we need a Tory party 2.0?

Farage, though, likes the agility of populism - which is just as well for a man so lacking self-discipline. You could give him Rolls Royce policy but he wouldn’t bother read it, much less learn it. Policy will always be whatever falls from his lips, which is entirely contingent on what side of the bed he fell out of that morning.

This is not how we win. Matthew Goodwin is right when he observes that there is an inherent electoral ceiling to populism. I think we saw that in play at the election. Though Reform exceeded expectations in terms of seats, it didn’t do much better than Ukip in 2015. The real story of the election was overall turnout, at an alarming 59 percent.

We should recall that many who voted in the referendum of 2016 were voting for the very first time precisely because the established parties had so little to offer them. Most of them haven’t voted since. I haven’t. I could not vote for Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn or Boris Johnson. Those are the voters we need to mobilise.

Instead, Farage is off chasing the Red Wall votes, hoping to eat into Labour support. Who knows what or who else he will throw under the bus in the process?

Here we should recall that the Tories lost because they abandoned their principles. Instead of planting their flag on a set of ideas and persuading people to rally to it, they rely on focus groups and election data. They’re only interested in winning power, not the useful wielding of it. Reform looks to have fallen into the same trap. If that’s what Farage means by professionalising, then Reform will end up becoming what it seeks to replace.

I don’t know if my critiques ever got as far as Farage’s ears but it certainly feels like a certain Robert Jenrick was paying attention. He learned the lessons where Farage did not. He opened his leadership campaign by setting out ten core principles upon which future policy would be based.

Naturally they were watered down, but they weren’t a million miles from the core principles of National Conservatism - centred on national sovereignty, national resilience, family, and the rule of law. All themes with which you will be familiar.

Had Jenrick won, he might well have given Farage a run for his money. His position on immigration was firmer and more coherent than Reform’s “Net Zero immigration” approach. Jenrick started from first principles and built his subsequent campaign on those themes. It was enough for even me to put my cynicism aside and go to bat for him.

To date, though, we still have no real idea what Reform is for. It defines itself only by its opposition to the establishment parties. It gives a voice, of sorts, to the politically disenfranchised, and we can take it from Farage’s Thatcherite libertarian leanings what the general intent is, but there is now a question of whether it will still be an insurgent party by the time the next election comes.

Now you could argue that I’m being way too purist and pedantic but there’s been a sea change in political rhetoric just lately. Keir Starmer accused the Tories of running a deliberate open borders experiment.

This was shocking for two reasons. Firstly, a politician was speaking the truth. Secondly, it was a Labour politicians using rhetoric he would have called “far right” not so many weeks ago.

Starmer has recognised that immigration will be the key battleground for the next election. He is not wrong. And he’s very canny about it - having shot Badenoch’s fox by pointing out that she lobbied for more immigration. There is to be a bidding war on immigration towards the next election.

Though not nearly by enough, it is likely that Labour will get immigration down in the next few years. They would struggle to do worse than the Tories. If Badenoch has half the sense she was born with, she will recognise that the party needs to go into the election with immigration policy that will not only outflank Labour, but also tempt back Reform voters.

Given Reform’s incoherent approach, and with Farage espousing generic civic nationalist rhetoric in the hope of attracting ethnic minority voters, it may be difficult to discern the difference between them.

Meanwhile, it has not gone unnoticed that Reform is purging the party of anyone who supports Tommy Robinson. The Great Leader has said to the “ethno-right” that “we don’t want you”. Farage should note that while he takes the credit for killing off the BNP, he could just as easily revive it.

It should be recalled from the 2009 Euro elections that there were a million people at least who would vote for such a party - and that sentiment on immigration is harder now than it ever was. For every new voter he attracts as he moves his party to the centre, the more the grassroots right may conclude that another party better represents their interests.

Meanwhile, in recent weeks, we’ve seen impressive performance from Reform’s Rupert Lowe. He not only shames his own party by outshining them, he shames the entire house. He’s exactly what you’d want as a constituency MP. He’s making the best use of parliamentary resources to run campaigns and embarrass the government.

It shouldn’t just be Lowe on his own though. The entire parliamentary party could and should be setting the agenda. But there is no coordination. We can’t even be sure if Rupert Lowe is on-message.

Were it not the case, and all Reform MPs were pulling together to get the facts on immigration, feeding those campaigns into policy, then I’d have to eat my words. But somehow I have a hunch that Lowe will find himself increasingly estranged from Farage.

The lack of coordination in the parliamentary party speaks to a lack of focus, again a product of its philosophical vacuum. That is likely a reflection of the party as a whole. Fundamentally, it speaks to the lack of leadership.

And therein lies the paradoxical problem. Reform couldn’t have got where it is without Farage, but it can go no further with him. The party is failing to make the transition from cult of personality to political movement, and with no obvious successor, it may end up in the political graveyard, buried alongside the other two Farage-led enterprises.

There are two positions on this now. One is that Reform is all we’ve got so we have to put up with its inherent flaws. The other is that Reform is fast becoming a sunk cost fallacy. This now goes one of two ways. Either Farage will blow it somewhere along the line, and Reform will fail to expand its foothold in parliament, or it will surge ahead to replace the Tory party.

If the latter occurs, there is a real risk that Farage will have compromised so much, sacrificing steady growth for an adrenaline rush, that the parliamentary party is yet another fractious, incoherent coalition as prone to infighting as the Tories. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Ultimately, Reform’s problems are all born of being a rudderless populist party that cannot get by without the flamboyance of its leader, and in the meantime, its leader is the chief obstacle to the fundamental reforms it must make to become a sustainable party.

I would not stake my reputation on any predictions, but I know for certain there is a price to pay for this, and I will not be surprised if the insurgent Right ends up, once again, at square one.

In ordinary times, this would be more of an irritant than a crisis for the right, but we are soon to feel the real world consequences of decades of policy neglect. The economy cannot sustain the stifling overregulation of the workforce, the people cannot sustain the ever rising costs of Net Zero folly, and the nation cannot sustain a relentless onslaught of unchecked immigration. A death clock for the nation is ticking.

I’m not so fatalistic as to believe it’s too late. Nothing is irreversible, but we sure are cutting it close. We should be further along than we are, and I have a looming feeling we’ll have to start almost from scratch.

This is why I’m now a member of the emergent Homeland Party. It is my belief that no movement will ever succeed without a philosophical anchor credible and policy. An area of governance as complex as immigration requires a whole raft of policy interventions at all levels and sloganeering isn’t going to cut it. I’ve committed to developing the most comprehensive manifesto of them all.

There are some who say that it’s too late to start a new party, but it takes as long as it takes, and if that’s what it takes to do it right then so be it. I’m old enough to remember the days when leaving the EU was an absurd suggestion. It’s been done before. It can be done again. We should recall that while Marx published Das Kapital in 1867, the Russian revolution didn't happen until 1917.

Farage has shown that you can create a political storm through the media, but a movement for real change must be built from the ground up and have accountable leadership. The lesson the right must learn from the last decade of failure is that there are no shortcuts. It’s tempting to fall back on showbusiness in place of hard work, but a party that blows up overnight can evaporate just as quickly.