Hartlepool councillor Aaron Roy has defected to Reform UK from the Labour party. Roy migrated to the UK only a decade ago from Kerala, India and remains an Indian citizen. He's written a self-aggrandizing profile of his own life achievements. Laden with woke buzzwords, it reads like the LinkedIn post of a DEI coordinator. He writes that he is "fuelled by a deep belief in equity". He complains of seeing "gaps in representation — especially among ethnic minorities". Of his own election, he said:
"In 2024 I became Hartlepool’s first-ever Non-White BAME councillor. That election wasn’t just personal—it was a signal of progress and possibility for the wider community."
He founded a BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) football club and a Lottery-funded Kabaddi team (Kabaddi is a sport popular in South Asia). People start local sports teams all the time, but Roy sees this as a pretty big deal:
"I don’t just advocate for representation; I build the structures and platforms that make it sustainable and transformative...
What I bring to Hartlepool and the Northeast is more than a new sport—it’s a new game plan: one where diversity is celebrated."
On his own website, his "focus areas" list "Equality & Inclusion". He is the BAME Officer for Hartlepool Borough and is "committed to promoting diversity".
Meanwhile, right-wing candidates continue to resign from the party due to a lack of party support.
For all their faults, Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick are at least willing to call out the failures of the Conservative Party. Not so for Jacob Rees-Mogg, the man who provided a reassuring traditional face to a government that ushered in destructive revolutionary change. The intellectually feeble Rees-Mogg remains trapped in the personality cult of Boris Johnson. He has, like Nadine Dorries, called for Boris and the Reform party to unite ahead of the next election. He told The Sun newspaper:
"I think getting rid of Boris was a catastrophic mistake... Do you remember in the 2019 campaign when Boris got in a JCB and bashed through a wall? It would be one of those moments. The wall would not stand much of a chance against the combined Farage-Johnson attack. I want to unite the Right. That’s what I’m working towards. I want the Conservative Party and Reform to come together."
Mogg doesn't dispute the immigration figures. When Farage told Rees-Mogg "the Conservative Party allowed more people to settle in this country in 2022 and 2023 than came from 1066 to 2010" Mogg responds "I know". And yet Mogg refers to Boris Johnson as "the right-wing of the Conservative party". If the liberalism of Boris is the "right-wing" of the party, why would any true conservative stay in the party? The whole function of Jacob Rees-Mogg is to lead people down the garden path, to sure up support among actual conseratives for a party that is dominated by hyper-liberal MPs.
Yet even Rees-Mogg, despite being happy to be a cheerleader for the worst Prime Minister in British history, has concerns about Farage. He told the New Culture Forum podcast:
"My worry is what happens if Nigel wins the next election and then gets absorbed by the blob on day one, of which there is of course a risk. The latest economic policy from Reform indicates that the risk is much greater than I had previously thought."
One blob creature worries that another blob creature might possibly become a blob creature. Doesn't this guy have enough money to take early retirement?
The most common talking-point used against Restore Britain is the idea that the party is splitting the right-wing vote. By reducing the chances of Reform UK winning the next election, Rupert Lowe risks ushering in another Labour government. Here's why that argument doesn't work with me.
I live in the constituency of Edmonton and Winchmore Hill. When people here voted for Reform in the last general election, they assumed they were voting against woke excess. Finally, so many of us thought, we could protest against a politically correct culture that is entirely out-of-hand, and vote for a party that puts the British national interest first. But who was the Reform candidate? Neville Watson, a man that supports economic reparations for slavery. We ended up with a Labour MP, Kate Osamor. She's certainly not a good MP, but she has not publicly made any statements about reparations, and is arguably no worse than the Reform candidate would have been. We need to ask how a candidate like Neville Watson was ever selected. Reform UK performs extreme vetting to filter out right-wing candidates, but takes no such measures to keep out woke liberals.
In the Rochdale by-election in 2024, the Reform candidate was Simon Danczuk. Danczuk had been the Labour party MP for Rochdale until 2017. Is that the anti-establishment "radical change" Reform claims to represent? Is it an accomplishment to keep Labour out only by voting in an ex-Labour MP?
Nigel Farage is a good campaigner, but he won't be a good Prime Minister. He genuinely believed in Brexit, but he doesn't appear to believe in much else. In 2010, as the leader of UKIP, Farage described his own party's manifesto as "drivel". A UKIP figure at the time described Farage as "someone who isn't bothered, isn't serious, is a bit of a joker". We've already had one clownish Prime Minister who reached power through charisma alone, and we saw how that turned out. In parliament, Rupert Lowe has submitted 2,204 written questions. Nigel Farage has submitted 20. Farage is a lazy MP, and he'll be a lazy PM.
In the same way that the Tory sleaze of the John Major years directly led to 13 years of New Labour dominance, if the Reform party mismanage their time in office, the result will be catastrophic. Reform will likely serve one single term, achieve almost nothing useful, and be followed by a Green/Labour victory. Farage will likely succumb to business pressure to keep legal immigration high. Farage is desperate for mainstream acceptance and under the weight of negative headlines in the left-wing press, he will largely abandon mass deportations of illegal migrants. The shattered promises on immigration will lead to right-wing voters further losing trust in the political process and staying home at further elections. If Reform prove to be inept and chaotic in power, as I predict they will be, it will totally undermine right-wing chances for a generation. From a long-term perspective, a Reform victory could be far worst possible outcome.
This is not "purity spiralling". Farage has stated that deportations are an "impossibility". David Bull has described immigration is "the lifeblood of this country". The only reason they've changed their rhetoric now is to win back voters they've lost to Restore Britain.
The worry about splitting the vote is a conversation to have in three years time. My hope is that Reform will wither away and cease to exist, making way for the legitimate right-wing party. There is a chance that won't happen. When the election is approaching, an electoral pact could be discussed. If there are some decent Reform candidates, Restore Britain could choose not to run in those constituencies. However, if Reform picks candidates like Nadhim Zahawi, Restore Britain absolutely must stand against them and crush them, regardless of the consequences.
I'm not voting for the least-worst option anymore.
Munira Mirza served as Director of the Number 10 Policy Unit under Prime Minister Boris Johnson from 2019 until 2022. In the Spectator's Quite Right podcast, she revealed:
"Unfortunately I had not banked on how much parts of the Conservative party really liked those policies. And really wanted to back them. We had lots of MPs campaigning for self-id... Quite a lot of MPs trotting into my office and saying its very important we do this. It's the most important issue that the Conservative party can deal with."
It's worth dwelling on what self-id actually means. Legally changing gender is already an alarmingly simple process in the UK. There is no legal requirement to have sex-reassignment surgery. Self-id would take this further: any man, regardless of whether they have a full-grown beard, would be able to legally change gender, with no requirements whatsoever. They wouldn't need to prove they have gender dysphoria. They wouldn't need to wear make-up or female clothing or a wig. There are no medical or social prerequisites.
Labour Party ex-councillor Clive Furness has been selected as the Reform's candidate for mayor of Newham. He told a press conference:
"I am sympathetic towards refugees... I delight in the different colours of people, different cuisines, the different clothing... that is very positive."
"I fear that we will see a rise of a really worrying, dangerous form of extreme right ethno-nationalism. And I think we’re beginning over the last couple of weeks already to see some specimens of it. Nobody, nobody over the last quarter of a century has done more to defeat the genuine, intolerant, abhorrent, extreme, far-right than me. We did it with the British National Party and we’ll do it with whoever else follows."
While Farage doesn't name them directly, his target is clear: the thousands of former Reform voters and defectors now backing Rupert Lowe and his political party Restore Britain, a party that Reform's London Mayoral candidate Laila Cunningham absurdly labelled 'neo-nazi'.
Rupert Lowe remains popular in Great Yarmouth, the constituency that elected him as a Reform MP. If Lowe and his supporters are the “extreme right” Farage now claims to be confronting, then he is not attacking fringe radicals. He is attacking the very voters who built Reform UK in the first place.
With so many defectors to Restore Britain coming from Reform UK, there's an obvious question: if Farage truly believes these individuals are extremists, why was he content to have them in his party? He knew Rupert Lowe for decades. He personally selected him as a candidate in a constituency Reform expected to win.
This is not the first time that Farage has demonised his own supporters. A great many Reform members and voters remain unhappy about the elevation of Zia Yusuf. At a Reform UK press conference in 2025, Farage condemned the “online abuse and frankly outright overt racism” that was supposedly being directed at Yusuf:
"Had it been shown towards any other member of the ethnic minorities from the Labour and Conservative parties, every one of you in the journalistic arena in this room would have been in uproar. It would have been a major national story. Because its happening to us, no one seems to really care."
The overwhelming majority of the criticism aimed at Zia Yusuf came from within the Reform party, not outside of it. Farage was chastising the media for not calling his own supporters racist.
Nigel and Reform are themselves primary targets of Hope Not Hate, an organisation that has branded Farage a racist for years, yet Farage is happy to use the same rhetoric in a desperate and cynical attempt to discredit his political competition.
