A poll shows many Conservative supporters would consider merging their party with Reform, but Farage’s ascendant faction rejects the idea with contempt, saying it is focussed on fighting future elections.
Reform UK party chairman Richard Tice — a newly minted Member of Parliament along with four colleagues — appeared in good spirits when he appeared on British breakfast television on Wednesday morning, taking at times peevish questioning in his stride. A major feature of the discussion was Reform’s relationship with the Conservative Party, host and former Labour politician Ed Balls failing to grasp that the populist party could appeal to former Tories and former Labour voters at the same time.
Tice said of the Conservatives in particular and the Labour party as well — “There’s no difference between the two of them ” — that: “they betrayed us all on multiple things whether that’s Brexit, whether it’s immigration, whether it’s taxation. They basically became like socialists, high tax, high regulation, nanny state, mass immigration, pro-net zero.”
The Conservative Party doesn’t “own the philosophy of conservatism” and they should expect competition for having so spectacularly failed to perform, he said. Mr Tice continued: “We’ve got a bridgehead in parliament and as we head to the next General Election we’re going to be fighting in county elections, local elections. Our aim at the next general election is to be the opposition to socialism.”
Asked straight whether Reform would be merging with the Conservatives, a subject of intense speculation for weeks now, Tice asserted such a move was simply not on the cards. He told ITV’s Good Morning Britain:
We’re here a few days after the election. We’re not talking to the Tories, we’re not interested in the Tories. Frankly, they’re yesterday’s story. We’re the future, that’s what we’re doing that’s what we’re progressing, we’re growing. We’re looking at the May elections, we’re going to do really well in those… we resisted all that nonsense, we proved everybody wrong, we’re done with it…
…The whole point is to put [forward] a different agenda to socialism, which the two main parties represented at this election. We need a high growth, low tax, small state, freezing immigration, scrapping net zero, that’s what we stand for, and that’s completely different to the main parties which represent some form of socialism.
The remarks come as British establishment-favourite pollster YouGov completes new research which is says shows Conservative supporters are totally split on whether they would support “the Conservative Party and Reform UK merging to form a single party”. Per YouGov, 47 per cent supported the idea, and 48 per cent opposed.
The polling illustrates neatly the real long-term problem the Conservative Party faces, and has faced, which is its model of being a “big church” and the only right wing party in the country is fundamentally broken. The globalist-centrist, pro-mass migration, managerial faction which controls the party and has for decades has basically nothing in common with the pro-Brexit, border control wing.
Any attempt to absorb Reform would ultimately be a move to prolong that uncomfortable situation of two parties under one roof, leading to the endless infighting and stasis which has characterised the Conservatives this past decade.
These issues have been clearly identified by some Conservatives on the right of the party, although without yet apparently having realised their continuing attempts to capture a party which is overwhelmingly centrist at its core are quite probably a waste of time and energy. Suella Braverman, the former Conservative Home Secretary who was forced out during the Sunak-Hunt coup era over fundamentally different ideas of what the point of a Conservative government is, said in Washington this week: “We published lots of [conservative] policy documents and we did precisely nothing”.
On the Conservative failure to control mass migration during its 14 years in power — despite repeatedly promising to control it at election time — Braverman said the issue was the leaders of the party simply didn’t want to do it. She said: “The reason it didn’t happen was because [conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak] didn’t want it to happen. It was a choice by the politicians not to do it. It wasn’t because it was impossible. And it certainly wasn’t because he bravely tried it yet nobly failed to get it done. It was because although he publicly claimed time after time that he wanted to do it, but he simply didn’t. He set up his his face against doing it and accomplished that goal [of blocking reform].”
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