What's wrong with the Reform Party?

Over on X, I’ve been having a protracted debate about the Reform party. I feel somewhat qualified to comment on how the party is run having intensively blogged the rise of Ukip and our departure from the EU. I’m often reminded that for all my criticism of Ukip, we did eventually leave the EU, and as such, I’m told Reform can carry on making all the same mistakes.

But of course Ukip was not an unqualified success. What was billed as a “people’s revolt” and a “political revolution” was very easily quashed and the establishment soon reverted to business as usual. What we got was an administrative Brexit where the best we can say about it is that it didn’t have the catastrophic implications for trade that many anticipated. Any revolutionary potential, however, has evaporated.

Long time readers will know that I attribute this to the complete absence of a plan. Brexiteers bleated about deregulation and reform but at no point specified what should be deregulated or how. ERG radicals wanted a clean sweep which was never practical or, in fact, desirable. Any such attempt would be met with a wave of public disapproval, and the Tories were not up for the fight anyway. Any coherent Brexit vision was then drowned by ERG bleating about free trade, and the “Brexit revolution” was quietly abandoned by the chosen one, Boris Johnson.

As I’ve explored in recent posts, though, there was and still is a case for deregulation and reform, not least the removal of climate dogma from infrastructure planning, but we have to go much further than simply leaving the EU. As we pointed out many times on eureferendum.com, Brexit alone wasn’t going to be enough. The EU is as much an implementing agent as it is an originator of regulation, where much of its climate regulation regulation is born from international treaties and binding targets agreed at the global level. Though we left the EU we are still signatories to the various climate treaties and the Westminster regime is still committed to the same objectives. We are still in lockstep with the EU - compounded by Johnson’s infatuation with Net Zero.

As such, the EU was only ever part of the problem, and the core problem remains the nexus of international law and a feral establishment that subordinates British sovereignty to it. Had there been a Brexit plan, and a strategy to hold the establishment’s feet to the fire to ensure a real Brexit was delivered, the Brexit movement would still have momentum. This is why our independent Brexit campaign, The Leave Alliance, included a series of constitutional reforms in our unadopted Brexit plan.

But in walking away from Ukip, and subsequently The Brexit Party, Farage effectively declared “mission accomplished”, sailed off into the sunset leaving the job only half done, abandoning Brexit to a Tory party that never wanted it in the first place.

Consequently, the Tories have pretty much buried it and resumed their usual habits, and the insurgent right is having to rebuild momentum from scratch. Somehow, though, the very same people responsible for the botched revolution are now telling us to back them again, this time as the Reform party.

As you can imagine, I’ve been less than enthusiastic about Reform. We do need an insurgent right wing party but not a gang of incompetent populist opportunists with no idea what to do or how to do it. And unsurprisingly, because it’s the same old people, it’s making the same old mistakes.

Back in the day, Ukip had its fair share of crank candidates and the party would face routine embarrassment because there was no quality control. The central organisation was poor. It also suffered due to its overall lack of substance. When it finally got round to producing a manifesto, Farage publicly disowned it. That same thread of incompetence ran right through Ukip, then subsequently the Brexit Party, and now Reform.

The latest example is Reform deselecting candidates highlighted by the far left organisation “Hope Not Hate”. An avoidable humiliation for the party. In so doing, Tice has managed to alienate a lot of grassroots support and shown that it’s open season on Reform candidates.

Tice is dancing to the tune of Hope Not Hate because he doesn’t want Reform to be seen as an extreme party. One imagines Tice is bright enough to realise that the party has to be credible, and Tice does have an obligation to vet candidates. A serious party needs to stay away from cranks with conspiracy theories about vaccines and the World Economic Forum, and have absolutely zero tolerance for the antisemitism that's creeping in on the right.

That's not to say there aren't good questions to be asked about the Covid vaccine or the influence of WEF ideas, and there is space to criticise Judaism as much as any other religion, but in the end, these aren't issues that preoccupy the ordinary voter. If that's what you're banging on about, then chances are you're going to be a liability.

Vetting candidates isn't particularly difficult. You can usually tell a crank within about ten seconds of looking at their social media feed. Even cursory vetting would have avoided the embarrassment of having Hope Not Hate calling the shots.

But all the same, a party can't run for the hills every time someone calls it far right. Robust immigration policies are popular, and opposition to mass immigration is a mainstream point of view. Dinghy arrivals should be removed immediately and their claims to asylum invaded. Foreign criminals must serve their time then be DNA logged and deported. A new illegal immigration department should be set up to hunt down and deport/detain illegals and businesses found knowingly employing illegals must be wound up. This is not an extreme position.

As such, an unapologetically right wing party needs to reframe the debate. The extremists are in Westminster. They're the ones flooding the country with more migrants than we can sustain, employ or look after. They're the ones driving up the cost of energy for ideological reasons. They're the ones who subordinate British sovereingty to international treaties and foreign courts. They're the ones undermining democracy. They're the ones strangling our towns and cities with their unwanted climate measures. They're the ones taxing us into oblivion.

They're the ones destroying the car industry by forcing EVs on us even though demand is falling. They're the ones allowing teacher to "socially transition" children and allowing crossdressing perverts into schools. They're the ones who'll jail a man for the crime of printing stickers. They're the ones who sit on their hands while Jihadis preach genocide. They're the ones presiding over the demographic replacement of the British people. Hope Not Hate are far left degenerates and they're in no position to be telling any of us who is kosher.

But then if you're going to have a party called reform, it might help if you actually had a detailed Reform programme, addressing not just the symptoms, but the root causes. As such, a serious party of reform necessarily has to be radical. Only Reform isn’t. In adopting a “one in, one out” immigration policy, it’s still effectively a mass immigration party. Its literature also shows it’s still committed to the Paris climate accords.

If you’ve done any serious thinking at all, you know that we need cheaper energy to get the economy moving - so we have to scrap Net Zero. But Net Zero is just an implementation of international treaties - the same ones that compel us to add masses of climate red tape to just about everything - which is why nothing ever gets built. Similarly, we can't deport illegals because of the ECHR and the Refugee convention.

This is happening because our political class has subordinated British democracy to a galaxy of international treaties and global accords, which have fundamentally distorted how we are governed - to the point where our local councils are merely implementing agencies of global agendas. We've abolished local democracy.

As much as policy needs to address the symptoms, we need a new constitution based on democratic consent, that puts British sovereignty and national democracy first - making far greater use of referendums - locally and nationally. (Ulez, for example, would never have got past a public poll).

As much as we want a restoration of proper local government, we need to restore national democracy and undo Blair's divisive and corrupt programme of devolution. London doesn't need a mayor and we don't want regional mayors or citizen's assemblies, or any of this ersatz democracy. Scotland has no business funding UNWRA or having international envoys. It’s a regional administration. There is no need for a Welsh assembly at all. North Wales has more to do with Manchester than Cardiff. A nationalist party should want to stitch Britain back together, and to put an end to the corrupt little devolution dunghills whose meddling makes everything worse.

Ukip fought with one core objective in mind: Britain's exit from the EU. Now that's done, we need to finish the job. The job of a "reform" party should be to author Britain's new constitution, and the subsequent policies that will flow from it - from energy to immigration and local government. It should then build on it so that, at a point in the future, when the Tory party is on the ropes, a general election essentially becomes a referendum on that constitution.

A generic populist party with a list of disparate demands plucked out of a tombola will find that its policies are interchangeable (and expendable if politically expedient) - because these ideas are not born from an intellectual framework. As such it will be pulled this way and that, and will continually compromise what it believes in.

Policies have to stem from core beliefs, but if a party doesn't have any, and its leading voices are free to make it up as they're going along (because they don't have an intellectual product to sell), they'll be no coherence, no consistency, and will not be any different in nature to the existing parties.

If you're going to the trouble of running a party, you need to be in the business of developing ideas and convincing people you do have the answers, and that you can be trusted to deliver them. You have to develop talent within your own ranks to be able to go out and sell what you're building. You need a long term plan and a strategy. If you're just bleating populist slogans and making things up on the fly, you're wasting your media exposure and standing candidates for its own sake. Your candidates should effectively be door to door salesmen, selling a coherent intellectual product. Sort of like political Mormons (as opposed to morons).

Anyone can set up a party and cobble a manifesto together, and if you've got money you can build a brand and get exposure, but movement building has to have a vision and plan to get us there.

The lack of such in Ukip is why we ended up with an administrative Brexit, with the establishment allowed to define what Brexit should be. Now the TCA is signed, it can all be brushed under the rug. Because Farage et al never outlined a vision or a plan, there was no further role for Ukip, and Reform is effectively having to build up the same momentum from scratch, only without euro-elections and a european parliament platform. We’re worse off than before.

Before Brexit, Ukip had a central objective to work towards, but Reform has no such revolutionary ideas. It's just a vague populist party that says it will fill potholes, cut immigration and tinker with energy policy. Consequently, it is not making waves, it has no momentum, it's not shaping the national debate. It has nothing much to say for itself.

As much as anything, the big problem in British politics is a crisis of competence, and there's nobody at all in Reform that makes me think they might be the solution. Farage and Tice prefer yes-men and sycophants in their entourage which is why it will never develop and nurture talent. They wouldn't know how to even approach building an intellectual platform because they're lazy opportunists and media careerists.

Because of that, Reform will never be more than it is, and will end up wasting a lot of time and a lot of money, and wasting the energies of a lot of good people who'd be better off building their own platform from scratch.

People turn to Reform because it has profile and money, and a certain amount of legacy appeal, and it's a shortcut rather than building from scratch. But ultimately, if Reform is just leading people to a dead end, then it's not actually a shortcut. We'll be back to square one.

It's all too predictable where this is going. Reform will do ok, but will underperform at the next election. It will cost the Tories a few seats. We'll then have a Labour government, after which we go through the traditional Tory party civil war in which it feels compelled to turn rightwards in order to fend off Reform, and maybe adopt a few of their basic policies on Net Zero and immigration. Other than that, nothing will fundamentally change, and Reform is left on the sidelines scratching its head, wondering what to do next.

This is essentially because it has no idea why it exists. In that regard, it is much the same as the Tory party. The sole aim is to get elected an attempt to implement a rag bag of populist policies without addressing any of the fundamental causes of Britain's malaise.

A party of the right seeking to replace the Tories should make National Democracy its core mission, from which all other reform ideas and policies should flow. A party born of Ukip should have the primacy of British sovereignty at its core - recognising that everything from the Lisbon treaty, the Paris Agreement to ULEZ and Net Zero, are things that were done to us without consultation or consent. This happened because our politicians don't know their place and have forgotten who they serve.

It was not good enough simply to leave the EU. The mission is to rebuild British democracy and accountability, and ensure (by way of constitutional reform) that never again can our politicians sign away what is rightfully ours.

None of what I’ve said here is especially new as long time readers will know, but it’s something that needs repeating. But any time I say it on X, senior Reform party individuals take it as an attack rather than constructive advice, and will continue to make the same old mistakes.

Ultimately, Reform is never going to get its act together. The rot starts at the top. It's run by incompetent opportunists, most of whom are as insulated from working class concerns as the establishment parties, and they don’t know how to do politics. The party needs a total clear out, but doing so would deprive it of its only sources of funding. That’s what happens when a political party is a privately owned cartel.

Because of that, Reform is a bed blocker that will continue to soak up exposure and resources but do nothing useful with it, and will end up wasting everybody's time. That hasn't changed in twenty years and it's not going to change - especially if Farage returns.

In movement-building there are no shortcuts. If we want a revolutionary movement, it has to be built from the ground up as a people’s movement. Hitching our wagon to the Reform Party Ltd will only end in failure.