Tag Archives: Reform UK

Desperate times

2 Apr

Reform UK may have bagged themselves a mayoral candidate for Newham, but it seems they are struggling to find enough people to stand for council seats.

The above was posted to Twitter by one of the Conservative Party’s candidates for Canning Town South in a thread about Reform’s desperate efforts across the country. It’s all a bit embarrassing for a party that the pollsters say is the most popular in the country right now.

I have no idea who the Labour candidate is, though it must be someone Reform had a number for and who was thought to be persuadable. While we know some councillors and candidates have a transactional relationship with party affiliation, surely Reform is a step too far, even for them.

Amusingly, the Reform mayoral candidate’s blog ran a piece a few weeks ago about ‘Labour’s candidate crunch’, noting the trouble the ruling party is having filling its slate. People in gals houses…

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Are they related?

4 Mar

Clive Furness (with Laila Cunningham, Nigel Farage and Sir Robin Wales on the far right)

Reform’s mayoral candidate. A man who looks a bit like Clive Furness, but younger, thinner and with much darker hair.

Are they related?

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Journey’s End

4 Mar

Wales Furness Reform.

Robin Wales and Clive Furness with Nigel Farage (picture via London Evening Standard)

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. Sir Robin Wales and his long-time ally and fellow Blue Labour acolyte Clive Furness have defected to Reform UK.

Wales will be joining as ‘Director of Local Government Development’ and Furness will be the party’s candidate for Mayor of Newham.

Both men have long promoted a politics well to the right of mainstream Labour opinion and their recent piece in Spiked about why they left the Labour Party was merely a trailer for this announcement.

This blog was largely founded as a way for me to express my disgust and amazement that Wales, a man who so clearly possessed no Labour values whatsoever, was in any kind of leadership position at all, much less the all-powerful and unchallengeable directly elected mayor. And it turns out, in the end, I was absolutely right.

Those currently running what remains of the Labour Party in Newham – hollowed out by five long years of suspension – should have a long hard think about their decision to turn their backs on the last eight years and embrace the politics of the previous 20.

Wales and Furness have gone. Good riddance. Their politics should go with them.

 

Update: Wales’ new title at Reform is Director of Local Government Development, not Director of London Local Government as I previously had it. Apologies.

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