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Reform UK wants to relitigate COVID and just won 14.3% of the vote. If anything the movement would be stronger if the state did not violently suppress it.
Reform UK Party Ltd is a private limited company with a single controlling shareholder, not a substantial movement. By the time Reform was polling above 5%, Farage had resigned as leader and it had gone back to running a standard-issue right populist campaign based around dubiously-funded tax cuts and reduced immigration. COVID wasn't mentioned in Reform's 2024 election campaign, at least as far as a random voter who was paying attention could see.
Right populism in the UK is fundamentally about Islamic immigration. The attempt to make US-style public health skepticism part of the movement failed.
Most small political parties are organised as companies because there's no other coherent legal structure for managing the finances of a political party. What else would they be? State owned? Not in a democracy. Charities? By law, they can't be tied to a political party. This talking point about Reform is intended to misinform someone with (admittedly typical) ignorance about what companies are. It's not a serious argument.
I know exactly what a company is - my day job involves managing a regulated Group with separately licensed legal entities.
I also know why the entities registered with the Electoral Commission for the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats are unincorporated associations, with the company set up to hold the asset being a company limited by guarantee whose members are certain elected officers of the unincorporated association.
The fact that Reform is set up as a company limited by shares is linked to something important about the internal democratic processes of Reform, namely that there are none, and that Nigel Farage retained (literal and figurative) ownership even during the period where Richard Tice was leader and Farage held no party office. There is a reason why non-profit companies (whether or not they are charities) are usually limited by guarantee - the Koch-Crane feud at Cato being an example that was briefly famous in US right-wing circles of what can go wrong if they are shareholder-owned. Reform (and Cato back in 1977) chose to do the weird thing for a reason.
If a normal political party with Reform's level of support decided through its internal democratic processes to campaign on COVID lockdown blame, that would be a sign that a substantial movement was doing so. If Reform's owner decides that Reform should campaign on COVID lockdown blame, it is a sign that one man is doing so. Given that one man's primary source of income is his appearances on foreign media, it is more likely than not that the "substantial movement" he is representing is the one paying him - he certainly didn't find himself leading a substantial movement of still-salty-about-lockdown libertarians in the UK given Reform's anemic poll performance at the time.
If your problem with Reform is that it lacks a coherent internal structure and meaningless membership, then sure, that's an actual criticism. One that I'd also levy at the Labour and Conservative party, which have internal democratic processes in theory but not in practice. But you should just say that, instead of complaining that reform is a company.
Reform lacks much internal structure as it was a very small party, re-founded during a time when the organisation of something akin to Conservative Associations or Constituency Labour Parties would have been mostly illegal. and only recently growing to a point where such an internal structure would be necessary. So already it's committed to changing structure to a company limited by guarantee.
GB News is not foreign media.
Political organisation against lockdowns was de facto illegal during lockdowns. This is about as surprising as finding out there were no pro-Capitalist parties successfully participating in Soviet Elections in the 1930s.
I don't have a problem with Reform - I support proportional representation because I think the way that excluding 20% of the population from meaningful political participation (whether that is the populist right in the UK with the globalists in control of the Conservative party, or the centre-right in the US with MAGA in control of the Republican party, or various left-wing equivalents) is bad for democracy, and that Reform should have more MPs than they do. I profoundly disagree with Reform and I am proud of the fact that my country is more resistant than most to their kind of politics, but getting along with your political opponents is part of living in a civilisation.
I think that Nigel Farage's decision to take up anti-lockdownism in 2020 was not the result of a social movement. You implied that it was. The presence or absence of an internal democratic structure in Reform is relevant to this question.
This is incorrect. Reform was founded (as the Brexit Party) in November 2018 long before the pandemic. The name was changed during the lockdown, but if Farage had wanted to stand up a normal party organisation he had had over a year to do so. In any case, Alba (founded February 2021) was able to stand up a more normal political party organisation during a COVID lockdown (although, I agree, not a full set of local associations).
GB News hit the air in June 2021, after Farage's attempts to run a US-style anti-lockdown campaign had failed. In 2020 his most lucrative gig appears to have been Fox News.
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If this is what you were going for, your first comment was an extremely confusing way of going about it, and this is literally the last thing that would come to my mind from the way you phrased it.
If the lack of internal democratic processes bother you so much, you can just not vote for them.
It's still a sign of a substantial movement doing so, unless you're saying he has the power of forcing people to work for him, and to vote for him.
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