The Hunt Is On

Over half of the jobs advertised on Reform UK's website are to work from home, and by Sunday it had already suspended the newly elected Councillor Donna Edmunds of Shropshire County Council because she had indicated her intention to join a new party led by Rupert Lowe and Ben Habib as soon as it existed. Yesterday, she resigned from Reform.

We still await Louise Haigh's resignation statement to the House of Commons, and it is has always been inconceivable that Keir Starmer had not known about her past. She and ever-more others are of course right that the electorate has not just expressed its desire for more of the same, only even more quickly. That is what we are going to get, though.

Zack Polanski is personally implicated in the anti-Semitism scam against Jeremy Corbyn, and the Greens, of whom he is already Deputy Leader, support NATO and the war in Ukraine, in keeping with the fanaticism of the governing Greens in Germany. Polanski is also challenging for the Leadership because he considers the existing Co-Leaders too soft in their resistance of the acknowledgment of biological sex. There are good reasons why I have not joined the Workers Party. But I would still vote for it. It never will be, but if Labour were more like the Workers Party, or the SDP, then Reform would hardly matter.

For the Conservatives, meanwhile, the challenger is the Liberal Democrats, and vice versa. Across the socially liberal, pro-EU, Thatcherite heartlands, mostly but not exclusively in the South, millions of voters make a case-by-case judgement each time as to which of the old Coalition partners was better-placed to advance that ideology, or at least that sensibility. The Conservatives do not need a Leader who could beat Reform. They are barely in competition with Reform. They need a Leader who as the Lib Dems swept through, say, Surrey last year (a county council that they would have taken last week if the elections had not been postponed), nevertheless managed to hold on to, say, Godalming and Ash, even if by only 891 votes. Imagine that such a person had been Culture Secretary, Health Secretary, Foreign Secretary, and Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Hunt is on.