Reform needs Zia Yusuf

New Statesman​

18 hours ago

After the turmoil created by the resignation of Zia Yusuf as chairman of Reform UK, and then his return 48 hours later in a new role, the risibly titled 'leader of the DOGE unit', Nigel Farage's anti-system party started the week determined to regain control. While Yusuf was interviewed in the coveted 8.10am slot on the BBC's Today programme on 9 June, Farage was in Wales. There he delivered a speech, fusing right and left populism, aimed at disaffected Labour voters. He took credit for Labour's U-turn on restoring the winter fuel allowance to most pensioners, accused Keir Starmer of being in a 'blind panic' about Reform (he had previously boasted that he was living rent free in the prime minister's head), said he would like to see the return of coal mines to Wales and pledged to reopen the Port Talbot steel blast furnaces. All in a morning's work.
As the so-called Conservative and Unionist party withers in Scotland and Wales, Reform, dismissed as an English nationalist party, is supplanting it; without any significant infrastructure or organisation in Scotland, Reform improbably won 26 per cent of the vote in the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election last week, which Labour took from the SNP. John Swinney, the SNP leader, had declared before the vote that Labour could not win. Don't follow his racing tips.
Support for Labour has collapsed in Wales, and, according to the latest YouGov poll, Reform is second behind Plaid Cymru in the contest for next year's Senedd elections. The mood in the old industrial heartlands of Wales is no different from the red wall areas of England: one of mass disaffection.
Starmer's advisers believe the next general election will be a straight contest between Labour and Reform and it's one they think they can win, not least because they expect progressives, as well as crypto Liberal Democrats, to fall into line when confronted by the prospect of a Farage premiership. That might turn out to be another progressive delusion.
The greater challenge for Farage, as framed by Dominic Cummings, who caricatures Reform as being little more than 'Nigel Farage and an iPhone', is this: can the party attract elite talent?
They were once antagonists, but Cummings is now one of the most astute analysts of Farageism. 'Does he want to find people to be chancellor etc who are better than the old parties?' Cummings wrote in a long Substack post, prefaced by the obligatory blizzard of quotations from Bismarck, Churchill, Nietzsche, Mao, Thucydides and James Marriott. 'Can he exploit the surging energy for new politics among the young, can he hoist a sail and let that force blow him along to greater victories over his enemies? Or does he blow the chance and let that energy be captured by others?'
When I spent a day with Farage on the Essex coast last summer as he campaigned in the general election, he told me, as I wrote at the time, that he believed he had done more than any other politician to defeat the far right in Britain. 'If you think I'm bad enough, imagine what might come after me,' he said. 'But while I'm here that person will not emerge.'
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Farge is adept at simultaneously deflecting and attracting the nativist right, which is why his party is split. Rupert Lowe, a boorish Monday Club-style reactionary now sitting as an independent in the Commons having been banished from Reform, represented a hardline faction that is obsessed with Islam. That faction is closer, in spirit and intent, than Farage can tolerate to European far-right parties such as the Sweden Democrats and the Afd in Germany.
I was reporting from a Reform rally in Quendon, near Saffron Walden, in Essex, in February, when Lowe demanded the deportation of rape gangs 'and members of their families'. He later posted on Facebook that he had been 'instructed by Farage's team, sanctioned by him, to remove a call to deport all complicit foreign national family members'. He claimed he was being censored. Shortly afterwards, he was out, having also clashed with Yusuf.
Farage wants to position Reform as a mainstream centre-right alternative to the Conservatives, but he also wants 'to move the needle' on what counts as acceptable political discourse. Angela Jenkyns, the new Reform mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, said something similar when I asked her about her recent comments about putting asylum seekers in tents.
'I was talking about illegal migrants, not asylum seekers,' she told me while conceding that some of her statements were deliberately outrageous. 'You've misquoted me there. But it should be like in France, a contained area [of tents] – look at the stats, look at the people coming through. The majority are males, economic migrants.… It's about fairness for the British people. I'd never say that about asylum seekers. The tent thing was intended to be provocative to make the public realise that people have had enough. People should not be put up in hotels when British people are struggling to pay their taxes. I know I'm a glutton for my own punishment, but the thing is, I always know what I'm saying.'
Sarah Pochin also knew what she was saying when she asked her question in the Commons about banning the burqa. Yusuf, who has endured repugnant racial abuse online, was correct to call the question 'dumb', on multiple levels. Why prioritise such an issue with your first question as an MP when it was not even party policy? The answer is that Pochin, who won the Runcorn and Helsby by-election, was cynically, opportunistically (choose the most appropriate adverb) 'laying down a marker' as one her allies put it to me. This is who she is and what she wants.
In his BBC interview with Yusuf, who is a British Muslim of Sri Lankan heritage, Nick Robinson suggested that he provided 'cover' for Farage. The implication was that he was a useful idiot. That is one view. Another is that as a Goldman Sachs alumnus who earned as much as £30 million from the sale of a business, and has since demonstrated his competence by professionalising the party, Zia Yusuf has the kind of experience Reform must attract if is to become anything more than an anti-system protest movement. That was the real reason Farage was desperate not to lose him.
[See more: Will Labour's winter fuel U-turn work?]
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