More on Farage and Reform

What I think of them, and Farage's apparent strategy

It occurred to me that after I wrote the previous post¹ that I should write a bit more about Nigel Farage and his Reform UK party.

Farage in his natural environment - the pub (source)

The first thing to note is that it really is his party. Reform UK is a company:

Reform UK Party Limited was founded in November 2018 as an “entrepreneurial political start-up”. Mr Farage owns 53 per cent of the company.

It says it is a UK national political party “offering common-sense policies on immigration, the cost of living, energy and national sovereignty,” according to its website.

[…]

Meanwhile, Mr Tice has a minority holding of around one-third of shares, and chief executive Paul Oakden and party treasurer Mehrtash A’zami each hold less than 7 per cent.

There are various places where Farage has said that this was deliberate because he wanted to be sure he had control. It is also notable that Reform has been around since before Boris Johnson got his sweeping mandate to achieve Brexit (and then bollux everything up with the Wuflu panic).

Anyway the “entrepreneurial political start-up” is key. Farage has borrowed heavily from Silicon Valley start-up methodology. He’s the charismatic founder, others are the Engineering and Operations executives who take his vision and turn it in to practical reality. I think this is actually a pretty good model, particularly for someone like Farage who is absolutely a guy with vision but who struggles at mundane day-to-day operational things. It also makes the planned takeover of the rump of the Tory party look like the kind of thing that private equity firms do when they purchase hitherto public companies. That, when (if) it happens is going to be very interesting.

On that note various people have noted the parallels between the fortunes of the UK Tories in the early 2020s and Canada’s ones back in the early 1990s that led to electoral wipe-out in 1993. “Coincidentally” (not) the Canadian Tories then merged with the right wing Reform party to regain power in the mid noughties. Farage admits up front that the name is the same because the aim is identical. It is notable that a lot of commentators (e.g. this in unherd) are extremely skeptical about Reform’s electoral prospects and think that the Tories will do less badly than some of the direr predictions.

The timeline of the Tory take over is going depend heavily on the results of the July 4th General Election and whether a number of Tory candidates actually jump ship as Guido reported they were considering earlier this week. Some of that depends on whether Reform is seen as a viable party and I think Farage’s entry into the race was necessary for that to be the case. Having the party leader win his seat is the bare minimum that is needed, but the fact that prior to this week he didn’t even try would have been fatal because it showed a lack of courage/conviction. That is likely to impress voters as well as potential Tory candidates jumping ship.

On that note something I was not aware of (because I was, like most, paying only slight attention to the election or UK politics before Farage’s announcement) is that Lee Anderson - a notable Tory rebel who was kicked out of the party for worrying about Islamic fundamentalism in London - joined Reform back in March and is standing for them again now. Anderson had said he would not do so if Reform and the Tories formed an alliance, something that other Tories on the right of the party apparently urged Sunak to offer. Sunak, reports suggest, deliberately chose an early election in the hope that it would wrong foot Reform and to a degree it did, but probably not enough to matter.

[ Aside: Anderson is quite a scrapper whose questioning of a woke Fire Brigade leader was a classic takedown

He is precisely the sort of person Reform needs ]

Reform’s Popularity

Yes, Reform probably won’t manage to get all the candidates it hoped for but, as I said previously, Reform’s realistic goal is to get enough seats to be a major player. That’s probably around 20 though obviously it would like more. If it can get 50 (a serious stretch goal IMHO) it will probably be the third largest party in parliament which will give it a number of benefits. Depending on how things roll it could manage that with fewer, but it seems likely that the Lib Dims will also take a few seats from the Tories to increase their number from the current pathetic level of 11. It is notable that Yougov currently thinks the LibDims can get 48 seats and Refrom gets zero.

I suspect that is wrong, but it gives an idea of what sort of seat numbers Reform should be targeting (minimum 50). I personally think that Farage’s entry in Clacton will net him that seat and Lee Anderson will hold his Ashfield seat despite current poll numbers. The question is how many more can they get. Historically in the UK insurgent parties have struggled get any seats due to the first past the post system and this may still be an issue, but if Reform has done more broadly the sort of research that told them that Clacton would vote for Farage and assuming it acts on that to concentrate on 50-100 seats and no more then it may well get a couple of dozen seats which would give it a solid platform in parliament.

The point here is that, unlike the Tories or Labour, Reform does not, in this election, need to have candidates in all 650 seats or even in half of them. It just needs to have enough candidates in enough winable seats that it gets a few MPs. It also needs to poll higher than other third parties in the seats that it loses and generally in the election. It looks to me that it will achieve those goals, particularly now that Farage is fully engaged.

Before Farage’s jumping in to stand for Reform in Clacton support was in the 10-15% range, but Farage’s entry into the election seems to have moved the needle significantly.

Source: yougov

Support rose by 3% from the week before while the Tories and Labour both lost ground. Yougov’s article talks about how they made a methodology change in the days leading up to the new result so they ran the same data and the previous data using both methodologies. The change in methodology means the minor parties on the whole gained from the major two, but in both cases Reform’s popularity increased by 3% so that seems to be a solid number.

What are their policies?

It’s all very well looking at support and stuff like that, but given that parts of the media brand them as “far right”, it is worth taking a look at their policies.

Fundamentally they are best described as lower regulation free-market capitalism, ending most immigration and stopping the idiot greenery of NetZero as Richard Tice explains:

Only nuclear power can fulfil our energy and carbon objectives in the longer term, while shale gas can bridge the gap as we build our nuclear capacity. […]

In terms of energy security, Russia’s weaponising of gas supplies during the war on Ukraine makes it clearer than ever that Britain must embrace shale gas production to bridge the transition to cleaner energy.  

No less important to Reform’s agenda is returning financial and social stability to Britain. High tax and regulations are killing our freedoms, our businesses, and our prosperity. […]

This is the political, economic and moral case for Reform. Similarly, our policy on immigration is underpinned by a respect for the dignity of British citizens that is not shared by Labour or the Conservatives. Although published by the Office for National Statistics, it is a little-known fact that gross immigration into the UK in the past two years has exceeded 2million people. Offsetting that, around a million left, but people leaving Britain en masse is clearly not a good sign, and the net influx over the period was some 1.1million, a population increase equal to that of Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city, in just two years. […] Mass immigration is anti-democratic, and it is wrong.  

You can search the Reform UK website in vain to find the bit where it says to enslave all the Muslims or execute all the transgender people (neither, sadly, does it suggest killing two transbirds with one stone by sending all the LGBTQWTFBBQ brigade to Gaza or Iran).

Basically the Reform platfrom is:
reduce regulations, immigration, and wokery;
allow fracking, and stop the idiot move to electicity for everything now.

Personally I would have liked to see some emphasis on NHS reform while the website mostly skips that. Sadly that’s probably a wise decision, Reform needs to concentrate its fire and the NHS is generally popular in the UK (for reasons that are illogical).

It is notable that Farage and co are very clear on the answers to questions like “What is a woman?” which most of the rest of the political parties in the UK are not. This (see below) may gain Reform some surprising votes.

Where will Reform get its voters?

The primary target voter for Refrom is the white working-class. Reform’s supporters tend to be like Brexit voters (in fact most voted for Brexit): generally older, poorer, lower in social class that the average. Many of these voters were traditional Labour party voters until Corbyn and co sent the Labour party off into the far left weeds of wokery. Many of them are the voters who allowed Boris Johnson to get such a large majority by turning hitherto Labour seats Tory blue.

These voters have seen five years of gradual immiseration under the Tories who have promised to do all kinds of things like cut immigration and yet utterly failed. Inflation, and particularly price rises of energy, have made them poorer and the push to Net Zero means that they are being gradually forced to replace perfectly functional gas heating systems with electrical heat pumps that are less good and far more expensive to install. Likewise their preferred cars (fossil fuel powered) are being made harder to buy while EVs are still stupidly expensive and harder to use for long journeys.

Immigration and NIMBYs in the planning system mean that housing is getting ever more expensive, as you might expect from a country which has seen several million new immigrants over the last decade and a complete failure to build several million new housing units.

Unsurprisingly these voters are upset. They feel betrayed by the Tories and yet also betrayed by Labour who have shown more interest in the travails of transwomen and Gazans than those of a (white male) person from the North of England. In terms of the USA these are the MAGA Trump voters for the most part. The parallel isn’t exact but it is close enough.

Before this week many of them were planning to vote Labour because they wanted to give the Tories a bloody nose. But very few of them were enthused by that choice, nor were many of the commentariat. It is notable that the word “uniparty” has been seen used unironically in major media outlets in the UK and most people understand exactly what that means. As far as policies go that will positively impact the working class voter there is little to no realistic difference between the Green pary, Labour, the Lib Dims or the Tories. It all boils down to personalities and perceived competence.

Labour is of course making noises about how it will fix the situation by doing things that are guaranteed to make it worse such as rent control and doubling down on immigration and net zero. I’m not sure how many people have paid attention to these plans or their likely impact.

However my hypothesis is that likely reform voters are going to be concentrated in certain locations and Reform can (and will) target those seats and let most of the country vote for someone else. Wikipedia lists about a dozen seats that it conmsiders to be part of the former “Red Wall” that turned Tory in 2019. What is notable about these seats is that they voted heavily Leave in the Brexit referendum (between 59% asnd 70% leave). One of them is Lee Anderson’s Ashfield and another, Workington, was won by a former UKIP candidate who turned conservative. There are almost certainly other, non “red wall” seats that also have high leave votes (Clacton, unsurprisingly, is one) and Reform is of course targeting those. Some (e.g. Clacton and “Boston and Skegness”) were among the safest Tory seats in 2019 but had significant UKIP support in 2015

Finally, the Reform party’s traditional view of sex, gender and the like is likely to appeal to all sorts of people who might otherwise vote Labour. I hope (and expect) that Reform candidates will try and get their opponents in each constituency to define what is a woman and probably other similar tests that would have been obvious in, say, 2010 but now are not. If you are want to protest both wokery and the uniparty then Reform is pretty much your only choice.

The Impact of Farage

Farage will go down in history as one of the most influential politicians of the early 21st century despite never being in government. He identified the EU as a threat to British values and culture and kept the idea alive while all the major political parties and most of the British intelligentsia metaphorically jumped into bed with Brussels. Despite that he managed to force David Cameron to agree to a Brexit Referendum and the rest is, as they say, history. He is a rarity in the modern world because he did not attend a university and instead went to work in the City of London as an LME trader. Apparently successfully so.

He comes across, cultivates even, as a man of the people. He had the news media in a pub after his Clacton speech for example, and he is clearly comfortable in a pub. Neither Sunak nor Starmer have that image, both are winebar and posh hotel bar denizens at best, and both present that way though in fact Starmer is originally a classic grammar school boy. Farage is a good public speaker who doesn’t need notes let alone a teleprompter and good at handling the media, all of which were on display at Clacton pier and in the pub afterwards.

It is hard for outsiders to grasp how much he gets up the nose of the great and the good in the UK. Rather the way Trump does in the US, and unsurprisingly the two men seem to have a fairly good relationship. I don’t expect Farage to make much of his Trump connections during the campaign but the other parties may try and make him appear a Trump puppet.

What I think is clear is that he provides a clear option for a protest vote and a very clear difference to the duelling Uniparty leaders. As he himself wrote in the Torygraph, the other party leaders are bland boring nonentities that are hard to tell apart in terms of policy and general outlook. He will be trying to get the ignored deplorables to vote for him to send a message and I strongly suspect they will do so in far larger numbers than the commentariat and the pollsters expect.

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