Yves here. This post on the longer-term prospects for the Reform Party is certain to annoy some readers. As Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway wrote in her book, Sense and Nonsense in the Office:
In my experience, prejudices make for good reading. They either confirm your own, or make you cross, either of which is better than nothing in these bland times.
The fact that Murphy over-eggs the pudding at points in his depiction of Reform positions does not make his core points about the party’s prospects wrong.1
One issue is that Farage has repeatedly tried starting parties only to see them fizzle out. Farage does not appear to have changed his operational playbook despite that. The second is that when you translate Reform rhetoric into policies, they look set to harm people (or their close family members) who might like Reform talk at a distance.
I am doubtful about Murphy’s point, that some voters will wake up and realize that supporting Reform amounts to self harm and will thus turn away from the party. Thomas Frank wrote an entire book, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” on how red-state Republican voters were regularly backing the GOP even though it was against their personal interest.
By Richard Murphy, Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University Management School and a director of the Corporate Accountability Network. Originally published at Funding the Future
Farage’s political track record is poor. The moment anyone tries to hold him to account, he runs a mile. How long will it be before Reform falls apart, because he and it will fall out?
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
How long is it before Reform implodes?
I ask the question for a very straightforward reason, and that is that Nigel Farage has, of course, had three political parties in his career. He started with the United Kingdom Independence Party, which was not founded by him, but which was totally identified with him from very soon after it started, and then he had the Brexit Party, and now he has Reform. And if we look at what happened to UKIP and the Brexit Party, both of them basically imploded.
Farage proved himself absolutely unable to manage a political party.
He is capable of running a personal fiefdom.
He’s capable of running what might be called a cult.
But he is not capable of managing a group of people who might actually challenge his leadership of a political party.
And if we look at Reform, his latest so-called party, it is in fact no such thing. It is a private limited company controlled by him and the party chairman, and there is no right of representation for anyone else within the party at all. Even its MPs are not reflected in the ownership of this private company, which runs the political party that they supposedly represent in parliament. And this is deeply problematic and an indication of problems to come for Reform.
How soon will those problems arise? Well, actually, they are already arising.
Remember that in July, 2024, Reform had five MPs elected for the first time to the UK Parliament, but one of them, Robert Lowe, a person for whom I have no great affection, I have to admit, has now defected from the party, or rather been suspended from it because he and Nigel Farage have fallen out. The words that he is using about Farage are pretty blunt, and there’s a libel action now in progress about whether or not Farage libelled Lowe when he was suspended from the party.
But this is not the only occasion when this has happened. There’s a more recent suspension from the party. A person called Donna Edmunds, who was elected as a Reform councillor in Shropshire only a week or so ago, has now been suspended from the party because what she said after she was elected was that she believed that people had lent their votes to Reform, they may not continue to do so, and that she thought this was a perfectly acceptable form of protest vote, creating political debate in the UK.
Reform did not agree with her. They said that she had undermined the national party and damaged its interests, and as a result, she’s been suspended.
She is not happy about that, it’s fair to say, and has made various comments which have been reported by the BBC, and basically, her suggestion is that Nigel Farage is running a cult and not a political party.
There is some evidence to support that. The relationship with Robert Lowe is clearly one indication.
Another is the relationship between Farage and Richard Tice, who headed the party for some time, but who was cast aside the moment Farage decided he wanted to get back into Parliament and would stand for the Clacton seat at the last general election. Tice just stood aside and let Farage do what he liked.
And that is the problem of this whole party. It is an organisation where Farage does what he likes. And what we know is that Farage and accountability don’t mix.
But what we also know is something else, and that is that Reform is a party based on hate.
I do not think that is a provocative statement to make. I think it’s a statement of fact.
It is very clear that Reform does not like migrants.
It does not like people who care, who they call woke, but actually, all they mean by that phrase is people who literally show empathy and compassion for others who are not as well off as them or who are different to them.
It doesn’t like civil servants and makes that fact very obvious. Nigel Farage told all the people working in local authorities where Reform has taken control of councils that they should beware for their jobs if they were doing things that Reform did not like.
He doesn’t actually like government itself. One of the major policy platforms for Reform in 2024 was that it would cut 5% out of all the costs of government, and it was sure that such savings could be found, although nobody had bothered to do the research to find out.
It doesn’t like the arts. It’s very obvious from their comments that they think many of the subsidies provided to arts in the UK are unacceptable, and that is completely consistent with the standard far-right line that freedom of thought and expression is something that they do not like.
For the same reason, Farage does not like universities. They are proposing that many university courses be cut from three years to two, not because they think that will improve the quality of the education, but because they think education is not about learning how to think, but it is all about learning specific skills for use in the workplace. And the idea that education might be of merit for itself is alien to Reform.
They don’t like those with disabilities. Farage has questioned whether many people who now claim benefits, whether that be because they have mental illness or because they have autism or ADHD or other conditions which mean that they have difficulties in managing life in the way that neurotypical people do are going to be subject to much greater scrutiny if he ever gets near power. And yet those people really do suffer those difficulties, and he basically is therefore saying, if you are not the type of person who I like, I am going to make your life very much more difficult. And this is, again, part of a standard far-right agenda, all of which is always based upon the idea of hating ‘other’ groups in society, where ‘other’ means people who are not like us, who are the people who Farage is trying to appeal to.
So, if you run a party based upon this idea of otherness, unsurprisingly, you will fall out with some people in your own party. It is inevitable when division is your primary political strategy.
You will fall out with your councillors, your MPs, your party, the local membership, or whoever else it might be, and that will be particularly the case if you run a party where one person is deemed to be in control of everything, which Farage clearly is within the cult that is Reform. And I use the word cult advisedly because their own members do.
So, how long is it before Reform fails?
My suggestion is that it actually won’t be very long at all.
There are already too many people now associated with Reform for it to survive.
We saw that with UKIP, in particular. The moment that it had a lot of MEPs, and the moment it had a lot of councillors, everything began to fall apart. Nigel Farage couldn’t manage it. He couldn’t handle criticism. He didn’t know what to do with it. And he left in a huff and formed Brexit, where the same thing was seen. The Brexit Party fell apart, and now we have Reform to replace that, and my prediction is very clear, very strong, very loud, and very certain, and that is that Reform will not survive for very long, because Farage cannot handle accountability. And yet, accountability is at the very core of the democratic process in the UK.
Reform is a phenomenon. And, let’s be clear about it, Farage is a phenomenon. He is a totally singular character within inside British politics in the way that he has managed to create ideas that have had influence, very often without him ever having political power. My suspicion is that Reform will prove to be part of this pattern.
It is so obviously structured in a way where failure is the almost certain outcome of the fact that it is not accountable to its membership, to its elected politicians, or anyone else. That failure is hardwired into it.
Farage cannot succeed because Farage cannot handle success, and Farage cannot handle accountability.
So, for all those who are placing their faith in Reform for the future of the UK, I suggest you think again.
This is not the party that is going to transform British politics.
That is not possible with Nigel Farage.
And the far-right agenda in the UK cannot exist without him either.
It is therefore time for us to look at politics afresh because there is a world post-Farage that is available to us, but it is not one in which either Labour or the Tories are going to play a significant part because they both moved far too far to the right, and it is one in which Reform will not be playing a part either.
We are going to look at a political future where the players might be very different, and Nigel Farage’s Day might be done.
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1 I cannot respond to his “party based on hate” claim, not being in the UK to see what Farage and his followers have said. But that seems like hyperbole. I can see depicting a hard-core conservative party as being based on resentment and/or anger. Those feelings are in the same emotional color family as hate but are not intense enough to amount to hatred. Again, perhaps I have missed it, but have Reform voters engaged in what we in the US would call hate crimes like vandalizing homes or businesses of immigrants or, say, charities supporting trans initiatives?
Even yours truly, who has described some Trump Administration actions as deliberately cruel, finds statements about Reform like this to be a caricature:
It does not like people who care, who they call woke, but actually, all they mean by that phrase is people who literally show empathy and compassion for others who are not as well off as them or who are different to them.
IMHO, no one has yet well articulated the anti-woke position, perhaps because it is actually more than one position. There are admittedly some hard-core conservatives who take offense at traditional power/status hierarchies being threatened at all. But there are many more layers. Traditional affirmative action was concerned about “fair” results, as in countering the effects of discrimination in practical settings, importantly hiring and promotion. There have been a few instances of effective remedies, like blind auditions to professional symphonies, which resulted in the elimination of the former, and considerable, discrimination against female performers.
But in nearly all other areas, there are no such tidy mechanisms.
And as far as I can tell, “woke” goes much further. It appears to assume that all members of existing elites (primarily white men, although it can be extended in context to include other high-status groups) at a minimum hold deep-seated prejudices against various “out” groups and act on them, and in some cases do so consciously and deliberately to preserve their advantaged position. This amounts to shaming as well as what are seen and often are heavy-handed measures to promote “out” groups and even worse, “correct” speech and thinking.
Note that the Harvard Implicit Bias test often find that members of “in” groups are neutral in their unconscious reactions to member of “out” groups or even can be prejudiced in their favor. And the results of the Harvard Implicit Bias test hold even after taking the test an initial time and understanding how it works. So these blanket attacks on in groups, which are every bit as prejudiced as the alleged behaviors they deplore, have backfired.
I commented to his video almost immediately after he posted it, alerting him to how Reform is already being vile but is also already falling apart here in Notts. They’ll lose their overall majority by September at this rate.
PS I should have remembered to add this to initial comment but forgot. It was 6 days. Just SIX days after election that the we got the first Reform Councillor announce his resignation. So our local tax will fund a by-election. That’s in addition to the by-election already scheduled in one of the main towns in Nottinghamshire due to death of the main candidate shortly before polling day.
The resigning guy might have had a sudden health diagnosis. But nobody round here believes that. They all think that Reform achieved a “Blair 1997”: never expected a landslide. Blair infamously let slip that always expected only a small overall majority and was ready to give the Lib Dems electoral reform in return for coalition to get his agenda through. Then when he got his landslide he told everyone else to sod off. I think a bunch of these new Reform councillors wanted coalition with the Tories so as to learn how local parliament works and to give them plausible deniability for mistakes. Now the tory minority are just smiling and saying “OK let’s see you do things”.
Yeah people vote against their own interests. But when Reform try to strong arm the Local Health Trusts into shutting down or radically downsizing ADHD and autism services that affect voters’ kids the voters get very very annoyed and volatile with their vote here in middle England. Notts was Reform’s biggest prize. The country is watching us.
I’m not sure I agree with Murphy’s somewhat optimistic prediction… There will absolutely be increasing levels of chaos in a rapidly growing Reform, but when looking at the dismal election turnouts, it’s clear that Reform’s success is built on the total disillusionment with British politics. I spent quite a bit of time leafleting and speaking with folks about the pain Reform policies can bring to them. Their response wasn’t disagreement but rather “it’s all bollocks”. They’ll gladly sacrifice what little they have left just to see the Tories and Labour lose, and so they can retain some sense of dignity.
Until another party can come along, earn the trust of the British people, and provide an alternative positive program that they believe in, I’m not sure who will even be capable of beating reform. You don’t need to inspire people when only 20% of people come out and vote.
Thanks. I haven’t been as systematic as you in terms of actually door-kocking etc but I do over-hear and join in to discussions with locals around here – one of the most marginal parts of the country, never mind Notts – at the bus-stop. I agree totally that people want to kick both major parties in the privates, even if it hurts them too: that goes a long way towards explaining why we got BREXIT.
The low turn-out thing is also a big worry that you identified. The UK and US both see much reduced turn-outs outside of the general election in many areas because people correctly recognise that those levels of government have less/no influence on things. For instance the Conservatives since the 1980s have made local government increasingly reliant on central government funding (to keep them on a tight leash): this has led to the only “locally based” taxes (Council Tax on residents and business rates for companies) to become disproportionately important in terms of allowing the cities and shires to “do anything”. They are shackled and voters either don’t know or don’t care enough to enact national change so as to reverse this despicable state of affairs.
It’ll take some out the box thinking to kick-start a new positive-policy party. Unfortunately you must start with people’s wallets: find things you can cut to reduce Council tax that doesn’t materially degrade this country further. I’m thinking a lot about that myself and have some ideas that would appeal to the older people round here (who, let’s be honest, are the only ones likely to actually go out and cast a ballot rather than just create a funny online meme). Sometimes some somewhat negative stuff (based on real experience) is required to kick-start something new…..if people saw a 20% reduction in their Council Tax round here I’ll bet they’d be more open to listening to subsequent more positive policies that actually leads them to think someone CARES about Notts and not just the Islingtonistas in London and the financiers in the City. Maybe I’m now being the over-optimist but I’m throwing around some ideas with people on social media to get a feel for what might appeal to those who don’t normally vote or who otherwise might go Reform just to show frustration.
Watch this which just went up and tell me you couldn’t imagine Farage giving exact same speech. Jeez.
Plus those companies that you say should invest if they’re to be allowed immigrants to fill key skill gaps. Where do the private savings for investment come from if the government fetishizes a balanced budget and won’t incur a deficit in order to enable private savings. FFS. This is perfect example of aping Reform slogans with no remotely cogent plan to implement them with proper policies.
People, unless they see Reform continuing to do stuff to directly hurt their kids, are going to think in 2029 “why vote for Reform-lite when we could have the real deal?”
Thank you, Yves.
I agree with Terry and NM. Public revulsion with the red and blue Tory duopoly is likely to overcome Reform’s performance in local government.
Reform will also be helped by Labour fighting on Reform’s turf, as per https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/05/12/labour-are-playing-to-the-fascists-whilst-hurting-hundreds-of-thousands-of-people/.
Reform’s organisation is getting more professional. It helps that the organisation is owned by two people. The media is also on side. Over the week-end, it was interesting to see some centrist log rollers online make the journey from Blair to Cameron to Starmer to Reform.
I can see some red wall and red wall adjacent Labour MPs defecting to Reform before 2029. My money is on Dover’s Mike Tapp being one of them.
I hope that Murphy is going to write two more follow up articles. One for the present state of the Labour party and one for the Tories. After all, you would not really have Farage and the Reform party making any headway at all without how both parties are imploding and the UK political system has essentially stalled out. As an example – when you have one party take away money from pensioners so that they do not freeze in the middle of winter and use it to give to the most corrupt country in Europe, you would think that the opposition party would rip them a new one which would boost support for themselves. Instead you had crickets. Sure, Reform would probably be hopeless and be full of corrupt opportunists but I could see people giving them their votes just to burn the whole establishment down and some would even ask it that was so different to Labour and the Tories. In any case, would this be so different to so many Americans voting for Trump back in 2016?