For Conservative Party, see Reform UK

Martin Shipton

Why are so many people not getting the fact that Reform UK is just a rebranded and repackaged version of the Conservative Party?

Nigel Farage made a very revealing comment during an interview with the Daily Telegraph in April 2024 - three months before the general election that brought Labour to power, and two months before he took over as leader of Reform UK.

He said: “In the Midlands and the North, Reform is neck and neck if not a point ahead of the Conservatives already, and I think there comes a moment - if that momentum continues, which I think it will - where if you’re a Red Wall Conservative MP the only way you can save your skin is to stand for Reform.”

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Self preservation

From this statement, we learn two things. Firstly, that a significant factor in the growth of Reform has been the way Farage and others have encouraged Tory politicians to defect to the new party by appealing to a desire for self-preservation.

Secondly, Farage takes it for granted that individual decisions to defect will not be complicated by any need to compromise on ideological principles. Put more simply, it means that what those defecting believed in as Tories, they can continue to believe in as members of Reform.

That doesn’t mean that when defections take place, those joining Reform won’t be critical of the Conservatives. But their comments will be vague and essentially content-free. When South Wales East Tory MS Laura Anne Jones announced her defection while standing next to Farage at the Royal Welsh Show, she said: "I've just suddenly felt that the Conservative Party was unrecognisable to me. It wasn't the party that I joined over three decades ago."

She went on to say that Reform "is listening to the people of Great Britain" and called Farage "a great man".

And making comments that she could have uttered before or after her defection, she added: "Wales is a complete mess. As you know, we've got the worst educational outcomes. We've got health statistics that are the worst in the UK.”

Ms Jones’ claim that she had “just suddenly felt the Conservative Party was unrecognisable to me” lacks credibility. Which Tory policies in particular have “suddenly” alienated her? She doesn’t say. She then went on to announce herself as an adherent of Farage’s personality cult.

Sam Kurtz, her former Tory group colleague in the Senedd, offered a more convincing explanation for her defection: “To get re-elected”.

Which brings us back to Farage’s strategy to grow the party on defections.

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Preoccupations

The similarities between the Conservatives and Reform are apparent on social media in Wales, where posts from named individuals like Andrew RT Davies bear a striking resemblance to posts from anonymised accounts that have the same preoccupations.

The core principle is to assert a lie or distortion as fact time and time again, ignoring responses that seek to put the record straight. For months, Davies and his anonymised imitators tried to make people believe that the Welsh Government was handing money to all “illegal immigrants”. In fact, some unaccompanied child asylum seekers who had entered the care system had been included in a pilot project that entailed paying higher rates of benefit to care leavers.

The pilot project has now ended, so Davies and his entourage have moved on to attack the Welsh Government’s “Nation of Sanctuary” programme. Again, deliberate deception is taking place. It’s a fact that more than 80% of the money spent on the “Nation of Sanctuary” has been spent on resettling refugees from Ukraine, but Davies and co don’t mention that. Instead they give the impression that all the money is going to what they would consider less desirable migrants. In other words, non-whites. This is disgraceful behaviour from Davies and all those associated with him, whatever their status. Reform and its hangers-on are doing exactly the same thing.

Davies and co have jumped on another Reform bandwagon - defending the appalling Lucy Connolly, who was jailed for inciting people via social media to burn down hotels full of asylum seekers, referred to by her as “bastards”. All this high energy hatred from Tories and Reform is a substitute for practical policies that offer hope and prosperity to ordinary people. They think they’ve hit on a winning formula and hope to cruise to victory on a diet of culture wars and grievance indulgence.

Interchangeable

In and around the Senedd, there is a cohort of young Tory and Reform supporters, some of whom work for MSs, who socialise together and whose views are interchangeable. The rise of Reform on the back of Farage’s dubious charisma has given hope to Tories in Wales who thought they were destined to be permanently out of power.

What people need to wake up to is that the authoritarianism and chaos that now rules in the United States will come to Britain if Reform comes to power in Wales and/or the UK as a whole.

Farage, like Trump, is supposedly against what is characterised negatively as “Big Government”. In the United States this has entailed dismissing many thousands of public sector employees doing important jobs and weakening regulatory protections for the environment, for example. Tellingly, the Tory/Reform attack-dog social media entity Doge Wales is named after the Elon Musk initiative that set the chaos in motion. If Reform takes power here, it will seek to do the same, but will face greater resistance from public sector unions.

Farage would be keen to do a more comprehensive trade deal with the US, which would inevitably entail lowering food standards and opening up our market to the delights of chlorinated chicken - a product that Farage has praised.

Workers’ rights would undoubtedly be in Reform’s sights, with the party wanting to deregulate the labour market.

Israel

On the international front, Farage is a great supporter of Israel, refuses to accept that its war in Gaza amounts to genocide, and has praised Trump’s plan to take over Gaza and forcibly displace Palestinians.

Farage is also an admirer of Putin, having alleged that the West “provoked” Russia into invading Ukraine.

His latest position favours deporting refugees from Afghanistan back home to face certain death from the Taliban.

Strangely enough, Reform’s biggest donor Christopher Harborne, who lives in Thailand, has also donated large sums to the Conservative Party. He founded an aviation fuel company, trades in cryptocurrency and is the biggest shareholder in defence firm Qinetiq.

Perversely the hard right of the Tory party is having a field day following its de facto rebranding as Reform. Sadly, thousands of people in Wales who would never have voted Conservative are now queuing up to vote for the party in its new gestation. The other parties have eight months to change their minds.