Not the cavalry rescue, after all
PN
In which our Pete expresses some concern that Nigel may not be the Knight on the white charger, after all. However, Pete is maybe overlooking the dawning terror that five years of Labour could wreck the lives and communities of this nation, meaning that a lesser evil would be to give Nigel an opportunity to start the complete political Revolution that many believe is now the only way out of the uniparty mess. Everyone, be careful what you wish for... but make sure he takes the wote pledge - and agrees to do what the electorate want done. This opinion snapshot from James Melville's twitter account
"... My initial thinking was that Reform could be the basis of an insurgent movement, but it would require an intellectual foundation and a commitment to building policies and a grassroots organisation.
That was unlikely before the return of Farage (but it was worth a try), but it's absolutely impossible now.
You could give Reform the best policies in the world, but slapdash Farage wouldn't bother to learn them and would rewrite them or ditch them on the fly if he found himself in a tight spot. He's an amateur to the core. Always has been. So Reform is now going to soak up a lot of energy, money and exposure to no useful effect, will have its day in the limelight, but will gradually disintegrate and then it joins Ukip on the scrapheap of failed political parties. That then made me think that entryism, to try and build something from the wreckage of the Tory party is our best bet.
Looking at the constituent parts and the way the liberal wets are stitching it up to prevent an entryist takeover, it looks like an impossible mountain to climb, but only if you're thinking in the short term. I think the wets have to crash and burn a second time (on their own terms), in circumstances where they don't get to blame the right of the party. As such, the preparatory work begins now, in anticipation of the Tories losing in 2029.
This would have been easier without Reform in the picture, but now efforts are going to be split between conservative revivalists and those who think Reform is going somewhere. As such, I don't think the right is getting anywhere near power for the next fifteen years unless Labour completely implodes, but if that happens, the right still won't have resolved its internal conflicts, and is likely to go suffer the same factionalism.
In light of that, I'm starting to think we ain't voting our way out of this mess, but I will plod on in the hope that my limited efforts might pay off. I now think that instead of pratting about with political parties we now have to build flanking organisations that bridge the two parties of the right, providing the intellectual basis for policy and activism.
With any luck, by 2034, Farage will be bowing out due to age/ill health, and the decks are clear for something else. For this, we're going to need younger, sharper leadership. On that score, I'm quietly confident something will show up. Greatness seems to skip a generation so Gen Xers are not going to provide that leadership, but by then, a lot of the zoomers will be coming of age politically, and they won't suffer from the same boomer liberalism as they grew up in a different moral universe to the post-war boomers/gen X.