Around 5,000 people paid an entry fee to attend an impressive Reform UK rally in Birmingham on Sunday despite despite increasingly intense establishment attacks on the party.
The political class first went for Reform leader Nigel Farage over his comments that the war in Ukraine was at least in part “provoked” by NATO and EU expansion. The Conservatives were particularly pleased with the opportunity to bash Reform, having spent weeks losing voters—and, more recently, donors—to the insurgent party.
But the saga hasn’t really done much to Reform’s position in the polls (believe them or not), which is still much higher than at the start of the general election campaign. One particularly amusing poll over the weekend suggested that Farage is still the favoured candidate to replace prime minister Rishi Sunak, should he resign as Tory leader after the election, well ahead of Tory bigwigs like Penny Mordaunt and Suella Braverman.
A more sustained attack has, however, focussed on Reform’s parliamentary candidates. The Guardian complained this morning, on July 1st, that “at least 30” individuals hoping to become Reform MPs “have cast doubt on human-induced global heating.” The party did, in fact, drop support for three of its candidates before the end of June following reports they had made offensive or racist comments.
But the party has managed to turn the criticism on its head, claiming the establishment media is attempting to carry out a hit job for purely political reasons. This is especially in relation to a Channel 4 exposé on what it described as a Reform party canvasser in Clacton, where Farage is standing to be MP. The individual, Andrew Parker, was caught on camera suggesting—in working-class tones—that illegal migrants ought to be shot, and calling Sunak a “f*****g* P**i.”
Only, Parker is a self-described “well spoken” actor whose own bio pages (now taken offline) say he specialises in both “rough speaking” and “secret filming.”
Parker has insisted that his acting is separate from his volunteering for Reform. Channel 4, claiming “we did not pay the Reform UK canvasser,” said: “We strongly stand by our rigorous and duly impartial journalism which speaks for itself.”
But Reform has reported the leftist broadcaster to the elections watchdog over what it called “scandalous election interference.” The party’s lawyers also branded the affair an “absolute scandal.”
It seems that, if anything, these attacks have done more to shore up support for Reform among its sick-and-tired-of-the-establishment base, which continues to give Farage and company extraordinary levels of support (so far as British politics is concerned) wherever he goes. You just cannot imagine these levels of enthusiasm for any of the mainstream parties.
Nor can one imagine any of the major parties receiving £400,000 (€470,000) in just 24 hours “entirely from small donors,” as Reform says it has just done.
Really, the only thing that can now get in Reform’s way ahead of the national poll on July 4th is a fear of a Labour ‘supermajority,’ and what this might mean for the country over the next five (if not ten) years.
