Farage ditches Reform UK’s ‘contract with the people’

David Maddox, The Independent

Reform UK’s ruthless pursuit of putting Nigel Farage into Downing Street by 2029 has seen them already move on from their “contract with the people” at the general election just two months ago, the party’s new chairman has admitted. Businessman Zia Yusuf was brought in by Farage to reorganise Reform UK after what the new chair admits was “a scrappy start-up” election beset with scandals over candidates and serious questions over the party’s policies.

In a wide ranging interview with The Independent he also said:

•That Reform will allow members to ditch their own leader in a new constitution

•The party has been inspired by French far-right leader Marine Le Pen doubling her vote in France

•That people who work for the Conservative Party have been in talks with Reform about coming over

After Farage declared himself leader of Reform again at the start of the election he publicly ditched one policy agreed by former leader (and now fellow MP) Richard Tice on air during an interview with the Today programme, but now it seems he plans to go further. When the “contract with the people” (so-called because Farage claimed manifestos were considered to be lies) was launched at Merthyr Tydfil it was lampooned for being “Liz Truss economics on steroids”. The party promised £140bn in tax cuts including raising the threshold of income tax to £20,000, claiming it could find £156bn in spending cuts. But there were serious question marks over the mathematics.

At the time the Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank said that Reform’s plans were based on “extremely optimist assumptions” about growth and the sums “do not add up”, meaning the manifesto as a whole was “problematic”. But speaking to The Independent, Yusuf said that the contract with the people should now be considered “more as the philosophy of what the party wants to achieve rather than policy details.” Addressing the sums in the “election contract with the people”, Yusuf said: “They don't add up on the basis that you implement everything in there on day one for arriving in Downing Street. That's fair. But that was never going to be the plan.”

Some at the time saw the policies as a list to help win over Tories with no real expectation of winning; a claim that Yusuf acknowledged was true.

He said: “As ambitious as everybody is at Reform, there was no chance that we (were) going to be the party of government.” Yusuf insisted that over the “coming years” the party “will be putting the policy meat on the bone” as well as expanding on how policies would be phased in “so that we can demonstrate that we can be trusted to be great stewards and guardians of the British economy”.

He added that he would be happy for other parties to “steal Reform policies” for the good of the country. Reform policies though would remain focused on slashing immigration and cutting taxes. The overhaul is part of a “democratisation of the party” which would give Reform members the chance to throw out their leader if things went badly. At the moment Reform UK is a limited company with Farage as the major shareholder. Yusuf admitted that this was unsustainable, with the drawing up of a party constitution an early priority.

“We're a serious political party. This isn't a pressure group, and Nigel has been on the record, as has Richard Tice, multiple times, saying, of course, after the general election, we look at the structure, and that was the right thing to do.

“As we look forward, you know, our stated goal is to elect Nigel Farage into Downing Street in 2029. In order to do that clearly the party needs a constitution, and it needs a structure fit for purpose. “We have the huge advantage of the fact that Nigel has unanimous and universal support for some members right now that is unequivocal and clear. So what we're working [on] is drafting a constitution, of course, that will have mechanisms by which leaders can be removed and leaders can be selected.” He emphasised that this was to ensure the party’s constitution was fit for the long-term future rather than just the next few months. Yusuf’s target is to increase Reform’s votes by 5 million to 9 million in 2029. That year will see significant targets, with the English council elections as well as devolved parliament elections in Wales and Scotland.

But he believes that the biggest problem the party has to overcome was the “lack of a ground war”. That meant “we had no data like the other parties” and also “had no get-out-the-vote operation on the day of the election.”

He noted that four of the five seats Reform won were the “only places we had a ground campaign but it was very rudimentary”. To turn this around he has set up 120 pilot constituency branches already and hopes this will increase to 200 by the party’s conference in September. For that, Yusuf is looking to the German elections this weekend, where the far-right Alternative for Germany is predicted to make massive gains; and to the recent French election, which saw Marine Le Pen double her vote from 17 per cent to 34 per cent in two years. He said: “We are a very different party from them but we live in unprecedented times and we have five years not two to double our vote.” Yusuf claims that Reform UK’s appeal has already reached Conservative Party officials working at central office (CCHQ) as well as councillors who have defected.