The unlamented death of the Tories, and their replacement with something worse
Reform UK rises as Britain’s political plates shift — poised to eclipse the Tories with a hard-right, billionaire-backed nationalism that threatens civil liberties, rights protections, and democratic norms.
J ust over one hundred years ago, the two major political parties in the UK were the Tories and the Liberals. Then the Labour party rose on the left – Labour really was a left wing party back then, and in the years following the First World War, Labour entirely displaced the Liberals as the main left-liberal party reducing the latter to the status of a third party which at some general elections retained but a tenuous hold in the House of Commons.
We now seem poised on the brink of another such seismic shift as the tectonic plates of British politics realign themselves again. This time it looks as though it’s the Tories who are set to be replaced as the main party of the right by a new political party, Reform UK, a billionaire-backed hard-right party of naked English nationalist exceptionalism. Reform’s big trick is to pose as the insurgent party opposed to the established elites even though it is funded and backed by billionaires and its leaders are millionaire upper-middle-class, privately-educated white heterosexual English men, the kind of people that an AI program would generate if fed the prompt: show me examples of the British establishment elite.
— AI prompt: Show me examples of the British establishment elite.
Reform has built its brand by deploying the traditional fascist tactic of othering. All that ails the UK is the fault of minorities, above all immigrants, but also trans people, the ‘woke’, and the nebulous ‘elite’ of which the millionaire leaders and backers of Reform UK mysteriously do not form a part.
Reform UK, and above all its leader, the odious Nigel Farage, have been assisted in this by a British media which has fallen over itself to give a platform to Farage and his minions out of all proportion to their electoral success. I’ve yet to see any British media outlet hold Farage to account over his ludicrous claim to be anti-elite when he’s an upper-middle-class, privately-educated millionaire, former commodities broker and admirer of the arch-racist Enoch Powell. If Nigel Farage is anti-elite, I am a BBC Scotland presenter.
Due in no small measure to its favourable media platforming and the exposure it gets on the hard-right Anglo-British propaganda network GB News, Reform UK appears set to win swathes of seats in England in the English local and mayoral elections scheduled to take place on Thursday 1 May.
Recent opinion polling shows that Reform is gaining ground in England and looks set to drive the Conservatives into third place. Former Tory voters are deserting the party in droves, attracted by a party which makes no bones about its desire to be nasty to the traditional enemies of the right, feminists, the left, ethnic minorities, the LGBT community, and the EU.
For its part, the Conservative party, both in the UK as a whole and in Scotland in the form of Russel Findlay, has been reduced to running along in the sewage wake of Reform UK, shouting “We can be vile too!” to a dwindling audience which is increasingly no longer listening. Why pay heed to second hand poo when there’s Nigel Farage the poo flinging monkey.
The Tories have no answers, no analysis of what caused them to lose last year’s Westminster general election and not a clue about how to rebuild the broad base of support they would need if they were to have any chance of getting back into power. The Tories are a dying party, both literally and metaphorically. The next Westminster general election could be the last in which the Tories can have a realistic claim to be fighting to become the party of government.
Cue the world’s tiniest violin.
Unfortunately, what is set to replace the Tories is far more toxic, far uglier and much nastier. If you thought the last Tory administration was bad, it will be sweetness and light compared to a government which has 30p Lee Anderson in a senior government position and the grifter in chief in Downing Street. Polls suggest that Reform is eating into the Conservative vote. Reform is favourite to take two of the regional mayoral seats which are being contested next week, Greater Lincolnshire and Hull and East Yorkshire. In Greater Lincolnshire, polls put Reform 15% clear of the Conservatives in a county which was traditionally a Conservative stronghold; Margaret Thatcher was from Lincolnshire. Meanwhile, Reform has a 14% lead in Hull and East Yorkshire, with the Lib Dems in second place.
As well as the mayoral contests, all seats on 14 county councils, eight unitary authorities, the metropolitan borough of Doncaster, and the Isles of Scilly council will be up for election, a total of 1,641 council seats across 24 local authorities.
Polls suggest that the Conservative Party could lose between 475 and 525 councillors in the upcoming local elections. Labour, which is currently as popular as Donald Trump at Greenlandic weddings, will struggle to hold on to the seats it currently holds. Polling suggests that Labour could lose control of Doncaster to Reform UK and is at risk of losing nearly all of its seats on either Oxfordshire or Cambridgeshire councils. Reform UK could gain between 400 and 450 seats or even more, allowing it to take control of a number of councils as well as a couple of regional mayoralities.
Should this happen, the pressure on the Tories to reach some sort of pact with Reform pressure, which is already high, will only become more intense. This is what Farage meant when he claimed that his goal was a reverse takeover of the Conservative party. There’s no doubt that if such a deal were struck, it would see Farage calling the shots and the UK would be well on the way to falling securely into the hands of far-right English nationalism.
— Farage in Downing Street after the next General Election?
That’s not a UK in which there would be any place for Scotland other than as a ‘historic region’ of what would effectively be Greater England, with no more political relevance than Northumbria or Wessex. We’d be taken out the European Convention on Human Rights, opening the door to the reintroduction of the death penalty and the decimation of civil liberties, employment and environmental rights while our supermarket shelves would be filled with American chlorinated chicken and hormone stuffed beef, while the NHS would be opened up to American healthcare corporations and the UK would find its new place in the world as a satrapy of a MAGA Empire.
The choice facing Scotland has never been starker. It’s independence in Europe or the far-right, corrupt authoritarianism of Farage, forced to bend a knee to the whims of the man-baby emperor in the White House.
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