Is Reform UK the Real Deal? – New English Review

By Bruce Bawer

For many people in the UK, and for quite a few of us outside the UK, Tommy Robinson was for a long time the only person in that country, or at least by far the most prominent person in that country, who dared to tell the whole ugly truth about Islam. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage, despite all his heroic efforts to separating the UK from the EU, carefully dodging the subject of Islam and choosing instead to focus more broadly and vaguely on the need for a return of the UK to total independence from the EU and for radical immigration reform, while ignoring the core reason for that need. Others followed the same playbook. In doing so, they avoided – and supported – the demonisation to which Tommy was subjected by the British media, police, courts and (not least) the London-based beautiful world.

As the impact of Islam on British society has become more apparent in recent years, and Hamas supporters have repeatedly paraded through British streets since October 7, more and more Britons are clearing their throats and admitting that they agree with Tommy. Many even admit that they agreed all along. The failure of either major British party to muster up courage on this issue has allowed the Reform UK Party, which takes a much more blunt approach to the subject, to rise out of nowhere and achieve a level of public support that suggests it could soon replace the Tories as the legitimate voice of conservatism and patriotism, of outspokenness about border control and the threat that many immigrants pose to the country’s traditional freedoms and cultural values. In short, Reform US is Britain’s answer to the MAGA movement, which is very likely to win a majority in the House of Commons within a few years – presumably in an election in 2029 – and place one of its members in 10 Downing Street.

Or is similar to MAGA? The other day, podcaster Dan Wootton warned that “Tommy Robinson supporters are being purged from the party” and played clips from a recent interview with GB News in which Farage, who heads the Reform UK party, not only called mass deportations of illegal or criminal aliens “a political impossibility” but flatly confirmed that he wouldn’t even want to carry out such deportations if he could. Farage went on to claim that his goal was “a balanced migration policy,” apparently meaning a so-called “net zero” approach, to which his interviewer countered that such a “balanced” policy would mean that hundreds of thousands of immigrants would continue to enter the country every year. In response to that comment, Farage pathetically replied that “it can be done, but we have to start somewhere.” He also insisted that the current dramatic change in the UK’s demographics as a result of all that immigration is none of his business.

All in all, it was actually an extremely strange interview, since the only reason Reform UK has become a serious political player is because it has won the support of millions of ordinary citizens who support the policies that Farage now rejects. After playing those clips from Farage’s interview, Wootton himself interviewed Richard Tice, Farage’s current deputy and immediate predecessor as head of Reform UK, who said all the right things about the UK’s dire economic situation, the new Labour government’s extreme aversion to free speech, and the advent of “two-tier policing” in Britain (whereby police keep a wide berth on members of certain minority groups who commit actual crimes, but are quick to arrest white people for waving a Union Jack or telling the truth about the Koran on Facebook).

Wootton let Tice make these points and agreed with him. But then Wootton suggested that Farage and Dice had chosen to “throw people under the bus”, apparently to appease the British media, who hate them and their party. It wasn’t just Tommy, you see, who got the bum’s ass kicked. There were also several Reform UK candidates who had been sacked by the party simply because of one or two politically incorrect things they posted on social media a decade ago – things, Wootton noted, that he himself could have said or written at some point. Tice responded that while he believes in freedom of speech, he refuses to “defend the indefensible” because he wants Reform UK to be taken seriously as a “credible” political party that strives for “progress”. Wootton then asked him directly about Tommy Robinson: would someone who had attended a recent peaceful march organised by Tommy be considered ineligible as a Reform UK candidate? Tice even spoke of the danger of Reform UK being “hijacked”, apparently by Tommy and his supporters. Wootton identified himself as a “critical friend” of Reform UK and went on to press Tice over the expulsion of Tice’s former deputy from the party.

A few days later, Wootton pointed out that another popular figure who has been effectively cancelled by Reform UK is the long-standing columnist Katie Hopkins – who, like Tommy, is a brave, astute and outspoken truth-teller about the most forbidden topics. I saw her speak live in Oslo. She is amazing. The audience of healthy Norwegians at that talk welcomed her as a hero and cheered her remarks. As Wootton put it, excluding her from Reform UK is like Trump judging that, say, Marjorie Taylor Greene or Steve Bannon or Kari Lake or Dan Bongino are over the line. Welcoming people like Tommy and Katie into the fold, Wootton noted, would be a great way to shift the “Overton Window” — the range of views accepted by the mainstream — back to something resembling normality. Wootton also shared a clip of Douglas Murray acknowledging that Tommy should not say things that he is can I say that (sometimes, anyway) because Tommy, unlike Douglas, who went to Eton and Oxford, is a white working-class boy from Luton.

Now I’m not British, but when I look at Tice – a former Tory MP – I see a typical Westminster insider with a posh accent and something resembling a Savile Row suit. It seems to me that the House of Commons is not called the House of Commons for nothing. Why does everyone there seem to have gone to the same elocution school? Where are the Real ordinary Britons, of whom Tommy is the prime example? This is a man who, while virtually everyone in the House of Commons – along with countless journalists, social workers, police officers and judges – was implicitly involved in the cover-up of Muslim rape gangs that had been targeting thousands of young white girls in cities across England for decades, shone a light on this mass brutality. This is a man who has made documentaries exposing these crimes and exposing the systematic political agenda and general duplicity of the BBC. He is not to the taste of posh Londoners, regardless of party affiliation, but many ordinary Englishmen in the countryside regard him as nothing less than a national hero. When you exclude people like Tommy from a party that claims to want to fix the problems Tommy has exposed, you wonder how seriously the leaders of Reform UK take reform – and to what extent, like any other bunch of well-spoken, smartly dressed politicians, they are only interested in gaining power while allowing Britain to continue down the same disastrous path.

First published in Front Page Magazine