The party, which labels itself as the party of “common sense policies”, displayed themselves as having anything but this “common sense” they made a cornerstone within their campaign, having made themselves the laughingstock of UK politics with their laughable blunder of firing a dead man, but who actually are they? And what really happened?
Formerly known as the “Brexit Party”, the party emerged in 2018 in the height of the Brexit debates, campaigning for a no-deal Brexit and boasting Nigel Farage as party leader from March 2019 after the previous leader was revealed as an extreme Islamophobe. During the 2019 elections, the party received 2% of the vote and gained no seats within Parliament.
This coming election, however, is appearing to be far more favourable for Reform UK as many former Conservative voters and even some MPs defected to the new party amid the recent attacks on the government. As of January 2024, the party was polling circa 10% of the public vote, threatening around 30 Conservative seats according to the Guardian.
Reform UK describe themselves as being able to “make Britain great again” through lowering taxes, resuming oil mining in the North Sea and ensuring education is not affected by the “woke police” by not teaching children about “Critical Race Theory and Gender Ideology”. They also promise to have a zero-tolerance policy towards illegal immigration, although they do admit that in order to achieve this, they will need to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. They also wish to reduce ineffectual government spending by reforming the BBC, House of Lords and Civil Service.
Despite their insistence that they are a viable party for the next general election, the party revealed themselves to be unaware of the death of one of their own party candidates. A spokesperson for the party stated that the central York candidate Tommy Cawkwell had been fired due to inactivity, with the spokesman saying “we can’t afford to have people doing nothing in an election year”. It was then revealed to the party that Mr Cawkwell was not in fact avoiding their calls as they seemed to believe but rather was dead and had been for two months.
The party has since apologised, with the spokesperson admitting to being “mortified” at his mistake and apologising for any pain he may have caused his family. He stated that following a local paper suggesting Mr Cawkwell had been removed for inappropriate social media messages, he instead “suggested he had been one of those candidates removed for inactivity”.
Whilst the party has attempted to explain and apologise away their catastrophic error, there is one question that remains unanswered by them - if the population cannot even trust the party to remember their own candidates, how are they meant to trust them with our country which has been so battered and bruised over the past few years?