The party is not living up to the transformative energy that has pushed it up the polls
Reform UK are currently in first place in voting intention polls. The party has a golden opportunity to change Britain.
Well, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Nigel Farage has told ITV that he will not allow Senedd candidates who are anti-devolution. “That ship has completely sailed,” he says, “This has happened. This clock is not going to be turned back.”
What is the name of Farage’s party? Reform? Clearly, that won’t do. “Accept”? “Acquiesce”? “The Tories”?
I happen to think that devolution has failed (Sam Bidwell made this argument superbly for The Critic last year). But it is not an opinion I am rigidly committed to. I’m sure someone could make an argument for its success — or at least for its potential. “It has happened”, though, is not an argument. It is an excuse for not having an argument. It reminds me of progressives expressing disbelief about inegalitarian opinions and un-PC language in the mid-2010s because it was the current year.
Granted, sometimes politicians must accept public opinion even if they disagree with it. But devolution is not a settled issue. About a third of Welsh voters, as we learned last year, support its abolition. This included 61 per cent of Welsh Reform voters. Should the party reach out beyond its supporters? Sure! But this seems like a peculiar hill to lie on.
Bizarrely, while Reform UK maintains that devolution is irreversible, the party appears to be open to the prospect of independence. David Kirkwood, Reform’s deputy Scottish chairman — who backed independence in 2014 — has said that the party will support a referendum on independence in 2039. A constitutional settlement that has existed since the late 90s? Unquestionable. A union that has existed for centuries? Questionable!
Today, Liam Deacon has written an excellent piece for The Critic about how Farage and his comrades could legitimise major institutional change. But the question has to be asked: will they even want to implement major institutional change?
David Bull, the new Chairman of Reform UK, has been saying in interviews that immigration is “the lifeblood of this country” and “always has been”. He soon doubled down and said that Britain is “an island of immigrants”. (Conveniently, I wrote just last month about how it isn’t.)
I am not the soundness police. A range of different opinions on immigration are defensible. But Bull’s comments sound more radically cosmopolitan than Keir Starmer’s. Are Reform going to criticise the government on this issue from the right or from the left?
Reform have not created dissident energy in Britain — Farage, Yusuf, Bull and co are just its beneficiaries
There seems to be an ideological vacuum at the heart of Reform UK. Richard Tice MP, Deputy Leader of the party, told Steven Edginton of GB News that he was not concerned about the diversification of Britain because he will be “long gone” by the time that white Britons become a minority. Again, Mr Tice could have argued against Mr Edginton’s concerns. But he didn’t make any argument beyond an argument — and a self-centred argument — for personal complacency. This is a very strange attitude for someone trying to represent millions of people to take.
As Zia Yusuf leaves Reform UK and then returns, and as the police reject its leadership’s smearing of Rupert Lowe, and as David Bull wastes time musing about ghosts on Good Morning Britain, it is painfully obvious that Reform have not created dissident energy in Britain — Farage, Yusuf, Bull and co are just its beneficiaries. They would be wise to remember that.
