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A by-election victory will not mean Reform UK’s mastermind is out of the woods.
Nigel Farage has just taken the biggest gamble of his decades-long political career. To try to draw a line on the financial scandals that have dogged him for the past few months, the Reform UK leader has asked the voters to decide his fate. He has resigned as the member of Parliament for Clacton and will face a by-election in August to try to win his job back.
The big gamble here is not really whether Farage will be returned to parliament. Barring some freak event, he can be reasonably confident of victory—his Clacton constituency, on the Essex coastline, is the most Reform-friendly seat in the country, and Reform is now polling even higher than in the 2024 general election. The other main parties have also made victory far easier for him by refusing to take part in the by-election, branding his resignation a “desperate stunt.” Other candidates who have declared they will stand include Count Binface, a satirical candidate who wears a bin on his head and claims to be from outer space; Piers Corbyn, brother of ex-Labour leader Jeremy and noted conspiracy nut; and Laurence Fox, an actor turned politician, leader of Reclaim, a right-wing microparty. Farage should have no trouble.
No, the gamble instead is that the Clacton by-election fails to reset the narrative in Farage and Reform’s favour. Farage has posed the battle to regain his seat as a straightforward contest between “the people versus the establishment.” This is made much harder when the other candidates on the ballot paper are a selection of weirdos and misfits rather than genuine contenders. What’s more, there is every risk that the questions around Farage’s finances start to make him look less like an insurgent, anti-system outsider, and more like the very political class whom voters so despise—as just another politician, in it for himself.
In a just world, these scandals probably wouldn’t come close to derailing Farage’s political ambitions, but they have undoubtedly provided Reform’s critics with plenty of ammunition. The first involves an undeclared donation of £5 million from Christopher Harborne, a cryptocurrency tycoon. Farage says this money has all gone towards his personal security. The tragic necessity of such security was recently brought home by last week’s murder of Ann Widdecombe—a prominent former Conservative MP and, more recently, Reform spokeswoman—in her home in rural Devon.
The other scandal concerns Farage’s long-standing relationship with George Cottrell, a Reform donor and aristocrat who was once convicted of wire fraud. Both are currently being investigated by parliament as possible breaches of transparency rules, although there is no suggestion that Farage has broken any laws, misused public money, or personally benefited from any ill-gotten cash.
The danger for Farage is that instead of silencing the allegations of impropriety, the by-election could place them under a harsher spotlight. Several more weeks of Farage’s financial scandals dominating the headlines could prove damaging in the long run. His personal approval ratings have already slid to their lowest point since the 2024 general election. The parliamentary investigations will also resume should Farage be returned to his seat.
Depending on how serious the investigations deem any breaches of the financial-reporting rules, he could end up being suspended from parliament—and then having to face another by-election to retake his seat. At which point, few would blame Farage if he opted instead for an early retirement. Even if the people of Clacton decide they would rather have him as their MP than a comedian who wears a garbage can for a helmet, this does not mean he is out of the woods.
If Farage were to be taken out of the picture entirely, this could easily represent the biggest setback for the British right since Tony Blair and New Labour cast the Tories out of power for 13 years. The Reform leader may be flawed, but he offers by far the best vehicle for the British people’s desire to overturn the status quo. A Reform party without Farage would not have been ahead in 300 near-consecutive opinion polls—and it would not have romped to victory in two sets of local elections (usually the best guide to success in parliamentary elections). This is not to say there are no other figures in Reform who could prove to be effective leaders—the home-affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf and the Treasury spokesman Robert Jenrick would be the favourites—but none has anything like the name recognition of Nigel Farage.
The Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch will no doubt be pleased by the Farage farragos. Although the Tories are second in most national opinion polls, Reform has been trouncing them in recent electoral contests.
In the Makerfield by-election, which allowed Labour’s Andy Burnham to return to parliament and plot his path to PM, the Conservatives finished in a humiliating fourth place on 2.2 per cent of the vote. The picture was even bleaker in Gorton and Denton, where Reform came second to the Greens, and the Tories floundered on 1.9 per cent of the vote. Britain’s so-called “natural party of government” now struggles to get into double figures in parts of the country where they were recently in contention. But could the political kneecapping of Farage reverse the Tories’ fortunes?
One reason to suspect not is that voters have still not forgiven the Conservatives for their recent stint in government. Despite promising to cut immigration, they allowed legal migration to explode to record numbers, while also surrendering the English Channel to the small-boat people-traffickers. Their (always questionable) reputation for sound economic management has also been left in ruins after years of stagnant growth, tax hikes and mounting public debt. This is why Badenoch’s high personal approval ratings—the best of any UK party leader—have never translated into a recovery for her party. The Conservatives’ natural voters do not merely feel let down; they feel a visceral sense of betrayal that may take many more years to heal. Should Reform stop looking like a party on its path to power, many of its voters would sooner opt for alternatives, like Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, than go back to the Tories.
The danger of a Reform slump leading to a divided, rudderless right can hardly be overstated. For all of Keir Starmer’s manifest flaws, he at least recognized Reform as the biggest threat to Labour maintaining its electoral base. The signs suggest that incoming prime minister Andy Burnham will be far more eager to chase the approval of the left than the country as a whole, which will be music to the ears of Labour party members and MPs. As bizarre as it may sound, many in Labour see Starmer’s real failure as his inability to withstand pressure from the right. In the parallel universe that is Labour land, Starmer would have lasted longer in the job had he flung open the borders even further, raised taxes and welfare, and turned on the public-spending taps.
The upshot of this is that some of the Labour government’s few sensible reforms are likely to be watered down or shelved entirely by the Burnham regime. Most notably, Shabana Mahmood’s plans to make it harder for new migrants to settle and claim welfare are rumoured to be on the chopping block. This would not only be financially ruinous but could also make it legally tricky for a future government to control the border, as more than a million migrants will be moved from temporary visas to having legal settlement rights.
The other trap being sprung on a future government for the right is in Burnham’s obsessive focus on ‘devolution’. The future PM, drawing on his time as mayor of Greater Manchester, is convinced that Britain’s problems stem from too much power being centralized in Westminster. But while handing greater powers to metro mayors and local councils sounds like it is boosting local democracy, the more likely outcome is that it empowers another layer of political apparatchiks—the exact type of activist-cum-bureaucrat who would be eager to frustrate a future government of the right, in whichever party-political form that takes. Reform or the Tories could win a general election promising to remake the country, only to find out they have far fewer means to do so than did any previous government.
The battle between the establishment and the people that Farage wants to set up in Clacton may well be happening right now in Westminster. The unelected Andy Burnham will be making decisions that could reshape the country profoundly, long before anyone can get a mandate to reverse them. That may prove to be the far bigger story of the summer than the by-election against Count Binface.
The post Farage’s Great Gamble appeared first on The American Conservative.
The prospective prime minister aims to “reform” Britain’s democracy—into a disguised permanent dictatorship.
Proportional representation is an extremely boring thing. Which is precisely why, if you want to destroy British democracy, it is such a very useful tool.
The mind-numbingly tedious voting system is even known by the initialism “PR,” which is ideal for a structure whose main public appeal really is a matter of pure public relations. Marching into Parliament wielding machine-guns is far too obvious a way to stage a coup. Instead, you could more effectively enlist polling companies like YouGov to go out and ask the general public a harmless-sounding, but very carefully phrased, question like the following:
Some people support a change in the British voting system to proportional representation (PR), where the number of MPs a party wins more closely reflects the share of the vote they receive. Other people support retaining our present voting system, first past the post (FPP), which is more likely to give one party an overall majority in the House of Commons and avoid a hung Parliament. Which system would you prefer?
Well, when it’s put like that, how can you possibly say no to PR? YouGov may as well have asked voters whether they would prefer the fair system, where voters get what they vote for, or the unfair system, where they don’t? All PR means is that, if a party gets, say, 36 percent of the vote, they will end up with precisely 36 percent of the nation’s MPs. At first glance, this does indeed sound fair. Examined more closely, it resembles a recipe for oppression.
Significantly, figures show an outright majority of voters for the UK’s main left-wing parties, Labour, Lib Dem, and Green, want PR, whilst only a plurality of Reform UK and a minority of the Conservatives, do. This is because, whilst superficially more democratic in principle, in truth PR would most likely help deliver a permanent majority for a multiparty left-wing coalition government. All these parties want only slight variations of the exact same open borders, DEI, LGBTQ, Net Zero, tax-and-spend agenda—thus PR would transform the UK into an electoral left dictatorship.
There are 650 MPs in the UK Parliament, and, under the current FPP system, the one with most votes in each individual constituency becomes that constituency’s local MP, even if only by a single ballot. If a party gets the magic number of 326 MPs, just one over the halfway mark, they can form a national government.
Generally, however, if you collate the sum total of votes gained by all the other opposition parties put together, it will represent far more votes than the actual new government got; under FPP a winning 30 percent share of national votes may equate to 60 percent of MPs. So, letting that same “winning” government with a 30 percent minority share of the ballot govern is in fact highly undemocratic, and it would be far fairer to let all the 70 percent of losers gang up into one big coalition and rule in their stead, right?
That certainly appears to be the opinion of the UK’s incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham—who, even more undemocratically, wasn’t really elected by 99.99 percent of the general public into his current role himself. In the run-up to his takeover, the left-wing Labour Party leader has spoken of the alleged need for “a different type of politics,” one based “less [upon] point-scoring, more [upon] problem-solving,” a more consensual, less oppositional way of doing things: less oppositional because, in practice, under PR there will be no meaningful non-leftist opposition remaining to stop him anymore, just to shout impotently from the sidelines.
In the past, Burnham has explicitly called for PR to be implemented, speaking of how alternative voting systems help build “collaboration, partnership and consensus-building”. But what he means by that is the building of an artificial consensus, one which does not in fact exist anywhere outside of the left-wing Westminster Uniparty bubble within which Andy blindly lives. PR will lead to a more “consensual politics” only in the sense that the politicians forming all future governments will fundamentally agree with one another on the core key issues beforehand, and undoing their legislation will be made impossible.
Burnham has called for as many UK parties as possible to fight the next general election upon a commitment to introduce PR for all future plebiscites. Then, he can claim he has a democratic mandate for it, when he knows most ordinary people won’t read said parties’ manifestos, or be aware the PR promise is even being made in them, just as many people were not aware of Labour’s manifesto promise to extend voting rights to 16-year-olds at the last general election—including the majority of 16-year-olds.
There is currently a left-wing cross-party agreement to bring in PR. Why? The ex-Green Party leader Caroline Lucas rather gave the game away:
Andy’s right that PR is a vital way of changing the wider political culture as well as better reflecting the wishes of the electorate [or one particular portion of it, anyway]. And, crucially, it’s also our best way of protecting our political system from a far-right government elected on barely a quarter of the national vote.
By this, Lucas actually means it is a better way of “better reflecting the wishes” of uniparty blobs like herself, forever. On issues like mass immigration, a large majority of the British public want less of it: but uniparty hydra-head offshoots like Labour, the Lib Dems, and Greens all want more of it, so under PR that is what they will get “democratically.” The only plausible party in existence at present who will try and change any of this is Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK—or a “far-right government” who could be “elected on barely a quarter of the national vote,” as Lucas would prefer to call them.
Reform has been leading national polls for the last year or more, generally with 25–30 percent of the vote; under FPP, they could plausibly form a government, or at least team up with the “right-lite” Conservative Party as a governing coalition. Under PR, this would be far less thinkable. The latest polls at time of writing give Reform 26 percent of the vote, equating to 169 PR MPs, and the Conservatives 19 percent, or 124 MPs, for 293 in total, 33 short of a majority. But add up the combined PR votes for the left-wing cabal of Labour, Lib Dem, Green and the SNP Scottish Nationalists, and you get precisely the magic number of 326 MPs, enough to form a coalition majority government. Throw in a few Muslim independents and Plaid Cymru Welsh nationalists for extra “stability” ,and you have a picture of the likely perma-junta of Britain’s PR-based future.
At first, this seems like a partial loss for Burnham. Being the mere head of a multi-party alliance, not a one-party Labour regime, should give him less power. But being voted out of office altogether will give him no power at all, an all-too plausible prospect under FPP. If he can only manage to persuade the electorate to vote for him this one final time come the next general election, giving him a “mandate” to impose PR, then he or one of his Labour Party avatars could be in office until Doomsday—towards which such a government would assuredly lead Britain. Thus, uniquely, the consequences of the next general election scheduled for 2029 will probably not be able to be subsequently democratically undone. How is that “democratic”?
Under FPP, a severe change of political course gained with about 30 percent of the vote is always at least theoretically possible. Under PR, contrariwise, a party like Reform would need to gain at least 50.1 percent of the vote to form a government, which is impossible in today’s fragmented political landscape—the last time that happened was 1931. Of the 22 general elections held in the UK since 1945, there was only a single one where the left-wing parties combined would have got under 50 percent of the vote. So, no FPP, no Thatcher or (postwar) Churchill—and certainly no Farage, ever. Under Burnham’s auspices, the main left-wing parties all recently came together in a “cross-party council” for the progressive majority, explicitly to plot how best to keep Nigel out of office: evidently, their answer was “use PR”.
All across Europe, PR is already in place, expertly preventing “unacceptable” and allegedly “Nazi” politicians like Holland’s anti-Islam and anti-immigration Geert Wilders from becoming leaders of their nations, even when, under FPP terms, they win general elections outright. Only the UK, post-Brexit, and with FPP still in place, can become potentially free from prevailing European-style liberal tyranny—Burnham’s “electoral reforms” are designed to cut off this last final path to liberty forever in the UK too. Upon his success, the only possible way any change to the uniparty regime can thenceforward be affected by a huge, disenfranchised portion of the population will be by violence. How very “consensual” Andy will have made everything become then.
Although largely forgotten, Britain did once have a referendum on changing the FPP system, back in 2011. It was lost, decisively, when voters decided they preferred the current way of doing things, as this would lead to fewer hegemonic coalition multi-party governments of the precise kind favored by the Burnhamite left today—but, as the Brexit vote was later to prove, when the public give the “wrong” choice in referendums, they can always easily be overruled.
To win public votes, those left-wingers campaigning for a change in 2011 planned to erect giant blow-up plastic buttocks of people like Andy Burnham all over the country, advertising how scrapping FPP would supposedly be the best way to “Kick [your] MP up the behind!” Under any future PR regime, that word “Kick” will turn out to have been a misprint for “Kiss.”
The post Burnham’s Disproportionate Misrepresentation appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Reform UK leader is making the ultimate political gamble.
The leader of Reform UK, Nigel Farage, has gone all in. He has gathered his chips together, placed them center-table, and invited his rivals to show their hands.
Rather than wait for the House of Commons standards watchdog to adjudicate on his controversial donations from crypto dealers, he has resigned his seat, called a by-election, and challenged the “establishment” to defeat him. He certainly has cojones. But has he signed his own political death warrant? The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, has said his resignation today is “an admission of guilt.”
Resigning a parliamentary seat in order to force a by-election is a very risky tactic, especially for a controversial politician like Nigel Farage. He won Clacton-on-Sea two years ago with an 8,000-vote majority, 46 percent of the vote. But as we have seen in recent by-elections in Makerfield and Gorton and Denton, tactical voting by anti-Farage voters can destroy Reform UK candidates even in areas where, on paper, they should be winners.
The Reform leader is, as he made clear in his statement today, at the end of his tether. He is facing not one but potentially two disciplinary inquiries by Standards Commissioner Daniel Greenberg for failing to declare gifts from cryptocurrency dealers: £5 million from the Thailand-based billionaire Christopher Harbourne, and gifts in kind from another businessman with crypto connections, George Cottrell, who was sentenced to eight months in a U.S. jail in 2017 for wire fraud.
Farage has insisted that these gifts were “purely personal” and that he was therefore under no obligation to declare them on the register of MPs’ financial interests. But he clearly suspects that the commissioner is unlikely to agree, both because of the sheer size of the Harbourne donation and because it was accepted within 12 months of Farage becoming an MP.
If censured by Greenberg, MPs would undoubtedly vote for Farage to be suspended from the House of Commons. That in itself could cause a by-election. It only requires 10 percent of voters in a constituency to trigger a recall petition against an MP suspended by Parliament. Even in a rather right-wing area like Clacton, there is no doubt that 7,500 registered voters would certainly be willing to force Farage out.
American observers have recently had cause to be astonished by the quirks of the British system of democracy. Seven prime ministers in a decade. Andy Burnham, the latest, walking into the British equivalent of the White House, 10 Downing Street, without an election or even a leadership contest. His predecessor, Sir Keir Starmer, was forced to resign despite having won a landslide election only two years ago.
Now the politician who, according to recent opinion polls, had been on course to become the eighth prime minister—that is, Nigel Farage—has been driven out of Parliament because he received perfectly legal (if ethically questionable) gifts of cash and support before he entered Parliament.
Needless to say, the left are rejoicing at the downfall of “the grifter,” as the Green Party leader, Zack Polanski, styles Farage. Needless to say, the Right are claiming that this has all been, in Farage’s words, “a hit job” by the establishment.
“It seems to me,” Farage said in his statement, “the establishment have now decided that they can’t beat us fairly, so they’ve chosen to use foul means.”
Farage made no attempt to disguise the fact that he is a wealthy businessman. “Making money is not a crime,” he said. Indeed, he celebrated it, claiming that no one in the Labour Cabinet has any concept of how to run a business.
He said he needed the Harbourne cash for security because he is “the most physically and verbally attacked politician of modern times.” His life was in constant danger. Farage recounted a previously unreported incident where he was accosted by a violent mob surrounding his car, which “had to be written off.”
The Reform leader went on to accuse the Sunday Times of targeting his daughter by publishing a photograph of where she lived, and he accused Sky News of “lying” about whether journalists had harassed his family.
He is angry, all right—but is this reckless gamble the right course of action for his opinion-poll-leading party? Farage is Reform UK. There is no one else with his charisma and ability to connect with ordinary people. If he loses the by-election, he will be out of politics for good. That would leave Reform leaderless and rudderless.
The post Furious Farage Resigns to Force ‘People Versus the Establishment’ By-Election appeared first on The American Conservative.
Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, resigned his seat in parliament Tuesday, triggering a special election in which he intends to run amid allegations of failure to disclose financial gifts.
In a Tuesday speech, Farage responded to the allegations stating that he had received inappropriate gifts from the cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne, arguing that increasing threats to his safety necessitated help in providing security for himself. He attacked the media for revealing the location of his daughter’s home, citing the incident as reason for his resignation.
“Today I will resign as a member of parliament for Clacton-on-the-sea,” he announced in a video statement on X, “thereby forcing a by-election.” He also announced his intent to run for the seat again, appealing to the voters of Clacton to decide the merits of the allegations.
“I’ve decided that the people of Clacton should be the judges of my actions,” Farage stated, framing the election as “a people-versus-the establishment by-election.”
Farage’s Reform UK party has pulled ahead of both the Labour and Conservative parties for the past 15 months, according to POLITICO polling aggregation, a fact that Farage has credited as the catalyst for Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s recent ouster.
The post Farage Resigns As MP, Triggering By-Election, Running Again appeared first on The American Conservative.
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