Re: Reform Party
Posted: Wed Sep 17, 2025 10:20 pm
He’s seen them reading clever books on the train. Elite.
The Weeping Angel wrote: ↑Wed Sep 17, 2025 9:27 pm Zia is having a normal one.Reform's polling suggests we must take these sinister crypto fascists seriously but its so hard. The man is ridiculous.
Tubby Isaacs wrote: ↑Wed Sep 17, 2025 10:20 pm He’s seen them reading clever books on the train. Elite.Were they Mein Kampf and Pol Pot's memoirs?
The mayor of Greater Lincolnshire Combined County Authority (GLCCA) Dame Andrea Jenkyns has asked for a £147,000 increase in her office budget to employ people to help her.
"I literally have zero people in my team," she said. "I have over 2,500 emails each month from constituents. I'm staying up until three o'clock in the morning answering some of them myself."
Dame Andrea's request was made at a meeting on Wednesday, which also heard GLCCA council leaders plan to ask the UK government to cover a £630,000 overspend of the mayoral election that appointed her.
Jeremy Kyle is considering running to become a Reform MP
https://www.joe.co.uk/news/jeremy-kyle- ... ONc1mCI9nQ
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Farage’s pivot: destroy the Tories or absorb them?
Reform’s roll call of former Conservatives and why “Krugocracy” will test the brand
Sep 21
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Farage’s pivot matters
I have always found Nigel Farage a fascinating political leader. For resilience he warrants respect. I worry about what he stands for, because Brexit crushed the economy and, for now, the wind is with him.
Danny Kruger’s high profile defection looks like a change of plan. Until now the Reform strategy looked simple and clear: be the Not Conservative Party. Kruger, best known to many as Prue Leith’s son, is different. Though several of his former colleagues consider him a bit odd, he is a fully fledged Tory insider, former speechwriter to Iain Duncan Smith, David Cameron and Boris Johnson, and a veteran of Conservative think tanks. When he says the Conservative Party “is over” and then appears at Reform press conference as head of “preparing for government”, that is not protest. That is new bureaucracy, the first hint of Krugocracy.
Krugocracy will test the base
Set that against Farage’s own words. He said the “Tory brand is ruined”. He promised an “extinction event”. He said, “I want the Conservative Party replaced”. Those were not slips. They were the mission. For years the pitch was demolition, not assimilation. Now the pictures tell a different story.
Look at the new roll call. Nadine Dorries, former Conservative Culture Secretary, arrives and pronounces the Tories “dead”. Andrea Jenkyns, former Conservative MP, is Reform’s first metro mayor in Greater Lincolnshire. Add Lee Anderson, former Conservative MP for Ashfield; Sir Jake Berry, former Conservative Party chair; Maria Caulfield, former Conservative health minister; Adam Holloway, former Conservative MP for Gravesham; Marco Longhi, former Conservative MP for Dudley North; Anne Marie Morris, former Conservative MP for Newton Abbot; Ross Thomson, former Conservative MP for Aberdeen South; Henry Smith, former Conservative MP for Crawley; David Jones, former Conservative Welsh Secretary; and Ann Widdecombe, former Conservative minister and now a Reform spokesperson. Jacob Rees-Mogg has not defected, but his star turn on the Reform conference stage tells its own story. This reads less like a riot and more like a roll call of absorption.
You cannot be both a demolition squad and a living museum of past Conservative governments. Voters notice when parties change their skin, think Corbyn to Starmer, Cameron to Johnson, and they will notice this one too. So what is Reform now. The Not Conservative Party, or the New Conservative Party. If it is Not Conservatives, stop hiring Tories. If it is New Conservatives, say so and own the consequences.
Why absorb them at all ?
Because it looks serious. Recognisable names fill benches, calm donors and pass the television test. Because Farage wants to sound like a government in waiting rather than a protest movement. Reform promised rupture in the system, but if the weekly photo is a panel of former Conservative ministers, it begins to look like continuity Conservatism.
There is jeopardy here. Reform has found an audience among a slice of Labour’s old, dyed-in-the-wool vote, people who loathe the Conservative Party yet feel at home with Reform’s punchy approach to the establishment. They signed up for a kicking against the cosy club, not an annex to it. Will they still feel that way with Danny Kruger lecturing about “preparing for government”?
Recent polling is clear, and this is not hypothetical. Many current Reform supporters are not locked in. Only a minority say they would never vote Conservative again; a significant chunk say they might. If Reform starts to look Tory, some of its base may drift back the moment the original looks even half plausible. The bridge built for arrivals becomes the exit.
The Kruger moment also prompts the dull but vital questions a wannabe government must face. Where are your costings? Who wins and who loses with your tax strategy? What are your policy priorities? A movement makes noise; a party preparing for government must show next steps and timelines. And the man doing that job is a slightly odd former Tory insider.
None of this says the strategy cannot work. There is a coherent New Conservatives offer if Reform writes it with care: tighter borders, tidier finances, fewer psychodramas, less ego and more detail. If that is the plan, say so plainly. Admit the aim is not to destroy British Conservatism, but to be the new party that represents it. Replace the ancient Conservative and Unionist Party with your Kruger version of modern Conservatism.
There is also a coherent Not Conservatives path. Keep the outsider posture, be sparing with grandees, and give the country a costed programme on the economy and the welfare state, even if it borrows policies from Labour and the Conservatives.
What will not survive is the fudge. You cannot run the “ruined brand” line on Monday and the alumni association on Tuesday and expect to look serious. Politics is not kind to split identities. Voters do not reward costume changes unless the work underneath changes too.
Farage has earned his reputation for endurance. He has also reached a moment of choice. If Reform is only a spruced up version of the Tories, what is the point. If you want Conservatives, originals exist. If you want a revolt, stop staging a revival. He can wield the sledgehammer to the system, or join it, but not both for long. Voters, including former Labour supporters who lent him their anger, will decide whether they are buying a change of government or a rebranded Conservative Party.
Nigel Farage is riding high, but we are only fourteen months into a new government. We are about to see whether Reform can live with Krugocracy and meet the next level of public scrutiny.
Nigel Farage’s plan to scrap the right for immigrants to settle in the UK without citizenship could separate parents from children and husbands from wives, experts have warned.
The Reform policy to abolish indefinite leave to remain (ILR) and force immigrants to reapply for five-year visas, while making it harder to obtain citizenship, was also rounded on by industry for threatening economic growth and by NHS chiefs as a “kick in the teeth” for health and care workers that could bring the sector to its knees.https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/farag ... es-3932356
Youngian wrote: ↑Mon Sep 22, 2025 7:17 pm So this is Farage's plan to capitalise on his poll numbers and nudge Reform up to 40 percent. What a nasty myopic bunch of arseholes as a nation we've become.As I understand it, most of these people can get citizenship anyway. If they're inclined to stay, they'll apply for it. Or perhaps Ireland, Australia, Canada will make them a better offer.
Nigel Farage’s plan to scrap the right for immigrants to settle in the UK without citizenship could separate parents from children and husbands from wives, experts have warned.
The Reform policy to abolish indefinite leave to remain (ILR) and force immigrants to reapply for five-year visas, while making it harder to obtain citizenship, was also rounded on by industry for threatening economic growth and by NHS chiefs as a “kick in the teeth” for health and care workers that could bring the sector to its knees.https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/farag ... es-3932356