House of Commons July 2024
Its a structural feature of any organisation where Nigel Farage is the boss that sooner or later a bust up occurs. Beyond the current Reform debacle there are wider questions. In 1961 the BBC ran a series or programmes critical of what was then the new left. The historian E P Thompson proposed a response which the BBC declined. He published it anyway as the Segregation of Dissent. His point was that Parliamentary politics had quite narrow and strictly policed boundaries.
Views beyond the boundary got little coverage. Reform, on issues like immigration, is part, albeit a hard right part, of an official consensus. After the purge of Mr Lowe Reform now has the same number of MPs as the Greens and Plaid and one less than the Independent Group. We should now hear a lot less from Messrs Farage, Anderson and Tice and a good deal more from the Greens and the wider political left including the left Independent MPs and Plaid.
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