Reform Conference: Party ‘Last Hope for Return to Normality’ After 25 Years of Blairism

A Reform Member of Parliament articulated an uncommonly conservative pitch on Friday afternoon, asserting the past 25-years of liberal-left Blair and heir-to-Blair rule waits to be overturned, returning the country a more settled and harmonious path as seen in decades past.

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is meeting in Birmingham for a two day party conference, and delegates waiting for the day’s set piece spectacle — the leader’s speech — may have been pleasantly surprised by the quality of warm-up act Rupert Lowe, one of the party’s newly minted Members of Parliament. Lowe, who has come under fire in recent days for doing something as audacious as donating his political salary to charity on grounds this is allegedly elitist, excoriated the legacy political class of the past-quarter century for damaging the British constitution and putting the nation’s “special way of life” at risk.

The solution, he said, was to be a wholesale dismissal of laws accreted in recent decades, as well as totally scrapping “every diversity related role in a vastly reduced public sector”. In an appeal for a healthy democracy, it ought to be the case that “The majority will will prevail over minorities”, said Singapore-citing Lowe.

Diagnosing the problem, the Great Yarmouth MP said the government fosters “a dependency culture and lose sight of the fact governing means serving the electorate who empower them”, and stated his view that the British constitutional settlement was basically functional and balanced until 1997 when Prime Minister Tony Blair and his cronies got to work on wrecking amendments to further their ideological desires.

This has continued unabated ever since, as the Blair years were followed by ‘Conservative’ party administrations of David Cameron and his sucessors which, as people now widely acknowledged, talked right but governed left.

He said: “the equality act of 2010 — for which there was no need — has given legal force and backing to minorities to impose their will and views on the majority. This has fostered the rule of lawyers, not the rule of law, created unnecessary division in the country and suppressed free speech across society… Terms like hate speech, transphobia, and islamophobia have essentially obstructed dissent.”

Before the total remaking of Britain over the past quarter-century, Lowe said, the nation’s finances were in good order, the state was modest but effective, and public spending accounted for a third of the economy. “Most importantly”, he continued, “the population was stable and immigration was under control”. Contrasting that with the situation he diagnosed today, the MP observed: “Today, national debt has exploded 500 per cent to £2,770 billion. Public sector spending accounts for 46 per cent of economic output.

“The private sector is being crowded out by the state. Legal and illegal immigration is out of control, and more than nine million people of working age do not work. Markets will soon exact their price for the folly of the last quarter of a century, as a result of the failure of the two-party duopoly Labour and the Tories. Both of them are jointly responsible with the civil service for undermining our constitution, deceiving the electorate, and feathering their own dishonest nests.”

Observing there would be no improvement under either Labour or Conservative Parties, he remarked: “Reform is now the last hope for a return to some form of normality… Our country, our history, our freedoms, and our independent sovereignty are impossible to value. It is now a case of not just can we win, we must win.”