by PAUL COLLITS – WHILE globalists in Brussels, Geneva and other nodes of power might be licking their wounds – for the moment – over Trump, they are openly sniggering over their prospects in the UK.
Nigel Farage, hero of Brexit – to the extent that Brexit has actually made any real difference to British policy-making – and now leader of Reform UK, is currently making the news for all the wrong reasons.
- Farage and his ego seem largely to blame.
- He has forced the exit of two of Reform’s stars, Ben Habib and now Rupert Lowe.
- Members are leaving in droves.
Reform, hailed by many on the alt-Right as the new big thing, is politically becalmed and possibly in decline after peaking, very moderately.
I concluded some time back that Reform, electorally limp and trapped in a first-past-the-post voting system, would only ever eat into the Tory vote and would leave British Labour relaxed and comfortable as the awful, ghastly government in perpetuity.
EXCITEMENT
This is what played out at the election last July. Despite all the excitement and talk of a revolution in 2024, Reform ran an honourable but useless second – and ended up with a lousy five seats.
As the BBC explained: “The gap between the share of total votes won by the winning Party in the 2024 general election and the share of Parliamentary seats won is the largest on record, BBC Verify has found.
“This disparity has prompted renewed calls for reform of the electoral system, with Richard Tice of Reform UK complaining on BBC Radio 4’s Today program on Friday of the ‘injustice’ that his Party had received millions of votes but only five seats in Parliament.
“He said: ‘That is blatantly not a properly functioning democratic system – that is a flawed system’.”
The Green Party’s UK co-leader Adrian Ramsay said he wanted to see a “fairer system” to ensure that “every vote counts equally”.
The Electoral Reform Society claimed it was “the most disproportional in British electoral history”.
The UK’s first-past-the-post system has a tendency to generate disproportionate results compared with systems in some other countries.
So are these latest complaints justified?
Reform’s roughly four million votes translates into a 14 per cent share of the total votes cast in the election, but only 1 per cent of all the seats in the House of Commons.
By contrast, Labour won 34 per cent of total votes cast, but about 64 per cent of the 650 seats.
Ouch. It might be unfair, but that’s life. And it won’t change – not on Labour’s watch.
Mind you, a 14 per cent national vote share is enough to make Australia’s miniscule and splintered “freedom Parties” salivate.
In a more sympathetic electoral system, this would be a fine base upon which to build real momentum and political impact.
Doing that well also provides a megaphone with which to get your policy ideas and dissident philosophy to a much larger audience. To be regarded with some respect.
CEDING
And as if this hill to climb isn’t enough, Reform is now imploding. It seems to be literally throwing away its opportunity and ceding the considerable ground it has made to the establishment that it once pretended to challenge.
Farage and his ego seem largely to blame. He has forced the exit of two of Reform’s stars, Ben Habib and now Rupert Lowe. Members are leaving in droves.
The Reform “split” is soaking up media space in the face of an appalling and hopeless government.
Worse than the personnel bungling is the apparent shift away from policies that Reform’s supporters want, indeed, demand, and an embrace of the mainstream.
Farage seems to have been seduced by the whiff of parliamentary leather. Now that he is finally in the House of Commons, he is starting to act like an insider.
As he often now says in the face of his critics, totally unrealistically, “we have an election to win in 2029”. Whatever that means.
All this hasn’t impressed the powerful Elon Musk, who not so long ago saw Farage as the hope of the side in Old Blighty.
Is Reform UK now a limited hangout? Totally. Is Reform a globalist asset? Highly arguable.
Farage may not look and talk like an establishment asset. That is the beauty of assets and double agents.
They use their undoubted skill sets and acting ability to convince people they are on their side. And the suggestible will believe them.
The Manchurian candidates may not even be aware of their assumed roles.
Farage’s tip-toeing began with his abandonment of anti-Islamist hero Tommy Robinson.
And that also started the drift away of Reform members. They thought they had signed up for an insurgency. Many of them love Tommy and his metier.
At The Conservative Woman, John Hale laments: “What on earth is Reform doing to itself, and the millions who support it and look to it as the potential saviour of the UK?
“Who exactly is responsible for the utterly chaotic shambles that is unfolding in front of us?
“Members are now asking if this is a serious political force, or some toytown plaything of a handful of political wannabes who, with the first smell of success trying to create their own version of the Conservative Party, are now woefully out of their depth and unable to control the monster that they have created?
“Four million individuals turned out and voted for a Party that is now tearing itself apart. Their online vote counter didn’t look so clever when its tally was decreasing, demonstrating membership cancellations following on from this fracas.
“We need Reform to address what it is that has been taken, that we demand be reclaimed and returned. What is that booty, purloined while we were asleep at the wheel or preoccupied by our own lives?”
TRAPS
Those around the traps at the moment who chastise Trump and his cabinet colleagues are simps who just don’t recognise what is at stake, what has been lost, and the strategies needed to get back that which was lost.
They do not understand the war we are in, what the enemy has done to us, how they don’t play by the old rules – or any rules, really – and how, therefore, the dissident outsider politicians should not play by the old rules.
What is needed is, above all else, to move fast and break things, as US author Jonathan Taplin argued in his book about Facebook, Amazon and Google.
God help me for suggesting that we emulate Mark Zuckerberg. Taplin was describing the seizing of opportunities created by the internet to create new global monopolies in tech.
I don’t remotely admire the outcomes of their efforts, but their methods were commercially compelling, strategically brilliant and can and should be applied to insurgent government.
It is called disruption in the start-up world, the gospel of the late, great Clayton Christensen.
John Hale at TCW gets moving fast and breaking things. Trump 2.0 gets this. As Australian reporter Chris Uhlmann says, politically we now have a world “where the road rules have been torn up”.
It seems that Reform UK has abandoned a revolutionary approach in favour of steady-as-she-goes, old politics. Wow, on this trajectory, they might double their seats in 2029 … to ten – out of 650.
As Mark Steyn comments pithily: “When Farage says Rupert Lowe has been captured by the ‘online far Right’, he’s saying that Reform’s priority should continue to be aging lounge-bar whingers who, above all else, see themselves as the voice of Middle England and have no desire to remake themselves as firebrand revolutionaries.
“Of course, being a mainstream normie doesn’t mean the uniparty won’t shut you out anyway: ask Mme Le Pen.
CAT LADY
“Nigel seems to be trying to emulate her strategy of ‘de-demonisation’ and reinvention of herself as a harmless cat lady. In France, the cat lady herself has a Paris prosecutor demanding she be gaoled for five years and banned from public office.”
Indeed. What a ridiculous claim by Farage (about Lowe). Farage is even using the very same insult (far Right) used by the establishment.
He is playing into the hands of those who we once might have thought to have been his enemies.
He has taken on the appearance of yet another puppet.
He who once seemed to know the nature of the game now seems not to. Or, perhaps, he has simply lost the will to fight that he once had.
Back in the day, Nigel Farage seemed like the coming man. A little like Trump, who rode into the fray (or down the escalator) in 2015 after decades of American conservative disappointment.
Now Farage believes his own bullshit. It all looks like it is now blowing up in the faces of the 80 per cent of Britons who are utterly opposed to the direction of policy and cultural travel and who have simply nowhere to go electorally.
No wonder they are really, really pissed off. But some aren’t that pissed off, or so Patrick O’Flynn suggests in The Spectator:
“After a spectacular week of feuding, opinion polls appear to show support for Reform UK remains unscathed.
“Reform somehow still sits at level-pegging with Labour – perhaps even a point ahead – with the Tories several points further adrift.
Well, maybe. Reform still has to win seats, though, even if it does get through the current feud and policy stumbles.
And if the reductionist Farage policy view prevails, and Reform builds greater electoral success and somehow attains access to power, what will come of it all, anyway, if they abandon their base and their reason for being?
After Trump leaves office – or perhaps, after JD Vance leaves office – the globalist elites will be hoping for a seamless return to their rightful ownership of the world. It will have been a mere sabbatical.
No such pause buttons on their domination need to be pressed in relation to the Mother Country, alas.PC
As an Australian living pro tem in the UK I have become a Reform UK member but must admit to now wavering in commitment to it. Lowe and Habib are both soundly pragmatic but see the problems and are definitely on the right of centre whereas Farage is moving ever more to the centre and thus toward Labour/LibDems/Conservative. The answer to the UK’s problems will NOT be found there.
The overview by Mr Collits (above) is sound indeed and one with which I concur. Habib and Lowe see Farage as a ‘control freak’ (my words) and from all the noise around the matter this appears to be very much the case. A leader has to first listen to the voter base, then advisers and associated and ultimately his own vision. Farage will not tolerate criticism and the Chairman, Mohammed Yusef is draconian in insisting that there is only one hymn sheet which includes no criticism of Islam.
Interesting times of sorts but frighteningly important for the UK … similarly for Australia in May.
It’s very early to write off Nigel Farage. His basic premise is sound, and what other choice does the UK have! We’re likewise told that the Canadian Liberals are about to re-invent themselves and prevail at their forthcoming election, but that’s unlikely after they’ve presided over a decade long and steady decline in living standards.
Trump was only joking about making Canada America’s 51st state, as why would he want another California!
Farage is certainly durable, and apropos Churchill in 1940 he is currently Britain’s only viable choice should they seek to stay as a first world country, rather than descending into a sharia law type enclave.
Good analysis Paul. Imo Farage has had some good moments but not able to lead a potentially effective political group. Yes, maybe the UK system is not helpful but Nige seems a tad too authoritarian, for this conservative. Its recoverable for the long haul, without the histrionics and shoving dissenters off the deck far too summarily.
I found this commentary from Carl Benjamin aka Sargon of Akkad informative. Seems there’s a side to Nigel that he’s pretty well kept out of the light – until now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VEcv4_MTZk
Farage astutely took the electoral mess created by Conservatives. He has, as Collits refers, allowed his inherent self confidence become confused with political leadership. Not uncommon but risky.