Reform UK Taking Back Brexit From the Incompetent Conservatives

Who cannot have watched the Conservative Party Conference recently and not been struck by what a lost tribe they are. 

Writing for Conservative Home, even Emily Carver suggested it might be time for the Conservatives to go into opposition. For the Conservative loyalists and the grassroots it was a frustrating affair.

Judging by the social media commentary from numerous members, activists and Tory MPs, there was little in the way of enthusiasm for the party’s record nor for their prospects at the next election. Indeed, the overwhelming impression was of a Conservative party in the midst of an identity crisis.

Rishi Sunak’s keynote speech gave little for members to get overly excited or feel pride about. It was really rather a nerdy speech from a PM who seems not a very good team player, determined to make the HS2 cancellation the highlight of his speech for his own ends. He even tried to spin it into a ‘change’ message. Then we remember that parliament spent over 1,300 hours of time on legislation and scrutiny for HS2. So it was pretty un-parliamentary for the lone PM to just sweep it away himself at the party conference.

After days of chaotic messaging, we received confirmation that HS2 is officially derailed. The Northern leg is scrapped, and the money “saved” is supposed to be spent on hundreds of new transport projects in the north and the Midlands. The PM listed a whole of host of projects related to northern rail and then they were quietly removed from the Department for Transport website; apparently they were only ‘examples from the PM and not ‘pledges’.

Many Conservatives have long thought the case for this infrastructure was weak and, with ballooning costs (it costs ten-times more per kilometre than equivalent high speed rail in Europe), and the constant delays, the change in direction is pragmatic but certainly overdue. How many millions of pounds could have been saved, not to mention the new problem of unravelling land holdings, if the Conservative government had listened to our Reform UK arguments three years ago? The first loss is always the best loss, as Reform Party leader Richard Tice has been continually saying on his television appearances.

Conservative Party braced for a reckoning

So Tory members and activists know they’re headed inevitably towards a very big defeat at the next General Election. There was a big debate about the financial vision of Lizz Truss and the idea that she might be correct in warning of taxes being too high for too long. There was a big debate about immigration and on stage we had Suella Braverman talking about invasions, hurricanes, and how our national fabric is being changed by multiculturalism. She talks about invasions, and warnings and hurricanes of migrants. But as in all things with this government, she didn’t offer any solutions.

As Allison Pearson, so correctly pointed out in her Telegraph column: “If you'd asked people for their top 25 priorities for this government, pretty much nobody would have said banning smoking or rejigging A-level exams. These things from our nerdy Prime Minister probably wouldn’t even be in the top 50 priorities.

While the British do tend to like banning things for other people, to many small state Conservatives the smoking ban came across as absurdly illiberal, at the same time as being unenforceable and largely unneeded (very few teenagers now actually smoke). Surely it will just become another aspect of anti-social behaviour and borderline social work that our police forces do not have the time or resources to police?

Nigel Farage address to the Reform UK Conference

So what are we to conclude? The Conservative Party even invited the Reform UK honorary chairman Nigel Farage back into the party. Nigel drew some the biggest crowds and the most passionate followers at the Conservative Conference even though he was only there as a media representative for GB News. The Conservative Party is a broad church, said Sir Nicholas Chope. And then Nigel very vocally rejected these olive branches in his speech at the Reform UK Conference 2023.
 

“The very thought that I would rejoin a party,” said Nigel Fararge, “who we as the Brexit Party helped in the most astonishing way in 2019. And we did it. We did it within six weeks of launching the Brexit Party, by winning that European Election in 2019 and by getting rid of one of the worst prime ministers in British history, Theresa May. The very thought of it,” he said.

Nigel is right of course and there’s no doubt, that without the Brexit Party and all those supporters now involved in Reform UK, history in that summer of 2019 could have been completely different.

And we did it as a country collectively by pushing the importance of the Brexit agenda. Boris Johnson would never have become Prime Minister had it not been for the efforts of this movement and this party that is now Reform UK Maybe Rishi Sunak thought that Nigel Farage had been kind to the Conservatives back in 2019. A second referendum would certainly have divided the country even more, and we would not have been in a good place. So the deal for the Brexit Party to stand down candidates, like myself, in Tory seats, takes its place in history at an important turning point for Britain.

Brexit values and Brexit benefits are still unfulfilled

But what we’ve seen since 2019 is more divergence again from what the Brexit Party stood for, and what Reform UK now stands for. We have a Conservative Party that has seen legal, let alone illegal immigration, reach record levels. They’ve just put up Corporation Tax on our small businesses by 30% and refused to review the IR 35 rules for contractors, killing off 20% of the economic contribution of Britain’s smallest and most dynamic businesses. We have a Conservative Party with a bloated government and a bloated tax take, higher than anything under the last Labour government and the highest tax burden as a percentage of GDP for 70 years. We have the economy heading into a fiscal doom spiral of high inflation, high national debt, high debt servicing costs, low growth and low productivity. We have stubbornly high inflation and doubling of mortgage costs for many people.

We have the United Nations-ordained Net Zero agenda adding something like £1,600 additional energy costs per year, per household, and more for the next 30 years, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility. We have record numbers of jobless and people of working age who are economically inactive. Most of these do not even figure into the official unemployment data because they are ‘not looking for work’.

We have a Conservative Party that locked down the country unnecessarily three times, at great economic cost and cost to the welfare of children in particular. We have a Conservative Party that refuses to learn the lessons from lockdown and the vaccine roll out. We have a government which, at a time of great national danger, panicked and lurched from one response to the next based on the latest bickering in Number 10 Downing Street or the latest amateurish spreadsheet.

We have a Conservative Party that is now a social democrat liberalist party in all but name, defined by the big state, big control, nannying rules, high tax control over virtually every aspect of your life. They are indistinguishable in almost all respects from Keir Starmer’s Labour Party; like Labour only with fewer rainbow flags and fewer anti-semites.

Bye-bye Metro Bank

At the Reform UK Conference, Nigel Farage reminded everyone about the de-banking scandal. It’s good news that Lloyds Banking Group recently offered to get banking facilities up and running for Nigel. We all know about the establishment failure and cover up by Coutts/Nat West Banking Group. We know how regulation can work for vested interests and the hidden guiding hand that drives these things. But what about Metro Bank, the bank that suddenly foreclosed on the Brexit Party three years ago putting the party finances in a perilous position. Well, Metro Bank’s share price is currently down 99% from its peak, at the time of writing this.

Maybe Metro Bank won’t make it. Maybe that'll teach them that political de-banking is not a very good idea, particularly when still a majority of this country actually are good common sense people.

Former Metro Bank Chairman Anthony Thomsen said recently the bank has a flawed strategy and a limted future with its focus on branches.

So now we come to the legacy of the Brexit Party and what Reform UK means to people right now. As Nigel Farage said himself in his conference, he is good at spotting gaps. And there is an enormous, almighty gap in British politics right now. Reform UK is a party that has been quietly bubbling away, growing organically and spreading its national organisation, and quietly recruiting good quality candidates and good quality regional organisers. A bit like UKIP back in 2012 or 2013 some people might say, Reform UK has been growing steadily under the radar, sticking to its principles, to the point today of standing 8% to 10% in the polls. Even reaching the status of the third party above the Lib Dems in some polls and some regions.
 

At Reform UK we're actually making good, solid, steady progress. So when I get asked sometimes, so tell us honestly, what is the plan of the party? To attack the Conservatives? To attack Labour? I can only reply that Reform UK is going to carry on growing to become a positive political force for change in Britain. We’re not going to stop until we reach the point of achieving that. And it’s what we're about: national reform and renewal. We are party that is entering into new space because of what we are going to do, not because of what we say.

Conservatives right on diagnosis, wrong on action

The Conservative Party are making the right diagnoses on so many things, on tax on reducing the size of this big state and reducing immigration. And we see backbench Tory MPs talking about it all the time. But the public don’t see any action any more.

The Brexit Party supporters, and those voters who lent their votes to Brexit in the summer of 2019, can stand tall knowing that we helped Boris Johnson secure his 80-seat majority. Now you might have noticed that Reform UK has started putting the Brexit Party name back on the Reform UK logo. There’s a reason for that, as more and more people are starting to realise the amount of work left undone by the Conservatives following Brexit.
 

Whether it was dissatisfaction with Theresa May’s ‘surrender agreement (and all the issues it created for the later negotiations that followed), the lack of leadership, whether or not you agree with the Conservatives’ later decisions on Ukraine or the Covid response, domestically it was the Brexit Party that won the vote for the Conservatives in 2019.

Seven in ten 'leave' voters say there is more work to be done

Domestically the reason we won the vote, the reason the turn out was higher than the pundits expected, was because people fundamentally wanted us to take back our country and our borders. People wanted to secure the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement and not risk what might have followed from a Jeremy Corbyn government or a Lab-Lib coalition government.

That’s still true today, even if the Conservatives have completely failed the people on taking back control. When asked their main reason for voting for Brexit in a Guardian survey recently in October 2023, 68% of leave voters cited “having more control over our own laws”, and 67% said “stopping EU officials having control over the UK” continue to be the main concerns. For most leavers it was never about the details of the UK budget contribution, flag waving, or how much the NHS may or may not have benefited from leaving the EU.

When we look at strong and broad UK export growth, the new trade agreements, the growing financial fractures in the EU, the fractures on immigration, the rise of the EU army and non-consensual voting, Brussels waste and corruption, and the way EU-level politics gets even more disconnected from the people, there is hardly a single leave voter who wants to turn back the clock.

Only 45% of EU residents even know there are EU Parliament elections coming up in June 2024. These are the elections that in a fuzzy pseudo-democratic manner are supposed to influence the appointment of EU Commissioners and the President of the EU Commission. The European Parliament is the only such assembly in the world that has no powers to make laws, only to rubber stamp those it is told to. Democracy and nation states are dying across the EU. Government by faceless committees in Brussels and Strasbourg can only be something the most die-hard remainers and rejoiners could contemplate. 
 

So we come back to what people fundamentally voted for in the 2019 elections, which was to take back control of our country, our courts, our institutions, our borders. It was about reinforcing our parliament and our democratic institutions. Only a vote for Reform UK is going to secure these things once again. So come on Britain, we need to dare to dream. We need to stop giving second chances to the old Lib-Lab-Con parties.