This article was first published in The Telegraph. Everything I publish elsewhere is shared here, as a gift to the nation. But if you want the full picture, become a paid subscriber. It’s just a few quid a month; such is the price genius is reduced to.
Does anybody in Reform know why people vote Reform? It’s a question that seems increasingly uncertain. But it’s relatively simple to understand: immigration, immigration, immigration.
It is clarity and conviction on this single issue that is driving voters away from the mainstream parties and toward the one that, in Nigel Farage, finally seems willing to say what needs to be said – and to do what is necessary.
But despite reducing immigration being their central policy, their commitment to it is barely surviving contact with reality – even as an opposition party.
Earlier this year Zia Yusuf’s replacement as Party Chairman, Dr David Bull, used one of his first media appearances after being appointed to announce that “immigration is the lifeblood of this country, it always has been”.
Meanwhile Linden Kemkaran, the leader of the newly Reform-controlled Kent County Council, has written to the Government to lobby against a tightening of rules on migrant workers.
Kemkaran, along with the council’s cabinet member for adult social care and public health, Diane Morton, wrote to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and minister for care Stephen Kinnock to raise “grave concerns” about the proposals in the new Immigration Bill. Those proposals, in particular, were to close the health and social care visa route to overseas applicants, which Kemkaran argued could “leave providers on a cliff edge”. The Leaders’ call was seconded by the leader of the Lib Dem group on the council.
The health and social care visas have been a disaster, and one of the primary drivers of the catastrophic Boriswave: low-wage, low-productivity, high-exploitation migration that has undercut British workers and locked the country into an unsustainable dependency on increasing migration flows from low-wage economies.
Despite the visa route bringing in more people than the entire population of Montenegro, or a city the size of Bristol, care vacancies are now higher than when the social care worker visa launched. One in four foreign care workers has been found to abuse UK visa rules. There was a tenfold rise in investigations in the care sector by the labour exploitation watchdog in just two years.
There was an implicit understanding that Reform councils would be under stricter control from the party HQ than their mainstream equivalents, and would be used to demonstrate their willingness to use what limited powers councils have to fight on totemic issues like immigration.
Ahead of May’s election, Yusuf admitted that Reform might not be able to prevent asylum seekers from being housed in hotels where the Home Office already holds contracts. However, he said, the party would attempt to block such accommodations using “judicial reviews, injunctions, and planning laws.”
That commitment, it seems, has already begun to unravel – at the worst possible moment. In an electoral landscape where voters have already cast off one Right-wing party for betraying its promises on immigration, showing weakness on this issue is more than just a misstep; it is a threat to Reform’s entire raison d’être.
The question Reform must answer is simple: if they can’t hold the line on immigration in opposition – under no real pressure, with no real power – why should anyone trust them to do it in power? The British public have learned to spot a sheep in wolf’s clothing.