Reform UK Sounds More Like Fox News Than a British Political Party
Conspiracies, contradictions and carnival-barker theatrics - the Turquoise Tories are copying America's worst instincts, and it's backfiring.
Please forgive any stray typos, rogue commas, or questionable punctuation - most of this article was written out on an under-caffeinated, extremely early morning commute and scribbled between site meetings on overheated buses.
Since their party conference, Reform and Co have been… weird.
I mean, they’ve always been a little bit weird, but there has definitely been a steady uptick in the level of batshittery that’s come from the Turquoise Tories, and it has a distinct feeling about it.
Distinctly American.
A strange US style of delivering politics that’s been shining through. I’m not talking about the slick Obama-era way of doing politics, of course - no, no, they’ve decided to import the worst bits, the carnival barker exaggerations, culture war nonsense, fact free bluster and the ability (and audacity) of saying things so utterly absurd with a straight face for what feels like the express purpose of watching the commentariat fall over themselves debating whether this was technically “a lie” or merely “something blurted out without evidence.”
It was most apparent in the Tylenol disasters they had yesterday - or rather, the Paracetamol disasters. Because that’s what it’s called in the UK - Paracetamol1. Tylenol is not a thing in this country, it’s a very well known American brand name. And it bugs me, this use of the American brand-name. It jars.
You would think that the party desperate to portray themselves as the voice of Britain, the authentic voice of the “ordinary pub bloke” might actually adjust their messaging to refer to what we, in the UK, know it as. Instead, Richard Tice, in a very terse interview on ITV kept parroting Trump’s attack lines almost verbatim - wading waist deeep into the fever-swamp conspiracy theory that paracetamol use during pregnancy causes autism2. No evidence, no science - just a garbled cut-and-paste job from a rambling American dictator.
In the real world, where most of us adults live, Wes Streeting had to come out and say what any GP or clinician in the UK would tell you in five seconds flat:
There is no evidence for this.
None.
And yet, in an interview on LBC with Nick Ferrari, Farage, instead of dismissing this as the dangerous nonsense that it so clearly is, did his usual shtick of “oh, who knows, I don’t know, you don’t know, maybe, maybe not, also, let’s compare it to thalidomide”, and by doing so, giving credence to this entirely baseless claim by pretending very, very hard that fence-sitting is the same as being open-minded. Which it is not - it’s cowardice under the pretence of curiosity, and it’s something that Farage has over the years perfected into an artform.
The man never quite lies, but he never quite tells the truth either. He slips into that greasy middle ground that he seems so very comfortable in where plausible deniability lives - the place where every statement is covered with just enough ambiguity and flaccidity to keep the headlines going, and just enough slipperiness to avoid ever having to take responsibility.
It’s exactly the same story with the damned swans and carp, because in yesterdays extra feature of “what in the world will these charlatans come up with next”, he decided he would be copying Trump’s claim about Haitian immigrants “eating the cats, eating the dawgs”, except with a strange British twist about it. He said Eastern Europeans in particular were eating the swans in Royal Parks.
Yes. Swans. Apparently now being pinched left, right and centre from Hyde Park and being chomped down on by marauding groups of Romanians.
The Royal Parks, rather predictably, and likely from quite a bemused comms person, put out a statement saying that they had received no reports of this ever happening. The RSPCA jumped in to point out that the viral “evidence” of illicit swan-consumption was actually a clip from a 2010 TV show.
The point, however, was never the evidence, or whether it was true or not.
It was the headlines. Those delicious, shouty, life sustaining morsels of attention that Reform needs to stay relevant, ones that read “FARAGE WARNS OF SWAN-EATING MIGRANTS.” The absurdity is completely baked in, but so is the slightly confused and expected outrage, and before you know it, Reform is once again, dominating the headlines.
The issue is that while all of this looks chaotic, there is a method that’s becoming quite clear. It’s the same “a bloke in a taxi told me” that Andrea Jenkyns used just about this time last year when she was desperately fighting for relevance.
It’s all whispered rumours. “I heard this said”, “someone told me that…”, “did you know?”, “huge if true…” weasel words that have been doing the rounds more and more as time has gone on. It’s not a lie, but it’s not a truth either - it’s Chinese whispers and outright gossip being weaponised into our political lexicon.
It’s the implication that does all the work, and if challenged on the vagueness or inaccuracy, they shrug and say “oh, I was just repeating something that I heard”, but if it goes unchallenged, it becomes “common sense.”
This is how demagoguery works in the social media era - a constant, insidious flow of little suspicions, taxi-driver anecdotes and pub-bore theories, all creating the distinct impression (though not reality) of a world that’s gone made, and that the vaunted set from Reform are the only ones that can “say it as it is.”
The trouble that Reform has now though is that they well and thoroughly overplayed their hand with their Party Conference when they put Aseem Malhotra on stage - a man whose claims about vaccines causing cancer in members of the Royal Family were so grotesquely irresponsible that even the GMC is now considering action against him.
For a party that since the start of the year has put a lot of work into professionalisation and reaching out to more moderate voters, this was catastrophic. They gave him a keynote slot under the banner of “Make Britain Healthy Again3”, only to spend the next several days frantically backtracking and sweating through their suits in uncomfortable interviews by insisting he wasn’t actually advising on health policy before contradicting themselves again.
In their desperate pursuit for Trumpian showmanship, they reached for a controversial figure, whipped up the controversy and then suddenly realised that the British Public - even the more sceptical parts of it - don’t actually want their would-be government flirting with anti-vax conspiracies4. The Malhotra claim that the King and Princess of Wales likely had their cancers “likely” caused by vaccines had vast swathes of the population recoiling, and suddenly giving Keir Starmer the easiest PMQs of his life when he gleefully got to quote reform’s “health policy” back at them.
The contradictions have been non-stop. The deportation plan named “Operation Restoring Justice” was launched on day one as targeting “600,000 people including children” was clarified the next day as “well, not children, at least not for the next five years.” Zia Yusuf, Ex-Party-Chairman and the party’s main “policy man” said one thing, only for Farage to then say another before Tice claiming ignorance, and within 24 short hours, their flagship policy had gone from thunderous “MASS DEPORTATIONS!” to “we’ll need to clarify a few things, because golly gosh, this is a bit complicated.”
Pure, unadulterated amateur hour.
Earlier this week, at (yet another) Monday morning news-conference5, the latest idea was thrown into the mix - the planned cancellation of ILR as a concept, and the threat of retroactively rescinding it from recent migrants to the UK. It was all guns blazing, non-stop Farage Serious Face, only to fall apart spectaculary on first contact with reality, because there is just no appetite for a policy like this.
ILR is one of those rare areas of immigration law that enjoys quite broad support - it’s the recognition by people that if you’ve played by the rules for years, worked and paid your taxes and kept your nose proverbially clean, you earn your place in society. It’s stability and it’s security. Doing something like ripping that up retrospectively - telling people who have lived her for decades in some cases, built their families, careers and communities here - that suddenly their future in this country depends on reapplying under new rules every five years?
The public was not having it.
In fact, I would say it did something Reform wasn’t expecting - it interrupted the illusion. People that care about migration, and yes there are many, suddenly realised that many of the people in their day-to-day lives are, in fact (shock horror) migrants themselves, and that these people could be forced out by a policy that doesn’t even make sense economically.
Which brings me back to the point of it all feeling so jarring. Why is that?
It’s because it’s Americanised politics being forced onto a traditionally very un-American system. In the US, conspiracy theories about vaccines, Tylenol, migrants eating pets and sinister “no-go-zones6” find fertile ground because their system is already shattered into purely tribal siloes. To the British early all of it feels just a little bit… ridiculous. Even the one word that bugged me before I realised why - Tylenol - does not fit into our lexicon. We don’t do “no-go-zones”, we do “signal failures at Clapham junction.” We don’t do “suspect your family physician of the worst”, we do “have a chat with your GP when you’re unsure.” The rhetoric that Reform uses, while effective at outrage, starts feeling alien when pushed too far into our daily lives.
And yet, they keep pushing forward with it. It could very well be because Reform, as a party, is a one-trick-pony, only ever really good at getting people (on both sides of the divide) annoyed and outraged. Maybe it’s because they’ve watched Trump turn nonsense, bluster and dishonesty into power and they think they can do the same. Or maybe - and this is a hypothesis I find myself drawn to more and more - they’re doing this as a deliberate smokescreen.
When shouty headlines about swan-eating migrants start circulating and a Tylenol band-wagon becomes conveniently available, we’re suddenly not talking about Nigel Farage’s tax arrangements or that he’s the MP that earns the most money outside of his main employment as representative of Clacton in this Parliament. When we’re talking about Farage traipsing off to the US to go slag off the UK, we’re not talking about Rupert Lowe calling him “messianic” before suddenly being suspended.
The chances are that, beyond sheer incompetence and unsuitability for any form of governance, this is all just a game of “no, no, look over here, not at the things that really matter!”
Or maybe - and let’s not underestimate this possibility - they simply don’t have any sort of communication control at all, which when looking at the past few weeks, seems distinctly possible as well.
Tice contradicting Farage, Farage contradicting himself. Candidates suspended left, (far) right and centre. Andrea Jenkyns warbling in a sequined jumpsuit. Jeremy Kyle stalking the conference like a Temu Fox News Anchor.
And through all of this farce, Farage insisting that his party is ready for government.
I’m very sorry, but a party that is ready for government does not look like this. A party ready for government doesn’t have to clarify every single damned policy within hours of announcing it. A party ready for government does not give a standing ovation to a convicted racist and then claim to be defenders of law and orders.
And yet, this is what they’ve become - a jumble of American style outrage politics, taxi-man gossip and policy positions that collapse under even the mildest scrutiny. They’re reliant on never being pinned down, on never quite lying - but never quite telling the truth either. On throwing out enough smoke that nobody notices the yawning cracks in their foundations.
Those cracks are now showing anyway. The ILR policy has blown up in their faces, the Malhotra fiasco has them branded as anti-vax cranks, the swan-eating story has made them a laughing stock and the contradictions - the constant, wearying, ever-present contradictions are beginning to make even sympathetic commentators and supporters wonder whether Reform is a political party, or just shiny, poorly coordinated entertainment.
They’re desperate to be viewed as the UK’s answer to Trump’s MAGA - bold, brash and unafraid. Instead, they’re looking more like the UK’s answer to Trump’s worst instincts - incoherent, cruel, unserious and increasingly unhinged.
And for once, I’m not annoyed by that. I’m now quite enjoying it. The more they talk about Tylenol instead of Paracetamol, the more they darkly mutter about swans, the more they platform conspiracy theorists and constantly backtrack on their own policies, the more people will see them for what they are:
Not a serious party of government. Not even a serious protest movement. Just a bunch of middle-aged men and women, copying their favourite demagogue, playing politics, and getting overtaken by their own contradictions.
The danger, of course, is that we’ve seen that there can be success in this approach if enough people fall for the bluster and outrage - which is why I sadly cannot put my pen down just yet. The lies, the insinuations, the “taxi-driver-told-me” routines still need to be called out.
The Americanised pantomime is going to become more and more jarring as time goes on, but the one thing to always remember is that Britain isn’t America, and for all our faults, most of can still tell the difference between a serious policy proposal and a mildly unhinged man sitting in the corner of a pub mumbling about swans.
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Or Panadol if you’re feeling really flush.
Which is yet another direct copy-paste-job from the United States, this time aping RFK Jr’s campaign to get Americans Healthier by… checks notes… sowing a constant stream of misinformation about vaccines.
With, of course, the exception of the anti-vax crowd led by intellectual giants like June Slater and David Cartland.
Dutifully covered for a full hour by Sky News.
Which no one can ever point out, no matter how hard they try.
You're on a righteous mission with Farridge, Bear, and I am fucking here for it!
We've seen an attempt at Trumpism here before. Boris Johnson did a cuddlier, more smiley version of it and it went down like a cup of cold sick. I think (hope), that Reform's nastier version will end similarly. Especially as he keeps taking in more and more of Johnson's wingnut cheerleaders. Turquoise Tories (love it, by the way) is spot on, and any party comms officer with half a brain at Labour, Lib Dems and the Greens should be shouting that from the fucking rooftops.
When I comment, I do try / prefer to
a) put a thought through view and
b) aim for a “Change” related aspect (if that’s sensible/possible) (as Change is what I write about).
But today my comment is simply “they are all “**ckwits”.
(I think that’s well thought through 😂)