Dissatisfaction with establishment politics is becoming widespread and offers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a new political party to truly break through, Nigel Farage said Friday.
Brexit leader Nigel Farage addressed the summer conference of Reform UK, the political party he founded and is now relinquishing control of to its members, calling for hard work and determination while promising potentially considerable rewards.
While Farage’s speech had begun on very familiar ground, re-treading the old patter from his General Election stump speeches, the theme of the conference has very much been the transformation of the party from a centralised body under the direct control of Mr Farage to a nationwide federation of associations owned and controlled by its members, an essential move its leaders say for making it fighting fit to meet rapidly approaching challenges.
The 2025 English council elections are to be the “first big test of fire” in May, Mr Farage said, stating the “coming of age” Reform UK Party had to learn from the long-established Liberal Democrats who have decades of experience in punching above their weight with a mature and effective grassroots machine.
Reflecting on the state of British politics and the opportunity it affords for an insurgent to break through into the big-time, and potentially even to capture the government of the United Kingdom as has happened with right-wing populists in Europe in recent years, Nigel Farage told the delegates: “I don’t think there’s ever been a time where there is greater disenchantment in the two big parties that have dominated our political life for the last 100 years. Labour have not won through love, so the opportunity is there so that is why we must take the English county council elections next year [seriously]”.
If the party meets this challenge head-on, Farage said, the rewards could be “truly astonishing”: the “opportunity is enormous”, he continued.
Explaining why he was relinquishing control of the party now and not before, when he had faced criticism for running the party as a business with himself the majority shareholder, Mr Farage said it was now large enough, with nearly 80,000 paying members, to resist entryism. He stopped short of naming UKIP, his old party, which suffered from an imperfectly drafted constitution and was basically ungovernable and was hit by waves of entryism immediately after Mr Farage departed the party, but did cite Labour’s experience with hard-left entryism leading to Jeremy Corbyn.
He said the party is hiring “full-time regional managers and regional organisers… I also promise you that in future we will be vetting candidates rigorously at all levels, I promise you that. We haven’t got time, we haven’t got room for a few extremists to wreck the work of a party that now has 80,000 members and is rising by hundreds every single day.
“… new or nascent political parties are vulnerable to being hijacked by extremist groups and bad actors, and all the while I had control of it, that could never happen. Because we don’t want extremists, we don’t want bigots, we don’t want people who think that way because we represent the silent, decent majority of this great country that we live in.”
Speaking of the ongoing work to build a national grassroots organisation to fight the May local elections next year in the hope of getting “hundreds” of councillors, further entrenching the party at the local level to prepare for the next General Election, Mr Farage cited the Liberal Democrat model, a party which performs very well in British elections despite having comparatively few voters.
He continued: “…it’s about building teams, it’s about having unity. It’s through the branches that we get these structures. It’s through the branches that we raise money. It’s through the branches that we find the necessary candidates to fight elections. It is through the branches that we become part of the local community, not just part of a national political party. There actually is a template for this, and I never thought I’d say this, but we have to model ourselves on the Liberal Democrats.
“The Liberal Democrats build branches. They win seats at district, county, and unitary levels. The Liberal Democrats build on that strength, they put literature and leaflets through doors repeatedly in their target areas.”
