Speaking Tuesday at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London, Nigel Farage dismissed the idea of any right-wing split in UK politics.
The Reform UK chief rightly identified there was nothing conservative about the Conservatives and their 14 years of failure.
Ironically, Farage’s speech followed a day after under-fire new Tory leader Kemi Badenoch spoke at the same event, warning Western civilisation is “in crisis”.
In his speech, Farage cited net zero, “the highest tax burden since 1947″, and “mass immigration — legal mass immigration — on a scale hitherto never even dreamt of” as reasons the Tories can no longer be classified as a party of the Right.
He added the Tories were “completely incapable of dealing with” small boat crossings “because they couldn’t face up to what membership of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) was all about.”
Farage is right. Unless being ‘right-wing’ means flogging off British assets to the highest bidder or outpricing young people from home ownership, or maybe slashing defence spending, there was nothing patriotic, Right-leaning or conservative about 14 years of Tory misrule.
Many on the Left would cite ‘austerity’ to counter this, yet public spending as a percentage of economic output remained high while taxes rose, and yet the country had virtually nothing to show for it anyway.
This all no doubt explains the Reform UK phenomenon, as voters reject the Tories in favour of a party which — like it or not — is authentically and unashamedly on the Right.
In the Trump era, vibes matter, and voters smell a fraud in the modern Conservative Party. As Farage said, this is the same Tory regime which oversaw deindustrialisation and the collapse of the UK steel industry to satisfy alleged environmental objectives.
Reform is also gunning for Labour, with Farage attacking a declinist Keir Starmer government. Little wonder, he argued, that Britain — like so much of the world — suffers from low fertility rates given a profound lack of optimism.
Of course, a balance has to be struck. Thatcherism redux does not necessarily win over patriotic Red Wall types who still want government to provide a backstop.
Meanwhile, there remains a chance a new Tory leader could turn around the party’s fortunes. That said, a new broom is no guarantee of new fortunes, plus the optics of defenestrating Badenoch would be catastrophic.
Right now, Reform’s star is rising, Badenoch isn’t landing and lack of public trust in the Tories is palpable. No longer a ‘conservative’ party and no longer ‘conserving’ anything worth conserving, the Tories are fast losing hearts and minds to Reform’s authentic vibes and eye-catching policies.
