Richard Tice is on a mission. Leaders of the Reform Party – effectively a new name for the Brexit Party – are launching a quest to crush the Conservatives in such a way that they “never have a majority government again”. Or, at least, he has announced that he is.
At a press conference in London, the multi-millionaire property developer said Britain was “broken” by 12 years of Tory rule and believed his party held “brave and bold” solutions. So, how to get it?
First things first, win some seats in parliament. Despite occasional rumors of a rescue from extreme Tory Brexiters, the party’s current MP numbers currently remain at zero. Tice aims to change this by fielding Reform candidates in every constituency in England, Scotland and Wales at the next election, which should be held by January 2025.
Tice is ruling out any deal with the Tories, claiming his scars are still raw from the Brexit Party’s decision not to run candidates against Boris Johnson’s ‘Get Brexit Done’ Conservatives in the 2019 election. Johnson won in a landslide and suddenly Tice and Nigel Farage lost the gains they had made in the chaotic days of Theresa May. It has taken them so far – aided by the ouster of Johnson and born-again Brexiteer Liz Truss – to creep back into the polls.
These are the marks of Tice. But happily, if reforms were in place in government, those scars would be spotted and fixed by an NHS saved from a new crisis.
The party pledges to reduce NHS waiting times to zero within its first two years through greater use of private healthcare at a cost of a cool £30bn, proving the somewhat dubious hot new take on levelisation. Other reform policies included raising the starting rate of income tax to £20,000, to be paid by reducing government waste, and surprisingly cracking down on legal and illegal immigration.
They claim that all this can be paid for by the Bank of England stopping the payment of interest to commercial banks on reserves through its quantitative easing program as well as other fiscal steps.
Reform is currently polling at 7%, a figure that puts them neck-and-neck with the Greens and Liberal Democrats and four percentage points above where they sat just three months ago. Tice may believe they are the “party with momentum” (the amount of momentum, rather than a left-wing political group), but this is still no easy feat with a David and Goliath-style act – if David were less heroic and made more apt use of metaphors. Perhaps Tice knows something we don’t, which is a scary thought in itself.
The problem for Tice and his semi-alienated political partner Farage is that even at 7%, they are unlikely to win seats – for one thing, many long-time Conservative voters may currently be enticed by Reform. , likely to return to the Tories at the time of the general election to stall Labor or prevent a Starmer landslide; For another, so-called ‘Brexit traitors’ have no Conservative seats to target from the right (unless they want to target Rishi Sunak himself, who has a 27,210 majority in Richmond and is, ultimately, Brexiteer. ).
They need two things to be influential: 10+ seats in Westminster and far more important, a hung parliament (which can lead to PR, and even more influence for smaller parties). A strategy that seeks to take votes from a party currently 20-plus percentage points behind in the polls, ensuring them a heavy defeat and a substantial Labor majority, looks unlikely to achieve either of those goals. Is.