An early Election looks increasingly likely. But EVERYTHING remains up in the air and the more things change the more they stay the same…

Politically speaking, Friday (5th September) was quite the day in the U.K.

With what felt like a conveyor belt of macro and micro stories kicking off first with the anticipated and then confirmed resignation of Angela Rayner; Nigel Farage bringing his conference speech forward (to try and capitalise); The Format and flavour of the Reform Conference itself; and then Keir Starmer’s second (and far more substantial) reshuffle of the week certainly left the political pundits with a weekend to ponder which story will have really stuck most in people’s minds.

Perhaps the speed of both Farage’s and Starmer’s reactions are telling in the sense of just how important they both now feel it to be that they be seen to be out front on the news pages and airwaves. Even if Starmer and his Party almost certainly now know that the narrative is no longer theirs to control, and despite having proven himself to be quite canny politically, when real power was never at stake, Farage is now taking for granted that even a clown show will get taken seriously when he’s the obvious king in waiting.

What is striking to anyone looking at the theatrics of both Labour and Reform yesterday, as well as the attempts by what’s left of the quickly disintegrating Conservative Party to sound relevant and be heard, is there is a distinct vein of commonality that goes through all their actions just the same. That they all remain obsessed with how everything sounds and how everything looks – to the point, in Reforms case, of even being prepared to make it look and sound like they’ve already won.

As one who can recall the run up to the 1992 General Election, Reform’s approach to their Birmingham Conference this weekend sounds very reminiscent echos of Labour’s Rally held in Sheffield, about a week before, when it was very clear to all watching that Kinnock’s party took it as read that the election was already in the bag.

The Spitting Image Election Night Special nailed it completely. With one sketch focusing on the Rally being akin to something like the presidential campaigns coming out of the USA, and then a rather prescient sketch with Neil Kinnock sat on a tree branch with Roy Hattersley asking him what he was doing, only to be told that winning this election would be as easy as falling off a log – at which point Kinnock then fell and his legs tied, leaving him dangling.

That said however, the question this time isn’t about whether Reform can win.

Right now, and I mean as we look at all this today in early September 2025, it really does look like Reform can win and will win, when the next General Election is called.

But if Reform does win the next General Election, what can we really expect and what happens next?

It’s important to recognise that one key reason ALL of the political parties we have today are so obsessed with media time, being seen and being heard online, and running the narratives that are sticking in peoples minds, is because this vector that basically contains little more than the distraction of noise, does indeed reflect how they all expect people to behave and in turn to think – not looking beyond the messaging that will be obvious and therefore taken as read at immediate glance. With the overall impact of their efforts seeming to be more geared towards getting away with shallower consideration the whole time.

For all the glitter and spotlights pumping their way onto our phones from the midlands yesterday, the phrase ‘you can’t polish a turd, but you can roll it in glitter’ came very much to mind. Not because of anything or anything we could hear or see (no matter how many ex-conservative MPs and Councillors have no declared that our saviours from what they were part of causing will be their version of Reform). But because the substance of the policies we are hearing about and where it’s clear Farage’s objectives and approach lie, aren’t suggesting anything other than more problems ahead:

  1. because the motives behind them and the other parties are pretty much the same and
  2. because just like something out of the Trump playbook, where Trump appears to be trying to return the world to what he sees as US hero worship and subservience based on his reading of the dynamics of free-world politics having been around the time of Breton Woods 1944, Reform have this idea that the same fundamentals are ok for the UK and you just need to bully your way through removing everything that has been added in the past 80 years, that will then keep the public quiet or which simply doesn’t work for Farage and his vision.

In case you were wondering, these are also resets in both Trumps and Reforms case – with both resets not being about changing anything for the better, nor anything quite like the ‘Great Reset’ of the WEF; just turning back the clock (and thereby giving the corpse of a system that’s running only on latent momentum the chance to hurt even more normal people and keep them in the limelight until the whole thing finally runs out of time)

The biggest tragedy and with it the problem going forward for all of us, is that Reform could be getting everything right AND putting together a government in waiting that was prepared and able to deal with what really needs to be done. Rather than coming up with what are intended to sound like very clever ideas, such as the UKs very own DOGE and bringing in people from outside politics, just to move the chess pieces around the board so that ultimately it will all just resemble the same shit show with all the wrong things happening just as it is right now.

We should be under no illusion that where things stand today – even with all of the ministerial changes that have now taken place, Labour have created for Reform, what is pretty much an open goal, that this new home and hotbed of restless quasi-Tories will be only too willing to fill with new (and returning) MPs who will very quickly realise, post-election, that saying and doing are two very different things. And that no matter what talents Farage and Reform HQ try to buy in, the only way to change anything will be by changing it all.

We don’t have any politicians big enough to take on the job at hand

The quality of our politicians today is generally poor, right across the political spectrum. But with Reform still recruiting in pretty much the same way that UKIP and the Brexit Party did before, it would be fair to anticipate that there will be a lot of anger – and understandably so – from all those who have rushed to the Reform banner and put themselves forward as candidates, expecting everything they have been promised, to be delivered overnight, just as soon as they are through Westminster’s doors. Quickly finding that instead, their expectations could take decades to deliver – if indeed it will be possible with the intended approach, to ever deliver them at all.

Predictions about the timings of General Elections may be sensible to avoid. Not because it’s impossible to see where things are going at any moment in time; but because even the smallest factor can and probably will have the most profound implications and change the direction of everything at any stage. Meaning the longer the time between now and then, the chances are that what looks certain today could easily be left well and truly behind.

That said, with Labour having outed themselves for not being in any way representative of the people who elected them last year, and instead having all sorts of different agendas they are following, that probably just include their affiliation with the Fabians and WEF – but will never be about doing what’s right for me and you, there’s every chance that this government will collapse and a general election will be called much sooner than 2027 – which Reform have been talking about in the past 24 hours.

However, with Reform changing nothing they are doing now and continuing to approach the run-in towards government, either as a majority or lead partner, and as they openly intend right now, we should not be in any way surprised if their new government doesn’t then itself collapse within 12-18 months. When it will become resoundingly clear, even to them, that the Councils they have run since the Local Elections in May weren’t just a plaything or game.

Indeed, since May, Reform have given us all a very clear warning about what will happen under a Farage premiership. Where the strategy isn’t any more about the people than what we have now.

What awaits us, without change, will be the collapse of everything, as jobs for real leaders are filled to breaking point with people who may have taken them with good intentions, but don’t have the foggiest idea what they hell is expected of them or what they are going to do.

Yes, Reform are looking good. But the Tories could out reform Reform, IF they can remember what being conservative really is

Reform’s performance in the Local and Helsby and Runcorn by Elections really does look good.

Anyone looking on can immediately see why so many of the political pundits and members of the opinionati are now backing Reform for a similarly groundbreaking General Election result in 2029.

The uncomfortable truth that many supporters will fail to recognise is the only reason that Reform could achieve a seismic turnaround of the kind that would instantaneously drop Nigel Farage into No.10, would be that when compared to all the others, Reform could still be the only real unknown quantity, and therefore different enough to hoover up the majority of a very fatigued Electorates votes.

Unfortunately for the Electorate, without a significant change in their direction, voting Reform into power at the next General Election would once again be voting without due regard for the Law of Unintended Consequences. Just as it was last July when those who did vote put Labour into Government.

Nonetheless, it could and may well happen.

The real depth and direction of Reform are being hidden by Britain’s Political Perfect Storm

It won’t matter what problems the new Reform Administrations in Local Government create, being directed from Reform HQ, as if everything must now be run and controlled from the very top.

The unavoidable disintegration of the UK public sector that is already well underway will almost certainly hide whatever Reform Councils do from public scrutiny and view.

Because Labour, the Tories and Lib Dem Councils are going to struggle in this climate either not to go bankrupt or find other ways to avoid royally stuffing things up.

Reform aren’t reforming anything other than the public discourse over the issues that the majority of people can see and associate with the effects of the problems that are effecting society.

No matter how far detached those perspectives might be focused from the real cause.

Farage’s approach might at best be viewed as becoming increasingly aligned with the establishment and the global thinking that sits behind so many of the problems and the direction of travel that even this Labour government has.

The irony of this should not be lost, that whilst the parts of the political right that are falling in behind Reform either believe Brexit didn’t happen or that under a Reform government Brexiteers will get to finish the job, the reality is that everything that drove the EU project that Farage’s UKIP and Brexit Party so vocally championed against, also had globalism and the centralised global political model at its heart.

Once it becomes clear that a UK version of the Trumpian DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) has no basis within the realities that underpin how our current dysfunctional public sector works, there may well be a moment when those Reformers with elected roles, who are taking their responsibilities to local electors seriously, will realise that there are many things that can still be done. Whilst there are many others that simply cannot.

At some point, the rather large penny must drop, that there is a very careful and considered game to be played that without otherwise torching the entire system and structure of government delivery and bringing it all to a halt, will require the buy-in of key Government officers, nonetheless.

To those watching closely, Farage has already shown his hand.

Whilst it might not be prudent to visit the bookies and begin trying to get odds just yet, as far as the next General Election goes, whenever that actually will be, the perfect storm that has engulfed British politics may well deliver a Reform win.

But it will be the U.K. and our people, rather than whatever is left of the political opposition, that will lose in that Election if Reform have ‘won’ under their current modus operandi and plans.

A Zero-Sum Game?

A rather interesting perspective of the seemingly unassailable position that Reform now has, is that as far as the future goes for the Tories, they currently face a zero-sum game. One that applies whether they capitulate to Reform or carry on as they have done before. As they clearly are continuing to do so, now.

Yes, there remains truth in the suggestion that Reform might never govern without the cooperation or collaboration of today’s Tories in some way.

However, Farage is unlikely to ever accept anything less than remaining in control. And as head of any collaboration and apparent PM in waiting, the real difficulties will begin for us all just as soon as the leadership has a lucid post-victory moment. Probably not unlike like Starmer et al did on the 5th of July last year, when those who had arrived in No.10 realised that unless they were big enough to risk precipitating an immediate collapse of the entire system, pretty much everything would still need to go on as before, and that even though they were in government, they themselves would be required simply to do as they are told.

Picture it now; a coalition that includes what is left of the Conservative Party, all subservient to a government of the kind that will almost certainly be filled with very angry activists. Ideologues who will have been promised much from outside of power, who took it all at face value; all without any of the understanding of how government really works. People who will quickly be looking for someone else to blame.

Now may be the Tories only available Watershed Moment

To say that the choice the Tories have sits between change immediately or die, might sound extreme. But it is a genuine reflection on where the future of this once revered political machine now lies.

The way the Tories would now out reform Reform, would be to reject and distance themselves from the establishment, globalist and accepted positions on just about everything. And not just say, but put everything about the UK and our people, first.

The choice to change cannot mean anything other than putting people and our communities back at the very heart of everything they do.

The Conservatives must return to the basic principles of conservatism and remember what it is to lead and deliver for others, selflessly, and with the key motivation to conserve.

The caveat would be that the Conservatives will also be required to restore and return a model of U.K. governance and related infrastructure to us that can recapture the sense of cultural belonging and shared feeling that our system is fair, balanced and just.

The point being missed across all of British politics today, is that by engaging the public correctly and re enfranchising people and communities appropriately and restoring real trust, people would quickly focus on a very different model of political engagement.

They would not need the myths, false promises and clever narratives to explain away the pain that disenfranchisement has caused for so many before.

Can the Tories actually change, rather than just talk it up?

Whilst being able to stand up and say ‘We have for too long got this all wrong’ is a very important part of getting any credibility back, it will be the actions of Today’s Conservative Party that count.

The rump of what’s left of the Conservative Party must stop pretending that with the level of uncertainty in the world as we have now, they actually have 4 years to try out and give wasted chances to new leaders who still believe that all the Tories need do to remain relevant, is wait until the political merry-go-round does its thing and it’s ‘their turn’ to return to power, once again.

No politician who is a genuine public servant has time to waste. And as it would be correct to say to any would-be political leaders who are ready and willing to do the right thing by the people who put them there, the time to change and begin working as they always should have, is now.

Our Communities are the only place that a workable political solution can begin

Any Political Solution to the crisis we are in must develop and grow from our communities and grassroots; NOT from any existing Party that still wants to rule everyone Top-Down

One of the key problems with UK Politics today is that it operates as almost the mirror image of wider culture, where most people fall into the trap of believing that their own perspective is the right one. But that anyone with an alternative view of any kind – even in just the smallest of ways, is or will be fundamentally wrong about everything else, too.

Yes, you could easily argue that this is how tribes and groups work.

But politics or rather the UK political system is supposed to be about delivering public policy that is created and then implemented in the best interests of ALL British People.

The one thing that we can be sure of is that when it comes to the political classes who have been running Westminster and our local Councils for decades, there is very little about any of it – apart from the Election campaigns, that has anything to do with or what is best for us.

As I have been discussing in some of my recent blogs, time has now run out for the way that government and our economic system runs. Neoliberalism and everything such as MMT, FIAT money, and the increasingly illogically impractical schemes like Net Zero and everything that pushes people and businesses into being reliant on credit are no longer sustainable.

That is why everything is now in the process of crashing around the Labour Government’s head.

Yes, the politicians in power are incompetent.

No, the mess we are in didn’t begin the day after Labour were elected to power and Starmer arrived in No.10.

And No, not Labour, nor the Tories, the Liberal Democrats, Reform or any other group of politicians currently looking ahead to the next General Election are going to offer and deliver to us anything different. Certainly not in any way that the UK actually needs.

For a time, I was open to the idea that Reform could find itself pursuing a different way. One that would offer the cross-tribal consensus and answers that the UK now needs.

Instead, it has become clear that the mechanics of this 4th evolution of the anti-EU movement certainly hasn’t moved on in any kind of people-centric direction.

Instead, Reform is just reforming itself, but in ways that have a very familiar likeness to political parties that have been in power before, who have increasingly aligned themselves and been led by the machinations of the establishment instead.

The mess over Rupert Lowe and the inescapable optics suggesting that at every level of the Reform Party, the whole thing is all about Nigel Farage, really does speak volumes for itself.

That’s before taking the time to read the outpourings of words from former party activists and ‘officers’ who have recently walked away. Just like better known voices associated with Reform such as those of Howard Cox and Ben Habib.

If any of the names instantly trigger feelings that suggest you have taken a side as you read – no matter the reason, it is exactly that kind of emotion that is our collective problem.

Disagreement over the smallest of things shuts so many of us down to the reality that we all have views about different things that we might never agree on. But when it comes down to all the things that are actually important, there is an awful lot of commonalities between all of us to be found.

Difficult to hear though it might be, it is the division that is deliberately sown between us over issues that we do have in common – by them being presented in ways that make them appear and trigger us as if they are something else – that really plays into the hands of the incompetent political classes that we regrettably have.

As things stand, and without a lot of us choosing to approach our relationship with politics very differently, the same people dividing us and guiding us to hate people we should not have any hate for, are set to keep guiding the ship that we are all beginning to sink on. And they will happily continue to do so, until the whole thing actually goes down.

Westminster is just the tip of the ruling iceberg that we can actually see.

Behind central government sits all the things like power, influence and the wealth accumulation that money controls and which is carefully kept outside of open view.

Because the truth is that the only people who benefit from us continuing to elect politicians who are under the spell of the establishment are those politicians and all those who are benefiting from the continuation of the establishment itself.

Whilst there is very good reason to believe that the wheels could fall off this broken bus at any moment in time, for those who have been aware and watching the direction of travel of the UK (and for that matter the whole of the Western world) for a considerable period of time, both the Global Financial Crisis and then the responses to the Covid Pandemic could, and arguably should, have already been the catalysts that introduced a genuinely new way of doing governance to the UK.

That these two massive events didn’t doesn’t indicate that change cannot or will not come.

The fact that we have been led to believe that what the politicians have done in response is in any way normal just tells us even more about how deeply embedded those who genuinely believe or work with this Top-Down, them vs us culture really are, right across the establishment.

We can see just how far they are prepared to take things in their attempts to stop the whole thing from crashing down, even now. Indeed, they are growing so desperate to maintain The System, they are even attacking the people who their ‘tribe’ have always typically helped.

Whilst the talk of absolutes will certainly sound like a contradiction to the words used as I began writing this Blog above, the one dividing line that we really do have no choice but to observe and then decide upon, is which side we sit between the establishment and all it stands for, and on the other side, the people and what putting people, our communities and the environment surrounding the places where we live and work, first.

Whilst even the Tories are successfully making themselves sound very plausible, just 8 months on from losing power, in the context of everything that the Labour Government is doing wrong, none of these political parties – and that almost certainly now includes Reform, show any sign of genuinely offering an alternative to establishment-directed public policy today.

However, it isn’t today and what is now past that we need to worry about. The most important thing is the future, and specifically what happens when we reach the next General Election and what must be ‘our time’.

The UK and we as its people cannot afford another General Election result that delivers power to any group – whether elected directly, or assembled as a result of some kind of post-election ‘deal’, that then goes on to do whatever the hell it likes.

No political party out there today, currently canvassing for votes in this years Local Elections is offering to do anything in any different kind of way.

We know this, because the way that they are running their election campaigns right now; how they are communicating and most importantly, how they are engaging with real people outside the bubbles of their own members and activists, is exactly the same as it has always been before.

To put it bluntly, we can no longer afford to take the risk that comes with accepting a choice of political candidates in any election, that not us, but the political parties themselves actually choose.

Change will not come in the way that we now so desperately need it, if we keep on doing politics at every level in the UK in exactly the same way!

It is our communities and the people who are around us every day who should be selecting the people who will represent us at all levels of government.

Not people we don’t know beyond the pictures, websites, social media and TV screens.

We need public representatives to represent us who have genuine skin in our game. People who are answerable only to us and who are committed to delivering locality-centric democracy, that is the only way that democracy can genuinely thrive, survive and most importantly, work.

Whilst government and the public sector really do now need to undergo massive change, the reality is that our communities could be working together to select and elect non-party candidates in all elections, right now.

We certainly don’t need any kind of change to the electoral system that just favours the election of more incompetent candidates. Ambitious and self-serving politicians whose actions will be made even worse by the guaranteed requirement for compromise on public policy that schemes like Proportional Representation as a replacement for First Past the Post would bring.

Power MUST come back to the people. Not through carefully crafted labels like ‘devolution’ and ‘devolved power’ that is nothing more than Regional Centralisation sold to us with a very misleading name.

The power – OUR POWER is already ours and that power can be made to work for us right now. IF we choose to use it. Look beyond the manufactured differences. And focus on working together, on the important things that we all have in common, and to deliver a new world and way of being that is happy, healthy, safe, secure and governs life with fairness, balance and justice for us all.

Anyone can begin this process of change and the appointment of new candidates to become the public representatives and politicians who will create and deliver our new future, right now. And we need them to, IF we are going to experience beneficial change.

That change  will only be certain if we all change the way that we think. What we can be sure of, however, is that a good future for us all doesn’t and will not start where anything ‘new’ for the politicians and voices that we already recognise as public figures begins.

The unfolding tragedy of the UKs political right

You may have read the title of this blog and immediately wondered what I’m on about. After all, Reform UK are running level with the Labour Government in the polls; the gap is opening up to the Conservatives behind them, and it’s all looking rather like Nigel Farage’s prophecy that Reform will form the next government in 2029 is unfolding in front of them like a political itinerant’s dream come true.

Anything is of course possible. And with the result and consequences of the General Election only six months ago plain for all to see, there is just as much reason to believe that Reform could sweep to victory on a 2029 landslide, that a majority vote for, simply because they appear to then be the better option out of a very bad bunch.

However, could it really be as straightforward as that?

My guess today, as someone whose political background is the ‘right’; who was elected into local government twice as a Conservative and who has dealt with evolutions of reform that include UKIP and the Anti Federalist League before Farage himself was even around, is a considered no.

Not because a new political party from outside of the traditional mainstream cannot smash the current triopoly. But because both Reform and those who are riding off the idea that they can profit from being like Reform are still playing the establishment game and offering too much of the destructive sameness that the establishment demands.

Whilst the reader would need to be watching all forms of media closely to see a very different reason for Reform’s future unfolding differently, the other problem that Reform – and therefore the whole of the right or conservative family has, is that there are already two further parties emerging that to one degree or another could easily split the Conservative Party and Reform axis even further. Leaving it ever more realistic that a left-wing or rainbow coalition will form the next government, with an even weaker Labour Party leading and ‘in charge’ than the one being accused of crashing the economy right now.

What Andrew Tate, and whatever Dominic Cummings has cooking, the current mentality of the Conservative Party and Nigel Farage’s Reform all have in common is their belief that they are different. Whilst the only difference they offer or look like they will offer, is a distilled version of policies which are no better than calling out the issues facing the UK as they see them. Which in terms of being the difference that the majority of people now need and want is the same thing as no difference at all.

Whilst the polls create a constant source of excitement for political anoraks, they do not indicate that a sweeping aside of petty rivalries and egos is now or is currently likely to take place.

That means all the right is offering today is all it has done for living memory:

Whichever version you choose, it’s all about the politicians themselves rather than people – which is what we all so desperately need.

Being able to talk about the uncomfortable issues that the government today and the last conservative government would not, is no longer enough.

That much has been quickly proven by the reality that the Labour Cabinet is massively out of its depth with the problems and realities of the establishment machine that they face. When they also rode a wave of good faith-based voting that led them to believe that they were equipped and ready to take on what faced them on the 5th of July.

It will not be different for any of the politicians currently coveting the keys to No. 10. As will be the same case for all of their understudies who sadly show all too easily what we can expect from them through their ambition and failure to genuinely connect.

If the political right is going to gain a meaningful result at the next election, rather than contributing to the creation of greater damage to the UK and what may then be an unnavigable mess, they have to be ready to fight the next general election together.

More importantly they will have to work together in a very different, people orientated way.

2029 is not a long time, assuming that the next general election will be then, rather than much before.

The time to deal with the differences and find common ground is now. Not in 3 years and certainly not during the fall out of the next general election where on current trajectories, things are going to be hideously worse than they are even now.

I’m not convinced that a coalition of the right is possible as things stand. Because nobody in politics can face up to the truth that it’s the outcome that is the most important factor to consider. Not how they take us there or who becomes the name that everyone then thinks about as being in charge.

The one thing we can be sure of is that change of the kind that the UK currently needs and what getting there really means, isn’t going to be offered or achieved by any political vehicle constructed with the same motives and way of looking at the electorate as the Political Parties who have been swapping power between them up until now.