Under scrutiny, the wheels are coming off Reform

Editorial: As Nigel Farage refuses to backtrack on his fanciful claim that the West provoked Putin to invade Ukraine, it has become clear that the party he leads – from its bizarre policies and unattainable spending plans to the extreme views of certain candidates – cannot bear very much reality

Nigel Farage’s party is no longer banging on about the EU – it is a bin for protest votes (Getty)

According to the Reform UK website, its candidate for Bournemouth West, Ben Aston, has previously been active in grassroots campaigning for Brexit; believes the state is “an inefficient, coercive, necessary evil”; and is a competitive cyclist. He also appears to be someone whose views would ordinarily disqualify him from being a candidate for any decent political party.

As has been reported, Mr Aston has made comments on social media that could fairly be described as racist: he has suggested that Jews are responsible for Muslim migration to the UK, and accused the government of intentionally “injecting” Britain with African men.

In a now deleted post discovered by the media, Mr Aston wrote: “Many of the powerful groups agitating for the mass import into England of Muslims from the Third World are Jewish.”

Mr Aston is entitled to his views, obnoxious as they are, and he has a right to express them, but Reform UK isn’t obliged to put this man forward to represent the people of Bournemouth. It could disown him, even if his name can’t be removed from the ballot paper. It could apologise and condemn his remarks. As David Baddiel points out, Mr Aston’s comments appear to be a typical manifestation of a conspiracy theory that holds that Jews are controlling immigration and “promoting multiculturalism in order to weaken the Aryan white races”, or, at least, something like that. Perhaps Reform UK thinks that sort of thing goes down well in Dorset?

Reform should condemn Mr Aston’s statement – but it has done no such thing. Indeed, these antisemitic remarks appear to have been greeted with a metaphorical shrug and a smirk by the party chair, Richard Tice. Regarded in some quarters as the acceptable face of Farageism, the supposedly urbane Mr Tice posted on social media: “An apology. One of our candidates farted yesterday. The ever-windy Daily Mail and Tory party want him to resign. We will not be launching an investigation.”

In fact, Reform’s previous candidate in Bournemouth West was deselected only last month, after he was accused of sharing online content posted by the far-right group Britain First. To lose one prospective parliamentary candidate may be regarded, perhaps, as a misfortune; to lose a second looks like carelessness.

Nigel Farage, reinstalled as Reform leader and no stranger to extremists himself, has so far dismissed complaints about his would-be parliamentarians, blaming a failure of the vetting process and suggesting that, in any case, these candidates represent a minority of bad actors, as could exist in any organisation.

Yet there have been far more such cases among the Farageists than in other parties, with more than a dozen sacked after their offensive and racist comments were revealed – and Reform seems to set a high bar for taking action. After all, the co-deputy chair of the party, Ben Habib, recently admitted on GB News that, in extreme circumstances, he would allow refugees to drown rather than bring them to the UK for processing.

Mr Habib is still standing, in all senses, in Wellingborough. In the unspeakable nightmare of a Reform UK cabinet, he might be the home secretary. A sobering thought. David Cameron’s memorable words about Ukip, from a decade ago, spring readily to mind: “A bunch of fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists.”

This general election is a novelty for Mr Farage and his colleagues because, unlike those of his previous vehicles, Ukip and the Brexit Party, the policies of Reform are attracting a great deal of scrutiny. Reform UK is still a bin for protest votes, but it is no longer a one-issue party banging on about the EU. In those days, Mr Farage and his ilk had the luxury of selling Brexit as a hypothetical paradise; now, we understand its grim reality.

With Brexit “done”, Reform has moved on to a wider agenda – and frankly, it makes even less sense. The more weighty the examination of Reform UK’s self-styled “contract” with voters (don’t call it a manifesto), the more it buckles. As with its bizarre candidates, so with its bizarre policies. The wheels are coming off Reform.

Even on migration, the party’s central obsession, they subside into myth and magical thinking. It wants net-zero migration, but only for “non-essential” migration. But what if the labour market and the universities really do need hundreds of thousands of workers and students in order to stay in business? Mr Farage has got the much-vaunted “Australian-style, points-based visa system” he demanded, but now – rather like Brexit, in fact – it’s not good enough, because if these ideas had ever been good enough, Mr Farage would have nothing to whinge about.

Reform UK spokespeople cheerfully declare that they will tow small boats back to France, either unaware that the British can’t unilaterally violate French sovereign waters, or subscribing to the approach of Mr Tice, who suggests: “If we have to have a row with the French, let’s have a major row with the French, and sort this out and stop people dying, and stop the magnet effect through France.” Quite apart from making the British public think he wants to revive the Napoleonic wars, Mr Tice is making little sense these days, perhaps driven mad by the impracticality of his policies.

It is no surprise, either, that the analysts at the Institute for Fiscal Studies find Reform’s radical economic policy so fanciful, they judge that it “poisons” rational debate. The NHS is certainly not safe in the hands of Mr Farage; neither, given his taste for appeasing Vladimir Putin, is the security of the nation. He may wear union jack socks, and deride Rishi Sunak for not understanding “our” culture, but his foreign policy is far from patriotic.

And yet, according to the latest opinion poll, conducted after Mr Farage’s outrageous claim that the West provoked Mr Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Reform remains one point ahead of the Conservatives.

We hear much from Reform UK about Britain being broken – but, predictably, nothing at all about Mr Farage’s role in breaking it. His deranged campaign to take the UK out of the European Union has done more continuing, long-term damage to the economy than anything else. His malign influence, gleefully picked up and exploited by Boris Johnson, has turned the Conservatives from a broad-based party of government into an incompetent, talentless sect. It is the Tories’ own fault that they allowed Mr Farage to damage them; and now he is coming to finish the job. It is a miserable state of affairs.