I’ve been thinking that one of the benefits of FPP is that you get to choose your MP, not your party. Is there a way of making this more of a cross party thing? For example: backing Rupert Lowe regardless of him being independant or in any party. Backing Braverman even though she’s Conservative, but possibly also backing Champion for her stand on grooming gangs even though she’s left wing and Labour. Shouldn’t we have a movement that makes political parties less relevant and getting the best people for the job as the goal?
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Rupert Lowe, Tommy Robinson, Paul Thorpe, and many other heroes, belong here.
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Those PAC members who have Nigel’s ear need to use this moment to encourage Nigel to offer olive branches to Rupert, Ben and all the others who have been side-lined in last few months. Democratise the party. Prepare to be the government rather than act as a protest party.
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Even if Nigel did, I think many, if not most of us, could not trust him. Personally, I would struggle to trust him on the constitution and his desire for an elected upper chamber, but also his statements about child benefits show that he just isn’t serious, isn’t giving enough thought to what the country needs and the realities of the economy and what the country needs. Nigel has been shown to be a vacuous man with no vision to save the country who is costing only on vibes. Unless he agreed to be Habib’s puppet (not that Habib would agree to such an arrangement), Nigel just is not the guy.
While I understand your point and agree with it. The Reform Party, its grass roots, and its attraction in working class voters (not just in the red wall) is essential to saving the country. The Tory party is not going to be trusted after leaving all of Blair’s Technocrats and excessive government powers in place after 14 years of rule. The Reform Party needs to be made the vehicle of change and for that it needs to be constituted properly. Nigel needs to relinquish significant power to others. Those others need to be the right people who will eventually pull the country out of this dire malaise. It starts there, nowhere else. This is the path of least resistance.
Yes and no. We are in a once-in-a-generation place where people are considering something new. If Reform lets them down, that momentum will be lost forever along with the country. Essentially, we should not throw everything behind Reform until we are confident that it will do what is needed and not just be more centreist blob which is what Farage is trying to be.
I think we are saying the same thing. We have one bolt to shoot. We cannot afford to miss. The Reform Party maybe the crossbow, but Nigel is not the bolt (at least not as all powerful leader).
I would counter that somewhat with its impossible to tell what farage would do once in as it’s very hard to tell if farages centreline moves are tactical or ideological. If tactical then he may mask off once in.
If ideological he was never meant to win.
But for now I imagine if he was just pretending to be centrist to get the win with less establishment pushback we wouldn’t be able to tell.
I mean, you can judge the man for his actions. He has brought in a bunch of former-Tory/Lib Dem people to be Reform Councillors; he selected Luke Campbell to be a Reform Metro Mayor, the guy, bless his heart, is clearly in over his head and is not a thinking sort of person; he has a a closet full of the skeletons of right-wingers who he has knifed to be able to get where he is today; there is not a single person that used to work with Nigel that doesn’t seem to have a story about how he was an absolute dick to them. Even if, some how, some way Nigel has the right ideology, he just isn’t the leader we need and we would be better off without him.
I genuinely believe that if Nigel is trying to pretend to be a centerist, he must be a moron because pretty much everyone has an understanding of Nigel and he is basically too toxic for the centerists to vote for and is being too centerist for the right to support.
My hope is that Habib gets his party up and running ASAP and that somehow he can steal the momentum.
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Nigel will not resolve demographics, this is the only issue that matters, you literally might as well vote tory if you’re treating Farage as the new default vote on the right.
I have followed this discussion with keen interest and profound alarm. The challenges before us demand unwavering resolve, and I cannot emphasise this strongly enough: we must prevail. There is no alternative. We must win.
This fight transcends party lines, personalities, funding, or structures. None of these matter. Not councillors, not MPs, not careers or jobs—none of it. All are irrelevant in the face of this imperative: we must win.
Farage, Habib, Lowe, Yusuf—irrelevant. We must win.
If you are reading this, you know who “we” are. You know what this fight entails.
We must win. Only then can we tackle the problems we all recognise, forging solutions through compromise and collective will.
If we do not win, it is over. What must we ‘win’, what do I mean by “over”? You already know.
We must win. Let’s work out how to do that.
All the more important, that we make sure no one person is able to subvert us from our goal… to save Britain, its people, its culture, its prosperity, its independence.
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Read everything Dr Taspher says, because he summarises the reality of the situation regarding Farage. If Reform win the next election the smartest man in the new government will be Nigel Farage. Nigel Farage is a wily politician and can deliver good speeches, but he is not the sharpest knife in the cutlery drawer and with a cabinet of people less capable than him running the country, we might finding ourselves wishing we’d either voted Tory or we had Starmer back.
The existing and future problem with Reform is Farage’s ego. He truly believes that only he knows what to do, just like a few other dictators of recent history. That means he will not let go without a fight and if he is removed he will take a lot of others from the less sharp end of society with him.
There are two options. 1. Prove the real nature of Farage to the public at large and let them force him into a more subsidiary role in line with his abilities and make Reform democratic. 2. For Ben Habib to get his finger out and get Integrity up and running and democratic from the beginning.
The second part is crucial and means not launching the party with all the key roles taken over the chosen few. Every role should be elected by the members if a new party is to succeed.
Reform, or more importantly the people who are members of Reform, are the engine to save the country. With first past the post, we cannot keep splitting the vote on the right, that is how we ended up with a massive Labour majority with just 20% of the electorate voting for them. Nigel is a cynical egoist vulnerable to flattery, not unlike Trump. He can still have an important and positive role to play in saving the country, but for it to succeed (save the country and reverse the rapid decline) we need a higher calibre of leadership with the vision to see it done. Rupert and Ben are both clearly stronger choices. There needs to be a compromise that brings us all together.
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Aaand now Zia is back in the party again.
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Cringe. Nigel has zigged when he needed to zag.
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I agree especially with regards to compromise. I believe two universal truths apply here:
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Nothing and no one in this world is perfect.
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You will rarely, if ever, get exactly what you want.
With this in mind, our focus must be on winning, no matter what—within reason. Victory, even if imperfect, is essential.
To me, winning means more than securing 326+ seats in the next general election. To win, it may even require supporting imperfect candidates and accepting less than ideal positions.
Through compromise, we have to coalesce, around who and what party - I care not. We have to win.
The thing is (and we might disagree here) that unless Farage has a Damascene conversion, his being PM would not be a victory. Right now, given that I think that Badenoch cannot survive as LotO, I am more likely to vote Tory or indie than Reform in 2029 because I just cannot trust Farage. He’s said repeatedly that he doesn’t care about demographics, that we have to accept that this nation will become majority muslim and that deportations are impossible. And now, he has let Zia back in the party mere two days after he declared that “Getting Reform into government was not the right thing to do”, or whatever it was that he said.
I’m willing to compromise. I don’t think that I will get everything I want. But if the compromise is backing Nigel, that is like saying the country is currently dying from arsenic and no one is doing anything, so we should vote to give it cyanide too.
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I both agree and disagree. Such is the current political landscape. I avoid naming specific parties or individuals, focusing instead on first principles. The key issues, in my view are:
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The dictatorship of the civil service must be broken.
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Much of the post-1997 legislation needs to be repealed.
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We must shrink the state to revive economic greatness.
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Immigration must be solved.
Most major parties either openly reject these goals or show their opposition through their actions, with no interest in addressing these concerns. Only one currently viable party, untested in practice but saying some of the right things, seems remotely aligned. The others have consistently shown disdain for these priorities in both words and deeds.
Given the urgency of our situation, I’d support any viable party that genuinely tackles even one of these goals over the status quo.
You mentioned a “Damascene conversion.” I agree, but it would take something extraordinary, probably nothing short of divine intervention, for the Conservative Party to earn my trust again. Even then, I’d still think twice.
The priority is real progress, no matter who delivers it or what trade-offs are involved. That’s my view.
What a surprise. There ends any hope for Reform to do anything and Sarah Pochin now has a target on her back.
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