Since I withdrew my support from both the Reform and the Branch Committee, I have been joined by many other people locally.
We are not against Reform. It is the only party that offers – or offered – a manifesto that we can get behind. What we are against is the way Reform is being managed, the changes to core policies, and the treatment of membership. We are against what Zia Yusuf is doing to our party.
Therefore, we are getting together as Reform in Exile, although that’s a working title. A branch that will do everything that a branch should do, but without the control of Reform HQ or its highly paid managers.
We are not starting a new party. Far from it. We live in hope that Zia Yusuf and Nigel Farage are removed from Reform, along with all the aforementioned managers, and that Rupert Lowe is appointed as leader. Failing that, Rupert Lowe starts his own party, or GB-PAC sets up the mechanisms for us to operate under their umbrella. Regardless of the outcome, we will be prepared as a fully functioning local association.
If any other former Reform branch members share this sentiment, please let us know. We all need to be communicating with each other, and the GB-PAC umbrella might be the ideal platform for doing so.
Hi. You are one of many, there is a collective of X-Reformers who are taking similar action in the midlands and Wales. They are supporting each other under the banner of Independent Britain, some are standing as Independents in the May elections. Please check out Independent Britain on facebook. I will try to get some of them to reach out to you.
Count me in! Disappointed in how recently NF and Yusaf seem to have gutted Reform of what it once stood for. Disappointed too in how Reform have got rid of at least 2 of it’s best assets, RL and BH - a huge loss to the party.
I’m in West Sussex, but I have been in touch with Independent Britain, thanks to Caroline Smith, and they seem to be spreading all over the country, so I am waiting for a response and perhaps go forward under their banner as they are part of GB-PAC.
I came close to spending my 25 quid joining Reform. I was even prepared to knock doors for them to help get people elected. I’ve been very disappointed to see them move away from taking strong positions. Rupert Lowe was their only MP who was not afraid to stand with the general public and say what most people are thinking.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the UK doesn’t need Reform, it needs reverse. It’s was Tony Blairs reforms that got the country into the mess it’s in now. We need a party who will actually reverse these positions. I think Reform UK only plan to do the bare minimum.
They might stop the boats, but the boats are only the tip of the iceberg. They don’t have any policies to deport or stop the over use of legal immigration. Now Farage is saying Brexit is done, but it’s not done. They have replaced grassroots candidates with many of the same people who were part of the Conservative party’s problem.
I can see one of 2 things happening:
The Conservatives make a fake shift to the right to eliminate Reform, but only to win and nothing changes.
Reform UK wins the election, but only on the basis of being less bad than the others. We get Tories 2.0 and nothing changes.
Unless a movement can re-infiltrate parties and take our own long march or a new party can emerge without splitting the right wing vote, it will be more of the same. It seems like Reform are already preventing being infiltrated by patriots and removing the ones they have.
Sorry I haven’t suggested any solutions. This is more of an observation/rant.
A lot of what you say here rings a bell with me. I was removed from the Swindon South whatsapp group for daring to make the point that NF seems to be shifting course away from all that I found worthy of my support within ReformUK. Now is a) NF playing the long game to attract those on the centre left who have been let down by the Uniparty hence making Reform more attractive to them or b) is he being driven by forces we mere mortals are not privy to?
Whatever the answer is I am unhappy with the status as it is quo!!
At first I thought he was playing the long game. But the more I look into things, the more I doubt he knows what he’s doing well enough to play a long game.
I’m part of MAGA when I’m in the United States. They don’t have the same convictions as the MAGA crowd and are always cancelling the same crowd in their own party. Trump’s administration is built on that crowd.
There’s no way Farage would not cancel the likes of JD Vance and Kash Patel and there’s no way similar big guns on the British right like Braverman and Jenrick will risk joining him because he can only tolerate yes men.
That was 25 quid well saved. I have now joined Integrity, Ben Habib’s party and have all fingers and toes crossed that this might be the answer. Especially if/when Rupert Lowe gets on board. Maybe this is where all these policies we have commented on will find a home. We live in hope.
So glad to have found this forum as I was beginning to think I was a lone voice in Eastbourne. As a former parliamentary candidate for UKIP and an election agent for The Brexit Party I have seen sufficient of Farage to know what will happen next. He is as Rupert Lowe describes and will never change unless and until he has trashed Reform like he did the previous parties.
He thinks he can be a one person party but without a team of spokespersons he can never be seen as heading a government in waiting. And why would all those that have grand designs on helping Reform risk putting their heads above the parapet only to be cancelled like Rupert Lowe.
Too many of Farage’s MEPs and UKIP spokespersons were thrown under the proverbial bus because they opposed or spoke out and then in December 2019 317 candidates were dropped and abandoned at the eleventh hour without any thanks or the chance to thank their helpers and those that donated. We must never fall for that trick again. If anyone has a group near Eastbourne please let me know.
Hello from just along the coast in Bognor and Littlehampton. It seems that while those of us who have dealt with Farage and/or Reform first-hand have some idea of what is going on the mass of the Reform membership are still of the persuasion that Farage and Yusuf can walk on water and feed the five thousand with a bucket of KFC and a can of coke.
I think Ben Habib and the crew are much the same in essence as you guys were all members of the party. I was about to sign up and something made me hesitate, then Ben Habib left Reform and I started taking long hard looks at Farage.
The next place I looked at was UKIP. I have to say that I like them but they aren’t quite for me. Then I saw Farage dissassociate with a victim of Britains institutionalised torture, in the form of Tommy Robinson, Then Rupert Lowe happened and Zia Yusef and frankly I’m glad I kept a hold of my money.
Well former Reform members in bannishment is what it should probably should be called. You’ve taken the hit, felt the dissapointment of being let down. What if we make this what reform should have been all along but wasn’t allowed to be.
who would agree to this:
legal immigration is the problem it is only in connection with a way too generous welfare system that ends up subsidizing parallel societies that would be unsustainable without these subsidies.
I prefer all welfare to be phased out for all, but the first step: no welfare to any foreign new arrivals and no new welfare applications for non-citizens. Then phasing out deadlines for non-citizens already on welfare, but thereafter also phasing out deadline for citizens (below a certain age)
No. Legal migration is not only a concern due to the welfare state. Mass-scale migration rapidly changes the constitution of the country, leading to people with different fundamental beliefs and cultural contexts living together, and it challenges the purpose of the nation state. If we took the UK, took all the Brits away and replaced them with Somalians, what would be the point of the UK any more?
More than this, it means that first and second generation immigrants often feel dispossessed in their own countries. This is why, for instance, more than 50% of young Muslims want Sharia law in the UK and hold extreme Islamic ideologies. I am becoming increasingly convinced that in order to be British, you need to both grow up here and be born to a British parent, so you are able to inherit a genetic legacy to the land. This way you are both culturally and spiritually possessed by the British.
As for welfare, no. There is a problem with welfare for sure, and I do know people who have spent 5-10 years out of work and have no intention of finding work. However, the safety net of welfare is much needed. Without it, people who lost their employment would rapidly end up on the streets and even less able to help themselves than they currently are. It is worth remembering that there are currently ~2,000,000 people long-term unemployed and ~800,000 vacancies (and half of those will be ghost jobs or the like). Whilst I am sympathetic to arguments that welfare keeps pay low for example, without wide-scale economic reforms first and a large uptick in religiosity, undoing welfare will only ever be a disaster, sadly.
my view: state entitlement-welfare is poison and bears the serious risk of multi-generational dependency and disconnect from society. Before the state crowded them out during the 20th Century friendly societies (mutual aid associations) did a much better job at providing social security without the dependency spiral. Jobs would be plentiful if red-tape state regulations and tax burdens were lifted.
I wonder if your notion of inherited Britishness that harks back before 1600 is not more nostalgic then functional. Or is nation for you primarily an emotional blood bond, rather than a project to create prosperity, liberty, solidarity with whoever is willing and committed to contribute? I would say that new-comer participants need to assimilate and identify with the culture and ways of working they want to join. Without welfare this will happen much more, much faster. Also, if immigration is tied to jobs, this is already a sound selection criterion.
Prosperity for what reason? Liberty for what reason? What is the point of money or freedom (I appreciate that liberty and freedom are not directly analogous) other than to possess them? What gives them value, and why should I care about them? I apologise if you think that I am misrepresenting you, but if these are your core values, I do not share them. Wealth has no value inherently, nor does freedom; instead, their value comes from their function that both enable us to be independent, actualised human beings capable of supporting those around us that we care about and providing for our families and our wider communities. Given that immigration puts the long-term social structure that I live in at threat, it harms society by decoupling individuals who exist within the society from it, and it lowers trust within communities because they can no longer see themselves in their neighbour, I fundamentally reject your notion.
The problem, as I said, is not just new comers but their children. Children who are raised in the culture of their parents but also in the culture of this land. Children who end up being strangers in both the UK and in the lands of their parents, who end up not integrating. I have many friends who fall within this boat (not radical Islamic extremists), and have discussed the problems of not feeling like they are possessed by any country and don’t belong anywhere truly.
All of this is before we even discuss the problem of in-group bias. Welfare does not block assimilation and prevent social mixing, for the phenomenon of parallel societies would happen regardless. We all understand that, for example, Indians prefer to hire and work with Indians, the Chinese with the Chinese, Arabs with Arabs, etc. Even if you end welfare, you would still find these migrants naturally coming together, because of course they will. It is always easier to get along with people from the same cultural tradition as yourself; it is natural. This is why bonds of blood matter. If you are born in Britain to a British parent in a community which is more than 50% British, you will become part of the cultural continuity of Britain almost by default. It will be as natural to you as swimming is to a duck.
You can try and toy with the edges and the parameters, you do what Sweden has done and require migrants be spread thin across the country, but unless you force inter-marriage, you will still find that the Afghans will marry the Afghans in order to have Afghan babies, the Pakistanis will marry the Pakistanis to have Pakistani babies, and the Japanese will marry the Japanese to have Japanese babies.
So no, it is not “more nostalgic than functional”, the very core of a functional state requires a shared myth and a shared history. A shared value system, culture and sense of belonging. All of these things can only be passed down by blood.
I accept that liberalism as a political philosophy has only a very thin, abstract, non-substantive conception of the good life and needs to be filled out with thicker notions like Aristotelian virtue, or like medieval Chivalry - not literally these value systems, but something equivalent. I think there is such a shared value system in our advanced societies: creativity, self-development, life-long learning, contributing to public debate, to civic life, entrepreneurship, charity etc. I do not think that relatively small groups like individual European nations have a very distinct ethos. I accept that cultural memory is important but as a German who moved to England as a student attracted by Anglosaxon philosophy I can identify with this culture, history and institutions. I feel your approach is too narrow. I am an architect and architecture is now world architecture and we export globally. Literature is world literature, world cinema, and of course science, technology etc. Finally, your underestimation of prosperity (= material freedom through technology and productivity gains) is naive. The same applies to liberty (social freedom). Every mobile creature cherishes free exploration and tries to escape shackles and being controlled. The attraction of prosperity and liberty is universal and explains all migration streams. We have a problem if people so attracted do not comprehend the cultural predonditions of the achievement of prosperity and liberty and want to maintain their inherited ways that cannot create those achievements.
my main problem with uneducated mass migration from culturally distant places is that this starts to undermine the very few prosperity engines (including UK) that are well functioning to deliver liberty, prosperity and further innovation. high talent immigration on the other hand I welcome for the sake of us here and indeed for the sake of world society/prosperity. there is no cultural adaptation problem here.
Wales. They are supporting each other under the banner of Independent Britain, some are standing as Independents in the May elections. Please check out Independent Britain on facebook. I will try to get some of them to reach out to you.
we can but hope 
