Only one issue really matters in the seventh Senedd election on May 7th: stopping the abhorrent Reform UK. I doubt if anyone who reads this blog would fall for Nigel Fart Rage’s onslaught of brazen lies but just in case there are some toying with the idea of voting for the fascists, here are a few of the myriad reasons why these terrible people should be resoundingly rejected by Wales:
■Reform UK has been spending unprecedented amounts attempting to swing the Welsh and Scottish national elections and the English local elections, all taking place on May 7th. This is why every home in Wales has been subjected to an avalanche of Reform propaganda dropping through the letterbox. For instance, with a week to go, I have so far received:
●Eight leaflets from Reform;
●Seven from the Greens (the Caerdydd Penarth constituency where I live is their top target in Wales);
●Three from Labour (they seem to have given up);
●Three from Propel (Caerdydd Penarth and Caerdydd Ffynnon Taf, are the only seats Neil McEvoy’s small party is contesting);
●Three from Plaid Cymru (Plaid’s budget for their entire campaign is £250,000 whereas Reform spends £400,000 on each pan-Wales mailshot alone);
●One from the LibDems;
●One from Independent Rhys ab Owen.
Yes, Reform UK are throwing the kitchen sink at us and trying to buy our votes with the sheer wealth at their disposal, menacing the very integrity of the election and making a mockery of democracy itself. The money has come from various anonymous sources but mostly from bitcoin billionaire, Thailand-based Christopher Harborne (aka Chakrit Sakunkrit). He has given more than £22million to Farage, which accounts for two-thirds of all funding received by Reform UK (previously called the Brexit party), making it uniquely dependent among UK parties on a single benefactor. Last August’s £9m donation by Harborne was the largest single amount ever given in the UK by a living donor. Another £3m followed in November and now Farage’s war-chest overflows with Harborne’s cash. Reform is thus almost entirely bankrolled by an overseas billionaire whose wealth is tied to crypto-currency. No wonder Farage, like his role-model Donald Trump, is such a zealous convert to crypto: recently, he invested some of his small change (£215,000) in a crypto venture run by Liz Truss’s blink-and-you-missed-him chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng and, for a fee of course, he has plugged crypto-currencies on the video site Cameo. Essentially crypto-currency is a way to move money across borders, very popular with gangsters, scammers, money-launderers, Russian sanctions-busters, North Korean hackers and others who would rather avoid the scrutiny of moving money via a bank. It is actually just a new form of gambling, a means for insiders to rip off the gullible and the desperate while its fat-cat far-right proponents airily talk of digital currency as the gateway to liberation (translation: avoiding tax). Reform UK don’t give a damn about Wales, they just want to use it as a platform from which they can spread their vile far-right messages across the UK.
■So, what exactly is in these many Reform UK leaflets? Answer: disinformation, ignorance, insincerity and unmitigated lies. Their six point ‘plan to fix Wales’ is typical:
●They are going to “launch an emergency programme” to “save NHS Wales”, “reduce record NHS waiting lists”, “guarantee faster GP access” and “make sure the NHS is free and effective”. This is exemplary ‘populism’ at its most disingenuous: telling people what they want to hear with vague promises and no way of bringing them to fruition. Waiting lists are high in Wales not for want of trying (actually they have been gradually falling over the past year while GP access has improved significantly). Already 52% of the entire Welsh budget allocated by the UK government goes to the NHS. The problem is simply the systemic and perpetual underfunding of Wales by UK governments that takes no account of need – built in by disadvantage, impoverishment, historic exploitation and Wales’ subservient position as an English possession. Glib talk about waving a magic wand and resolving these profound issues is just sales patter – confirmed by the refusal of Reform UK to ever mention the key issues that are the reasons Wales is downtrodden and suffering: our lack of autonomy, lack of control of our own finances and resources, and lack of our rightful proportion of the UK’s huge wealth. In other words, Wales will always struggle until we achieve independence.
●They are going to “cut income tax” so that “working people will keep more of what they earn”. Another populist trope dressed up as concern for “working people” that is just a reiteration of the time-worn Tory opposition to the very idea of tax (rich people contributing to a collective pot in order to help pay for public services and improve the lives of everyone? no way!). Reform are strangely silent on what already threadbare public services they would cut to pay for this largesse. What Wales needs is the opposite: a massive boost in revenue. There are countless ways to do this like, say, taxing the land values of the super-rich whose ancestors stole half of Wales by violence, or charging England for the minerals, the water supply and the energy sources they extract from Wales without paying a penny.
●They are going to “scrap blanket 20mph limits”. It shows Reform’s total dearth of ideas for Wales when they have to resort to repeating a straightforward lie that has now been thoroughly debunked for over two years. Fact: there never was a “blanket 20mph limit” – it was always restricted to just built-up areas, and in any case was only following the example of no less than 70 local authorities in England, Scotland and Wales which had introduced 20mph limits without controversy already – meaning 30 million people in the UK lived in 20mph zones long before the Welsh government attempted to regularise it across all Councils in Wales. The limit has proved popular. It has been tweaked over time, area by area, as its effectiveness or otherwise became apparent and, most importantly, it has worked: traffic accidents are down 25% and deaths and serious injuries are down 23%. How upsetting that reduction in fatalities must be to the rightwingers in England who co-ordinated massive online opposition to the Welsh initiative by fraudulently misusing Wales’ petition system! And how dishonest and divisive of Reform to try to stir up this non-issue again!
●They are going to “put Welsh people first”. Here comes that Reform UK speciality: appealing to the worst in people with sly, duplicitous dog-whistle code-words that boil down to the trademark racism that is the Party’s primary policy. Two points must be made here. First Reform’s assertion that they will “end the use of hotels to house illegal immigrants” is an impossibility. Immigration is not a devolved matter, Wales has no say in it whatsoever, all immigration policy is determined by the UK government. Did nobody tell Reform? Or are they just ignorant? Or do they think Welsh people are stupid enough to swallow this lie? Secondly, there is definitely a very serious immigration problem in Wales, but it certainly isn’t caused by Reform’s obsession, the black and Asian people who make up just 0.9% of the population. It is caused by the staggering 25% of the population of Wales who are ENGLISH – you know, those uninvited people who outbid locals and buy up homes in desirable areas, who have second homes they use as holiday lets and that turn once vibrant communities into ghost towns, who dilute and eradicate the Welsh language, Welsh culture and Welsh character wherever they go, and who arrogantly abuse our natural hospitality and friendliness by taking over key positions in all aspects of Welsh life. By comparison, the asylum seekers Reform continually demonises are a blessing!
●They are going to “stand up for Welsh farmers”. Another empty and meaningless statement without any practical policy attached, but thrown in because it ticks off another box Reform strategists have heard about in far-right media like the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and their very own TV channel GB News. Presuming wrongly and insultingly that Welsh farmers are the same as English farmers and will fall for any old slurry hurled in their direction, Reform dare not admit that it is the rightwing policies they want to impose, like endless growth, ecological destruction, giant agribusiness and capitalist monopolies that do most damage to Welsh farmers.
●They are going to “rebuild Wales’ economy”. This sweeping piece of bunkum amounts to nothing more than building roads: the already rejected M4 relief road that will destroy what remains of the Gwent levels, Newport Docks and vital biodiversity all to shave five minutes off the journey Englanders make in and out of Wales; an “upgrade” of the A55 which is already a dual carriageway, already being constantly improved and already one of the UK’s fastest roads – what is this “upgrade” exactly, a six-lane racetrack all to shave five minutes off the journey Englanders make to and from their caravans?; and an “upgrade” of the A470 that can only mean more noise, tarmac and destruction of nature through the spine of Wales all to shave five minutes off the journey Englanders make to their unspoilt rural bolt holes and back. Reform UK have made it abundantly clear they don’t give two hoots about ecological issues and about the urgent need to switch from the private car to public transport (they will cancel all the planned improvements to Wales’ railways), and like so many selfish, anti-social rightwing males with masculinity issues they just crave a mini version of the USA where motoring counts as a human right – and to hell with the planet.
In addition, there is one theme that keeps recurring in all Reform’s leaflets: they continually use the phrase “Labour and Plaid” as if the two parties were one and the same, shared similar policies and have been running the Senedd in coalition since Wales’ infant democracy was born 27 years ago (fact: for only four years back in the third Senedd government when Rhodri Morgan was Labour leader have the two parties ever had a formal agreement). This is, of course, just one more big fat lie from the unscrupulous, corrupt crooks who, worried by Plaid’s poll ratings, are attempting to tar Plaid Cymru with Labour’s utterly discredited brush. Labour and Plaid could not be more different on the most fundamental level: Labour is a British nationalist party that bedecks itself in Union flags at every opportunity and its Welsh sub-branch in Cardiff spends nearly all its energy and passion attacking Plaid Cymru, whereas Plaid, the only true Welsh party, has one overarching policy that is its very reason for existing and that defines it: independence for Wales – something that the Labour Party would die in a ditch to prevent. Likewise, dedicated Plaid supporters want nothing but political oblivion for Labour (if in any doubt, check out what I – a stalwart Plaid Cymru supporter – have been writing about Labour on this blog for more years than I care to remember). So, grouping these two adversaries together as Reform repeatedly does is as ridiculously wrong as accusing the Tories of being in cahoots with Sinn Féin. And one of the many differences between Plaid Cymru and Reform UK is that while Reform want to break Wales Plaid want to make Wales – which means, to avoid chaos and misery befalling the Welsh people, and because Plaid is a responsible Party not a gang of wreckers, sometimes Plaid has abstained or even supported Labour’s annual budget proposals so that all the vital government services aren’t brought to a halt (as Trump likes to do in America). Reform UK, a Party of hate-filled far-right anarchists bent on destruction, would presumably just let Wales collapse if ever put in the same position.
■It wasn’t until February that Reform UK managed to find someone to lead the party in Wales, their talent pool being non-existent. Farage knew the leader had to be someone who was at least nominally Welsh, but that reduced the options even further given that no Welsh person with a scintilla of pride, intelligence and affection for Wales would touch Reform with a bargepole. The best he could come up with was the thumpingly unimpressive Dan Thomas, who grew up in Blackwood. He worked in ‘financial services’ in London, joined the Conservative Party and eventually became a Tory Councillor in Barnet. As deputy leader then leader of the Tory Council he was one of the new breed of far-right Tories who wanted to privatise all public services. In the mid-2000s, the borough’s Conservative leadership began promoting a vision that came to be known as ‘easyCouncil’. The name was borrowed from the budget airline model: residents would get the bare minimum as standard and pay more for anything extra. The aim was a Council remade as just a commissioning body and private firms running everything. By 2011 Thomas was deputy leader and a key figure in bringing the ‘vision’ to reality. Core services were outsourced on a huge scale, costs rose sharply and scrutiny disappeared. Thomas was vociferous in his defence of outsourcing, even in the face of mounting evidence that it was failing. To him private = good, public = bad and that was that. In 2013 Barnet signed two 10-year contracts with Capita, the UK’s largest business outsourcing company, with a track record of inept blunders and voracious profiteering. These contracts were worth about £500m to the company. One covered planning, regeneration, environmental health, highways and related services, the other covered customer and support functions including payroll, HR, IT and call handling. Unsurprisingly, it all went disastrously wrong. Outsourcing at this scale changes the texture of local democracy: a Council can be voted out, a 10-year contract cannot. As services started to fail while residents couldn’t get answers and lost their leverage, the people of Barnet suffered. The basics of local democracy were gone, because once services were fixed commercial agreements voters could no longer punish failure and expect change to follow. By the time Thomas became Council leader in 2019, Barnet’s pension queries were handled in Darlington, parking notices were dealt with in Croydon, payroll for school staff was administered from Carlisle, planning staff worked in Belfast, the call centre was in Coventry, and so on. Yet the Thatcherite ideologue refused to admit he had been wrong, remaining adversarial, arrogant and hostile to anyone who challenged him and, when residents tried to ask questions, he even shut down public scrutiny at Council meetings. People in Wales need to understand what he did when he had power. He championed contracts that cost the council £229m more than planned, left basic financial controls in tatters and saw Barnet become the first local authority fined by the Pensions Regulator. By 2022 the outsourcing model became politically toxic and Labour took control of the council after 20 years of Conservative rule, winning 41 seats in total and taking 16 from the Tories. The new administration ended the mass outsourcing of services and began bringing them back inhouse – a process that will not be swift since contracts on this scale are complex to unravel. It will take Barnet years to clean up the Thomas mess. But the meaning of the election was plain. Barnet voters had watched the experiment for years, lived with its consequences and chosen to remove the idiots responsible. Like so many of the Tory Party’s worst liabilities, Thomas defected to Reform UK and now Nigel Farage has decided that he is a suitable person to be Reform’s leader in Wales – and therefore our First Minister should Reform win the Senedd election. Our blood should run cold at the very prospect of this man being let loose on the much broader, complex, embedded, essential, intrinsic and hard-won public services of Wales.
■Finally, let’s look at Farage himself. The driving force behind Reform UK and it predecessors UKIP and the Brexit Party was hugely enabled by the ‘impartial’ BBC giving him continual publicity and broadcasting time to spout his gimmick-laden, ever-contradictory, contentious crap when he was not even an MP. From that kick-start he developed a patently phoney persona, pitching himself as a straight-talking man of the people who likes a pint and a fag, had done well in the City and could now afford to do politics for fun. It was all bollocks.
He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, the son of a City of London stockbroker, and had a privileged private education at fee-paying Dulwich College in south London. There his personality began to develop into a thoroughly nasty piece of work, a cruel, white supremacist bully, out-and-out racist and anti-semite with a creepy entourage of submissive crawlers hanging on his every word, confirmed by no less than 34 of his school contemporaries. After denying everything and refusing to apologise for anything, all he has grudgingly admitted to so far is some “aggressive banter”. His right wing politics were developing simultaneously. He joined the Tory Party when only 14 in 1978. He didn’t have the intellect to go on to University back in the days when only 5% of 18-year-olds had a tertiary education. Instead he followed daddy into the City of London as a commodities trader. In those days he and his type were widely regarded as laughable ‘Young Fogeys’, with politics centred on an imperialistic, nostalgic British Nationalism and the EU the pantomime villain. A watershed came in 1992 when he quit the Conservatives in protest after Prime Minister John Major signed the Maastricht Treaty.
He sole political aim consolidated into getting the UK out of the EU and, to that end, he was a founding member of UKIP in 1993. UKIP wasn’t a particularly rightwing party at that stage, since many on the left also objected to the EU as an authoritarian capitalist club that wouldn’t even allow members to dabble in socialism. But Farage gradually shifted UKIP rightwards with the extreme xenophobia that is so often found in Englishmen with plenty of ‘foreigners’ in their family trees (in his case German and French). He was elected to the European Parliament he wanted to abolish in 1999 as a UKIP MEP for South-East England and spent the next 21 years being jingoistic, bigoted and insulting in Strasbourg on a very handy fat salary.
Despite, or maybe because of, being charmless, crass and crude he went down well with stock Brit stereotypes such as the bar-stool bore, the last-days-of-the-Raj reactionary, the mentally ill misogynist, the lairy lag, the foaming-at-the-mouth fanatic and the rancid de-frocked rector. With that material he built his base and finally took over UKIP in 2006. After the Tories returned to power in 2010, at first in coalition with the LibDems, Farage cranked up the constant pressure for a referendum on EU membership and he got his way after David Cameron won an outright majority in 2015 and weakly crumbled to the Farage agenda. The referendum campaign featured so many lies there is not room to list them here. Suffice to say, most were cooked up by Farage and relayed by the rightwing press, and the Brexiteers duly won by a narrow margin in 2016. Farage was definitely the driving force behind Brexit – so, yep, it is he who is to blame for the resulting 8% loss of GDP, the 18% loss of investment, the 4% loss of jobs, the 5% loss of productivity, the 25% loss of exports, the loss of £80 billion of revenue every year, oh and the 5% decrease in EU immigration replaced by the 1000% increase in non-EU immigration that these days Farage spends all his time blaming on others. And likewise, the lousy UK public services that he slags off every other party for causing can also be laid at his door because of those crippling financial losses – yes, those very public services he is now promising to transform only got so bad because of him! He has caused grievous damage to all of us in his beloved Britain – with lots more to come well into the future. Cheers Nige!
If Reform UK get their grubby hands on Wales, God help us. The English Councils Reform took control of two years ago are falling apart in the normal Reform chaos of broken promises, false expectations and congenital incompetence. Also in 2024 Farage at last became an MP, taking the Clacton constituency in Essex from the Tories, one of England’s most deprived places. Since then he rarely turns up at Westminster to justify his £98,000 annual salary (plus expenses). Instead he concentrates on his priorities: attention-grabbing gimmicks, odiously provocative shit-stirring, and the accumulation of wealth via all the other jobs that take precedence over being an MP – like the £400,000 salary he trousers for four hours a month working for a company called Direct Bullion promoting the idea that people should buy physical gold without any warning that gold prices can fluctuate, the £450,000 salary he mops up as a presenter for grotesque GB News, the £48,000 a year the Daily Telegraph pays him for ‘writing’ a piss-poor column and the £50,000 he gets annually as a commentator with nothing interesting to say for Sky News Australia. Add in all his crypto wheeling and dealing and Farage now has the highest income of all the 650 MPs in Westminster, as he assiduously follows the example set by Trump of monetising a public position for personal gain.
Meanwhile his Party has become a recycling skip for toxic ex-Tories. Anyone will do for Farage as the unvetted members he induced to join implode in scandal after scandal with hosts of election candidates being ditched as fast as they’re unveiled – usually because their extreme neo-Nazi, crypto-fascist and hate-crime racist backgrounds have inadvertently emerged. Oh what a surprise! So now Farage is reduced to admitting the likes of ex-Tory trash like Nadine Dorries, Nadhim Zahawi, Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick, to name just a few you might remember. And this is ‘reform’?!? Sounds more like regurgitation! If any of this lot stood in Wales as Tories they wouldn’t stand a chance; nothing’s changed, the people of Wales must see through this swindle. If in doubt just remember the last time these Reform scumbags infiltrated our Senedd: their leader Nathan Gill is currently doing 10 years in prison for being enlisted by Russian agents to spread the propaganda of Moscow and against Ukraine while in office. Farage’s cowardly and patently untrue explanation that his long-time associate Gill was a single “bad apple” should fool nobody. Fascist parties such as Reform always draw people sympathetic to tyrants like Putin and Trump, both men that Farage used to speak of admiringly until it became unpopular to do so (after fawning to Trump for years he recently pretended he hardly knew him after Trump slagged off the British Army and polls showed that most people in the UK loathe him). How slippery, unscrupulous Farage has got this far is scarcely credible. Next week Wales is on the front-line of the battle against fascism; this is a fight we must win, as our parents, grandparents and great grandparents did before us. REJECT REFORM!
APPENDIX: Voting advice on how to stop Reform UK in each of the 16 new constituencies (alphabetical order)
AFON OGWR RHONDDA: Labour are a busted flush, the Greens have no chance – VOTE PLAID CYMRU
BANGOR CONWY MÔN: To wipe out Reform in Plaid territory – VOTE PLAID CYMRU
BLAENAU GWENT CAERFFILI RHYMNI: Only Plaid can stop Reform – VOTE PLAID CYMRU
BRYCHEINIOG TAWE NEDD: Either the Greens or more probably the LibDems can see off Reform – VOTE LIBDEM
CAERDYDD FFYNNON TAF: Go Green, Labour’s record in Cardiff is appalling – VOTE GREEN
CAERDYDD PENARTH: There is a case for voting Green or Propel or Plaid – VOTE PLAID CYMRU
CASNEWYDD ISLWYN: Plaid may not have the heft to foil Reform, but it’s either them or Labour- VOTE PLAID CYMRU
CEREDIGION PENFRO: Other than Gwlad, who are standing only one candidate – VOTE PLAID CYMRU
CLWYD: Tactical voting can thwart Reform – VOTE PLAID CYMRU
FFLINT WRECSAM: Evicting Labour is the prize here – VOTE PLAID CYMRU
GWYNEDD MALDWYN: Without doubt – VOTE PLAID CYMRU
GWŶR ABERTAWE: Unfortunately Labour will probably win here – VOTE GREEN
PEN-Y-BONT BRO MORGANNWG: Plaid are fielding a strong team – VOTE PLAID CYMRU
PONTYPRIDD CYNON MERTHYR: Time for these Welsh heartlands to stand up to Reform – VOTE PLAID CYMRU
SIR FYNWY TORFAEN: One of Reform’s top targets – VOTE GREEN
SIR GAERFYRDDIN: No problem – VOTE PLAID CYMRU