Reform did well last week but here is what is needs to do if it wants to avoid ebbing away
The challenger party has huge ground still to cover to get in shape for a general election and is crying out for bold new policies to connect viscerally with voters
REFORM UK party leader Richard Tice is entitled to be feeling quite pleased at the moment.
At the two parliamentary by-elections last Thursday, the right-wing challenger party firmly put to bed a theory doing the rounds among opinion pollsters that its recorded level of support “isn’t real”.
By chalking up a 13 per cent vote share in Wellingborough and a ten per cent share in Kingswood, Reform broadly matched its current national polling and did at least twice as well as it has ever done before in parliamentary by-elections. The extra publicity and brand awareness it garnered from the two performances can only help it tick further upwards in those polls.
My instinct says that still only around a third of the electorate knows about Reform, which does not have quite the same hard-edged political profile and tightly-defined objectives as its predecessors the Brexit Party and UKIP. So, to get the support of a third of that third is quite impressive and suggests scope for further progress as more voters come to learn of the party’s existence, its antecedents and its place on the political spectrum.
That’s the good news. Now for the bad: while the by-election results were good enough for Reform to give it prospects of further progress, they were not so good as to indicate that it is now immune from suffering a big two-party squeeze in a general election campaign.
For instance, if we compare its by-election performances of last week with the general election performance of UKIP in the same seats at the general election in 2015, we see how far behind the new party still is.
In 2015 in Wellinborough, UKIP got an almost 20 per cent vote share at a close fought general election in which media focus was naturally mainly on David Cameron’s Tories and Ed Miliband’s Labour. In Kingswood the UKIP vote share was almost 15 per cent.
So even under favourable by-election conditions, with the Tory vote screwed to the floor by both apathy and ignominy, and with two very strong candidates, Reform significantly lagged the UKIP of 2015. One should not judge it too harshly for this because we in UKIP had become very good at what we did by then.
A look at the by-election vote shares that we in the “purple peril” chalked up running into the 2015 general election underlines the point: 22 per cent in Rotherham in November 2012, 28 per cent in Eastleigh in February 2013, 24 per cent in South Shields in May 2013, 18 per cent in Wythenshawe & Sale in February 2014, 26 per cent in Newark in June 2014, 39 per cent in Heywood & Middleton in October 2014 and 60 per cent in Clacton on the same day, 42 per cent in Rochester & Strood in November 2014. And of course, those last two results were outright victories for Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless respectively.
UKIP also had a strong network of local branches, headed by sometimes bloody-minded but also well-known community activists. These propelled it to years of very strong local elections results, giving the party several hundred councillors at its 2015 zenith. UKIP also had two dozen well-resourced MEPs, of whom I was one, each with several paid members of staff. These MEPs were able to become familiar faces on regional broadcasting networks. And it also had, in Nigel Farage, a leader who had become a household name across the land.
Reform currently has none of these attributes and it is difficult to see how it is going to emerge from local elections in May with a good story to tell about growing momentum heading into a general election still most likely to be held in late autumn.
Apart from in a couple of local hotspots, most notably Derby, the Reform brand has simply not worked in municipal contests. The party’s lack of a branch membership structure has deprived it of a robust “ground game” and this deficiency cannot be corrected in time for this year’s council elections. There is even an argument for it to sit out the local elections on the pretext of focusing resources on a national challenge at the general election. Otherwise it is surely destined to get a paltry vote share that will allow its rivals – principally the Tories – to present it as a busted flush. Better news for the party is that it should score quite well in the Rochdale parliamentary by-election at the end of this month given all the prevailing circumstances there.
But overall, Tice and co should be in no doubt that there is an uphill stretch of ground now to be faced. Showboating and coasting will not naturally take it to the next level. So what will? Policies that give it a visceral connection with that large segment of the electorate which is outraged by the progressive positions of the Westminster bubble, would be my answer.
The party has already adopted a stance of net zero legal immigration and dumping the vastly expensive commitment made by the Westminster parties of reaching carbon net zero anytime soon. It has half a dozen points on stopping illegal immigration, including sending boats back to France, leaving the ECHR and setting up overseas processing centres. I think it needs something more dramatic on this front.
Were I in the shoes of Tice, Habib and the rest of their crew I’d adopt a policy of “ending asylum”. That’s right, I said “ending asylum”. Just abolish the thing. Everybody who might vote Reform understands it has become a nonsensical, socially corrosive, global racket to facilitate economic and welfare migration. So just pledge to scrap it and look forward to the squeals of outrage that will ensure from the establishment parties.
In place of asylum, the party could propose giving the Home Secretary quasi-judicial authority to personally grant say up to 1,000 exceptional applicants a year leave to remain. Had Alexei Navalny, god rest his soul, got to Britain, then he would of course have been permitted under this system to take refuge in the UK as an exceptional and distinguished dissident. But for the bog standard arrival off a Channel dinghy? No way and no expensive and time-consuming appeals granted to anyone. In fact the entire discredited immigration tribunal system could be scrapped altogether. Anyone ruled not entitled to be in the UK should get shipped off to a new accommodation centre on Ascension Island with no prospect of ever returning to our precious stone set in a silver sea.
Another simple and electrifying policy Reform should adopt to connect viscerally with potential voters is to adopt the position that only British citizens can apply for or be granted social housing tenancies. There is now very high awareness among working class voters about the vast scale of allocation of scarce council and social housing units to foreign nationals. In London, the most expensive city in Europe in which to live, a frankly astonishing 48 per cent of all social tenancies are now in the hands of people not born in the UK. A new “Brits only” policy would go down a storm in working class neighbourhoods and give the party a philosophical underpinning in favour of citizen preference.
It is policies such as these which could equip Reform to withstand a general election squeeze from the two big parties. If voters do not merely view the insurgent party as a receptacle for protest votes, but actually come to see it as standing up for a different and better world view then they are far more likely to stick with it.
There is of course something else that could also give Reform rocket boosters: the
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