Why is Reform Winning?

Before we talk about the local elections, I want to start off with a story. Some months ago, I and a friend of mine came across two rather unsavoury characters in a New Cross pub. As they nursed a couple of lagers, they chatted loudly about how they would "rather have 1000 rapists in this country than 100 immigrants". They were completely shameless in this conviction, shameless in the fact they knew others could hear and pressed on regardless.

Their politics were a point of pride. Some decades ago, such bile was relegated to the crude underbelly, the English Defence League -- a loose, grassroots initiative of fascist thugs, who had more of a knack for violence than politics.

Every democracy has its agitators. Every generation has its Nazis. Chamberlain wanted us to "appease" Hitler. Some decades later, on Cable Street in East London, Mosley's fascists were stopped as they attempted to march on Westminster. Britain has always flirted with fascism, but always on its fringes.

That changed in July 2024, when Nigel Farage was elected as Member of Parliament for Clacton. Farage's political history is long, complex, and significant in understanding the quagmire of modern Britain -- though, for a man of such influence, he had never even sat in the House of Commons until just under 2 years ago. No, instead, Farage spent most of his career as a snake-oil salesman on the sidelines of real politics. It wasn't until the misadventurous folly of Brexit, and the Conservative Party's descent into an ideological death cult - erected around the re-animated corpse of Margaret Thatcher - that Farage was given any semblance of mainstream seriousness in this country.

The lads that would rather have rapists than immigrants, the white supremacists that were stopped on Cable Street, the street-corner-poundshop thugs of the EDL have now been politically legitimised and socially emboldened by Reform's victories this week.

May 7th's local election results are catastrophic for Keir Starmer, the Labour Party, and the United Kingdom as a whole. The Reform landslide across England and Wales is nigh unprecendented for a nascent party. While there are some waning flames of hope, in the phyrric victories of the Greens and the Lib Dems, this overall portrait is dire.

It is mind-boggling, and infuriating, as the only question I can seemingly circulate around is the "why" of it. I guess the root of such a question has the same cause as the "why" of Trump, or the "why" of Brexit in the first place -- the electorate's uncanny ability to shoot itself in the foot. That, though, is reductive. Still, the proposition is eminently absurd.

Reform is a clown-car cavalcade of hollowed-out cadavers and opportunists. Just look at the gormless face of the braindead George Finch, Reform's 19-year-old leader for Warwickshire council. The party represents no grand political vision, no national directive. It is reactionary politics in its purest and most vile form. Zia Yusuf proudly announced that a Reform government would open immigrant detention centres in Green voting areas. Not only is that illegal, and fascist, but it is the greatest summation of the ideological rot at the heart of Farage's shitshow.

They know they won't stop the boats, or stem the flow of immigration, because Brexit fundamentally broke how our asylum system works. They won't tell you that, though, because it's easier to sell you a solution to a problem they caused than admit to it. "Rather than dealing with the issue, they'll just punish our political opponents instead!" This is what your average Reform voter actually thinks.

However. At this juncture, there is a point to be addressed. Reform's surge is squarely, and surely, the fault of Sir Keir Starmer. In addition to what must be, quite obviously, a piss-poor national education system.

Despite the outstanding parliamentary majority, Starmer has proven to be one of the most disappointing, hypocritical, morally fragile and impotent Prime Ministers in modern British history. He decided to pathetically imitate Reform -- whose voters would never vote Labour anyway -- while continuing Tory-lite neoliberal policies, employing outrageous rhetoric on immigration, amid constant fuck ups, lies and a disgraceful complicity in Israel's genocide. How Peter Mandeslon was appointed should and will haunt Starmer for the rest of his life -- not his political life, as that is certainly to not survive the next few weeks, but his personal one.

So is a man to be damned in the annals of history. It's a pitiful epitaph: an unravelling of one's own lack of imagination. These times demand strong leadership, and for that, Starmer does not heed the call.

In the aftermath of this, we are left with a pretty well-defined roadmap for Farage to enter No. 10. Whether by coalition or outright electoral shenanigans, it is in the best interest of the technofascists (and Russia) that Farage becomes Prime Minister. They will remake the United Kingdom in their own image -- an off-shore, technofeudal-hellscape-landing-base for the United States.

Maybe that's the "why". Starmer, thanks to Mandelson's interference in this government, is mired in contracts to Palantir -- the nightmare A.I. brainchild of Peter Thiel and Alex Karp. Reform, and Farage himself, are in bed with the technofascists -- Musk's "X" is algorithimcally designed to boost his party and far-right movements like it.

In that sense, a vote for Labour or a vote for Reform, while the former is significantly better than the latter, are both ultimately votes for Peter Thiel.

There is a grand conspiracy to enslave the human race, but it isn't coming over on small boats across the Channel -- it's from Silicon Valley. They're in the White House, and they control what we see and how we see it. We have absolutely no idea how bad things really are, and we are only seeing the tip of the A.I. disinformation iceberg. Will Musk or Zuck do anything to stem the flow of this?

Of course they won't.

Reform voters are goose-stepping over a cliff into a world that we have historically fought to prevent.

The sad thing is, most of them will be glad to lick the billionaire boot on their neck, as long as a bullet is put in the head of someone else.