Richard Tice announced yesterday that his Reform party would put up a candidate in every constituency at the nest general election.
There will, he said, be no deals with the Conservatives, even where a sitting Tory MP holds similar views to Reform.
From which we can conclude that Tice thinks the Tories will lose that election, with or without intervention from Reform.
So his best bet of being relevant afterwards is if disappointed Tory members decide they lost because of Reform and then demand that their party moves further to the right to attract Reform voters.
But it's far from clear that, without the issue of Brexit, Reform will be able to attract enough voters for that strategy to work.
And there's another problem. The voters Reform could attract will probably be looking for some protection from the market, whereas the party's leadership wants to give them more market and give it to them good and hard.
If Labour thinks it worth exposing this contradiction, the electorate may be more willing to listen than they were in the Ukip days, even though that party was similarly broken backed.
4 comments:
How would nationalising key utility companies give voters “more market and give it to them good and hard”?
Reform UK
We would also nationalise 50% of key utility companies to stop consumers being ripped off with the other 50% being owned by British pension funds for British pensioners.
Is it so hard to imagine a party's leaders having an ambition but denying it to win votes?
Post-Brexit the further right libertarian parties are stumbling around for a new agenda. Reform think they've hit on a winning USP by opposing environmental policies, having adopted the slogan NetStupid. The problem with that is that the most visible forms of Net Zero policy known to the public are wind/solar power, electric cars and insulation. These are either popular, cheap, money saving or at the very least gaining acceptance.
When it comes to Net Zero electricity, the UK decarbonised the grid by 66% between 2011 and 2020 (thanks to Ed Davey's policies), so it's a bit late to stop Net Zero anyway.
The Reform UK nationalisation policies resemble those of right wing parties in the 1970s and 80s.
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