Reform Schooled

Between 1999 and 2001, there was an outfit called the Pro-Euro Conservative Party, set up to contest the 1999 European elections, the first in which the whole United Kingdom used Proportional Representation. The media insisted on treating the PECP as a serious force and were left as near to dumbstruck as they could ever be when it failed to win a single seat. The PECP of the present is probably Restore Britain, which at Makerfield took fewer votes than the BNP had done in 2010, and less than one third of the Labour margin of victory over Reform UK. Parties have been wound up completely for better showings than that, and Leaders have been removed. As it is, Keir Starmer is being removed because his party won. What times these are.

And what of Nigel Farage? What has Christopher Harborne had for his £22 million to Reform, and for his five million to Farage personally? A policy of cryptocurrency deregulation that Farage and Reform are no nearer than ever to being in any position to implement. Mirroring Harborne’s £27 million is Reform’s 27 per cent in the polls, a figure lower than Labour’s result in 1983. Of five by-elections in this Parliament, Reform has won only the first, and that by all of six votes; even though none of them has been held in Northern Ireland, each of them has been won by a different party, although only Runcorn and Helsby has been won by a majority of 0.0 per cent. Half of Reform’s MPs were returned to this Parliament as Conservatives, including both of the Ministers responsible for Hadi Alodid’s indefinite leave to remain, and 40 per cent of the Reform MPs returned at the General Election have left the party. It is high time for the media to treat one of the two parties with with one in 81 MPs as just one of the two parties with one in 81 MPs. No doubt its previous donors are already doing so.