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.”
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.
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.
Support our Nation today
For the price of a cup of coffee a month you can help us create an independent, not-for-profit, national news service for the people of Wales, by the people of Wales.
Here in Trowbridge and St. Mellons we have a Plaid Cymru candidate who was apparently deform 4 months ago. She is refusing to state in writing that if she was elected, she won’t change back.
That’s an infiltrator. Rhun needs to look into that one.
Yes, please.
I would say if anyone has changed their personality… it’s Labour who have become what the Tories used to be. Pro-big business, anti-worker, anti-refugee, anti-trade union (ironic).
and the Tories/Reform have become the BNP. All they need to do is appoint Nick Griffin as the head and most wouldn’t be able to split the difference.
Many Tories are now desperate and Reform looks like a saviour to them. It doesn’t matter that the party will say and do anything to get a vote. Miss information is going to become far more prominent over the next few years. We’ve had blatant lies (remember the 350pw on the big red bus?) but it’ll be nothing like what’s going to happen in the near future. That’s why the proposed ‘lying act’ going through the Senedd is so important. Politicians need to prove what they say is correct and that will be hard for Reform to do.
When do you know a politician isn’t lying? When they’re not saying anything at all.
Funny yes, but a dangerous road to go down. Sowing distrust in ALL politicians is part of the authoritarian playbook.
A cheap gibe, and not true to boot. Do you include Caroline Lucas in that?
For Reform UK see Conservative. I totally agree. Can’t voters see this? Are they stupid, blind, or both? It shows the dire state of UK politics thanks to both Labour & Tory misrule rather than Reform UK being the panacea to all our problems. The policies Farage want to introduce have been in past Ukip and Brexit party manifestos. It’s obvious now that those contemplating voting for Reform UK are doing it because of Nigel Farage even though Reform policies will be disastrous. It’s the cult of personality.
“Are they stupid, blind, or both?” Their excuse is they are not interested in politics.
Trumps policies are already here, farage is going to parade a criminal in the US claiming freedom of speech broken in the UK.
Tory party peeps and farage were meeting vance during his visit. People now have orders enforced from the US. Make no mistake, kemi and/or farage=heritage foundation and project 2025. Far right win waiting, and people like farage will not want to give up power in elections, he is gunning for a dictator.
Said it before, say it again. Anti Reform/Tory rants like this article have no impact. The other parties have already wasted 8 months or so since the beginning of the Farage surge and have only 8 months left. Probably the trend is irreversible soon. The demos outside hotels are the barometer unfortunately.
These articles like an echo chamber. Utterly pointless. Just rile up plaid voters- who should probably make peace with the likelihood that reform are going to be the biggest party after the Senedd election
A handful of fascist, BNP/NF, football hooligan types? You wouldn’t know it from the media, but those demos are attended by a few hundred at most. They get a huge coverage in the news, whereas a pro-palestinian march of tens of thousands hardly gets a mention.These morons have always been here; the British Union of Fascists had 40,000 members at the start of World War 2.
‘In and around the Senedd, there is a cohort of young Tory and Reform supporters … 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.’ While that looks to be the case, even so I do wonder if dyed-in-the-wool Conservatives could bear the humiliation of finding themselves in power here, but only as the junior partner in a coalition with Reform UK. Because right now that looks like the only way they… Read more »
They’ll humiliate themselves to the n’th degree, if there is money for them in it.
Possibly you might just be right. But, on balance, I still think that for quite a few of them playing junior second fiddle to the Farageists would be just too much of a humiliation for them to bear!