{"id":369047,"date":"2025-08-24T05:44:21","date_gmt":"2025-08-24T05:44:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/369047\/"},"modified":"2025-08-24T05:44:21","modified_gmt":"2025-08-24T05:44:21","slug":"for-conservative-party-see-reform-uk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/369047\/","title":{"rendered":"For Conservative Party, see Reform UK"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Reform UK MS Laura Anne Jones with Reform\u2019s leader Nigel Farage \u2013 Image: Nigel Farage<\/p>\n

Martin Shipton<\/strong><\/p>\n

Why are so many people not getting the fact that Reform UK is just a rebranded and repackaged version of the Conservative Party?<\/p>\n

Nigel Farage made a very revealing comment during an interview with the Daily Telegraph in April 2024 \u2013 three months before the general election that brought Labour to power, and two months before he took over as leader of Reform UK.<\/p>\n

He said: \u201cIn the Midlands and the North, Reform is neck and neck if not a point ahead of the Conservatives already, and I think there comes a moment \u2013 if that momentum continues, which I think it will \u2013 where if you\u2019re a Red Wall Conservative MP the only way you can save your skin is to stand for Reform.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Self preservation<\/strong><\/p>\n

From this statement, we learn two things. Firstly, that a significant factor in the growth of Reform has been the way Farage and others have encouraged Tory politicians to defect to the new party by appealing to a desire for self-preservation.<\/p>\n

Secondly, Farage takes it for granted that individual decisions to defect will not be complicated by any need to compromise on ideological principles. Put more simply, it means that what those defecting believed in as Tories, they can continue to believe in as members of Reform.<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t mean that when defections take place, those joining Reform won\u2019t be critical of the Conservatives. But their comments will be vague and essentially content-free. When South Wales East Tory MS Laura Anne Jones announced her defection while standing next to Farage at the Royal Welsh Show, she said: \u201cI\u2019ve just suddenly felt that the Conservative Party was unrecognisable to me. It wasn\u2019t the party that I joined over three decades ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

She went on to say that Reform \u201cis listening to the people of Great Britain\u201d and called Farage \u201ca great man\u201d.<\/p>\n

And making comments that she could have uttered before or after her defection, she added: \u201cWales is a complete mess. As you know, we\u2019ve got the worst educational outcomes. We\u2019ve got health statistics that are the worst in the UK.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ms Jones\u2019 claim that she had \u201cjust suddenly felt the Conservative Party was unrecognisable to me\u201d lacks credibility. Which Tory policies in particular have \u201csuddenly\u201d alienated her? She doesn\u2019t say. She then went on to announce herself as an adherent of Farage\u2019s personality cult.<\/p>\n

Sam Kurtz, her former Tory group colleague in the Senedd, offered a more convincing explanation for her defection: \u201cTo get re-elected\u201d.<\/p>\n

Which brings us back to Farage\u2019s strategy to grow the party on defections.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Preoccupations<\/strong><\/p>\n

The similarities between the Conservatives and Reform are apparent on social media in Wales, where posts from named individuals like Andrew RT Davies bear a striking resemblance to posts from anonymised accounts that have the same preoccupations.<\/p>\n

The core principle is to assert a lie or distortion as fact time and time again, ignoring responses that seek to put the record straight. For months, Davies and his anonymised imitators tried to make people believe that the Welsh Government was handing money to all \u201cillegal immigrants\u201d. In fact, some unaccompanied child asylum seekers who had entered the care system had been included in a pilot project that entailed paying higher rates of benefit to care leavers.<\/p>\n

The pilot project has now ended, so Davies and his entourage have moved on to attack the Welsh Government\u2019s \u201cNation of Sanctuary\u201d programme. Again, deliberate deception is taking place. It\u2019s a fact that more than 80% of the money spent on the \u201cNation of Sanctuary\u201d has been spent on resettling refugees from Ukraine, but Davies and co don\u2019t mention that. Instead they give the impression that all the money is going to what they would consider less desirable migrants. In other words, non-whites. This is disgraceful behaviour from Davies and all those associated with him, whatever their status. Reform and its hangers-on are doing exactly the same thing.<\/p>\n

Davies and co have jumped on another Reform bandwagon \u2013 defending the appalling Lucy Connolly, who was jailed for inciting people via social media to burn down hotels full of asylum seekers, referred to by her as \u201cbastards\u201d. All this high energy hatred from Tories and Reform is a substitute for practical policies that offer hope and prosperity to ordinary people. They think they\u2019ve hit on a winning formula and hope to cruise to victory on a diet of culture wars and grievance indulgence.<\/p>\n

Interchangeable<\/strong><\/p>\n

In and around the Senedd, there is a cohort of young Tory and Reform supporters, some of whom work for MSs, who socialise together and whose views are interchangeable. The rise of Reform on the back of Farage\u2019s dubious charisma has given hope to Tories in Wales who thought they were destined to be permanently out of power.<\/p>\n

What people need to wake up to is that the authoritarianism and chaos that now rules in the United States will come to Britain if Reform comes to power in Wales and\/or the UK as a whole.<\/p>\n

Farage, like Trump, is supposedly against what is characterised negatively as \u201cBig Government\u201d. In the United States this has entailed dismissing many thousands of public sector employees doing important jobs and weakening regulatory protections for the environment, for example. Tellingly, the Tory\/Reform attack-dog social media entity Doge Wales is named after the Elon Musk initiative that set the chaos in motion. If Reform takes power here, it will seek to do the same, but will face greater resistance from public sector unions.<\/p>\n

Farage would be keen to do a more comprehensive trade deal with the US, which would inevitably entail lowering food standards and opening up our market to the delights of chlorinated chicken \u2013 a product that Farage has praised.<\/p>\n

Workers\u2019 rights would undoubtedly be in Reform\u2019s sights, with the party wanting to deregulate the labour market.<\/p>\n

Israel<\/strong><\/p>\n

On the international front, Farage is a great supporter of Israel, refuses to accept that its war in Gaza amounts to genocide, and has praised Trump\u2019s plan to take over Gaza and forcibly displace Palestinians.<\/p>\n

Farage is also an admirer of Putin, having alleged that the West \u201cprovoked\u201d Russia into invading Ukraine.<\/p>\n

His latest position favours deporting refugees from Afghanistan back home to face certain death from the Taliban.<\/p>\n

Strangely enough, Reform\u2019s biggest donor Christopher Harborne, who lives in Thailand, has also donated large sums to the Conservative Party. He founded an aviation fuel company, trades in cryptocurrency and is the biggest shareholder in defence firm Qinetiq.<\/p>\n

Perversely the hard right of the Tory party is having a field day following its de facto rebranding as Reform. Sadly, thousands of people in Wales who would never have voted Conservative are now queuing up to vote for the party in its new gestation. The other parties have eight months to change their minds.<\/p>\n

Support our Nation today<\/p>\n

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\n independent, not-for-profit, national news service for the people of Wales, by
\n the people of Wales.<\/strong>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Reform UK MS Laura Anne Jones with Reform\u2019s leader Nigel Farage \u2013 Image: Nigel Farage Martin Shipton Why…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":369048,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5018,3,4],"tags":[748,393,4884,1144,712,16,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-369047","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-britain","8":"category-uk","9":"category-united-kingdom","10":"tag-britain","11":"tag-england","12":"tag-great-britain","13":"tag-northern-ireland","14":"tag-scotland","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom","17":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115082157503552639","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369047"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369047\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/369048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}