TOM HARRIS: Danger of voting for Farage's cranks and crackpots
What gave the game away about Reform UK? Was it that one of their candidates at this election has suggested that instead of going to war with Germany in 1939, Britain should have reached an accommodation with Hitler?
Was it that one of their leading candidates in Scotland posted a hateful diatribe against the Royal Family, describing them as ‘benefit scroungers’?
Or was it the fact that Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage, has threatened to sue the private company responsible for vetting candidates?
It’s difficult to decide which is worse: that so many extremist, unsuitable candidates were approved, or that a private company, rather than the party itself, had to be given the job in the first place.
Mr Farage is rightly described as one of the most influential politicians of this century, having sparked and then sustained a national debate about Britain’s membership of the European Union, a debate that eventually led to the 2016 referendum and then to Brexit a few years later.
Any vote for Farage's Reform party risks handing a seat to the SNP
Now he has set his sights on another political prize: reforming, perhaps even replacing, the Conservatives after they’ve moved from government into opposition.
Despite the challenges imposed on any small party by our first-past-the-post electoral system, the coverage given to Reform has helped it capture the imagination and support of a sizeable portion of the electorate.
Its rise in popularity is bad news for Rishi Sunak as he seeks to hold together the traditional centre-Right coalition of opposition to Labour.
Scotland is not immune to Mr Farage’s charms.
Despite complacent claims that Scotland is an oasis of Left-wing progressivism when compared with the rest of the country, Reform’s predecessor party, Ukip, scored an unexpected success in the European Parliament elections in 2014, with David Coburn’s election as a Ukip MEP.
A ND in 2024, Scots once again are being invited to hop aboard Mr Farage’s populist bandwagon. Got a grievance? Reform will tell you whatever you want to hear if it will make you feel better!
The party’s General Election campaign was thrown into turmoil earlier this month with the revelation that Ian Gribbin, its candidate in Bexhill and Battle, said Britain should have ‘taken Hitler up on his offer of neutrality’.
The situation was only made worse after an official spokesman for Reform told the BBC that Mr Gribbin’s comments were ‘probably true’.
In 2022, as the late Queen and the nation celebrated her platinum jubilee, Jo Hart – who hopes to be the Reform MP for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East – blasted the monarchy.
In a foul-mouthed tirade on social media, the former nurse described the Royals as the country’s ‘single biggest benefit scroungers’, called for the monarchy to be scrapped and signed off with ‘F*** the Royals!’
Scotland will not return any Reform UK MPs to parliament on July 4. But for the time being at least, the party will be happy to make life more difficult for Conservative candidates.
However, the political stakes here are simply too high to consider indulging Mr Farage’s amateur army of activists.
The priority at this election is to ensure that the number of SNP MPs going back down to Westminster is as small as possible. And Reform is risking that aim.
Aberdeenshire North happens to be where the Conservatives are campaigning to return their current leader, Douglas Ross, as the MP.
The contest is already seen as being on a knife edge between the Tories and the SNP. But Reform’s campaign could affect the outcome in the Nationalists’ favour.
SNP candidates elsewhere in the country could benefit from a similar splitting of the anti-Nationalist vote. Which would be a dreadful result for Scotland.
A vote for Reform isn’t just a wasted vote; it’s not just a vote that could skewer a local result and allow the separatists to retain an undeserved foothold in public life.
I T is a vote for a shower of people who are wholly unsuited to represent Scots in parliament. It is all very well to react against the modern woke fashion that says no one should ever be offended by anything anyone says.
It is an altogether different thing to believe that people who are entirely out of touch with the vast majority of our citizens, who are utterly ignorant of Britain’s proud history of fighting fascism abroad, who think nothing of smearing the King and the Royal Family, should be elected to the House of Commons, from where they can spread their ignorance and hatred to a wider audience.
The rise of Reform is partly down to the failure of the mainstream parties to address adequately the issues of immigration and the rise of racial and trans ideology.
But those failures must not lead us into making a mistake that we will be unable to fix for another four years.
