YES, IT’S WAR: My thoughts on the Reform UK schism

00:28 GMT - 20/03/2025

I was going to spend tonight ("tonight" being the first night I started working on this LMAO) finally getting round to reviewing that Swans single that dropped recently (I wasn’t the biggest fan), but more pressing matters have emerged: Britain’s favourite far-right party Reform UK has finally suffered a major schism within its ranks. Rupert Lowe has stepped out of line, & has had the full weight of the party come down on him.

Now, this isn’t without precedent. When Nigel Farage put out a statement rebuking ex-EDL knucklehead Tommy Robinson, making it clear that his fans & supporters had no place in the party (at least not if they were loud about it).

Now, despite Tommy Robinson largely being an irrelevant figure in UK politics nowadays & generally being an optical nightmare for Farage & the British far-right, Elon & his groupies started bleating about how much of a DISGRACE it was that Ol’ Nige wasn’t giving their favourite blorbo the time of day for the sake of staying afloat in the polls & demanded his immediate replacement with… Rupert Lowe, who’d been somewhat less antagonistic towards Tommy Robinson (though still making it clear he didn’t consider him welcome in Reform). At the time, I found this both incredibly stupid (given what a dire state Reform had been in without Farage, & also given what had happened to UKIP once he finally ditched them) & incredibly unlikely to actually happen, given Lowe had not shown any prior signs of disloyalty to Farage & he even stepped in to clarify that he had no intentions of replacing him!

It seems Elon & co. have finally gotten their wish, but not in the way they expected.

The structure of Reform UK is extremely unusual & has been controversial since its very beginning (I remember reading about it as a teen back when it was still The Brexit Party LMAO): There were only three actual members (Farage among them); what your average Brexit Party punter was signing up for by sending the party money wasn’t an actual membership, but instead the rather less impressive “supporter” status. As a result, it meant that Reform’s leadership basically changed by decree; leaders passing the torch to their favoured deputy when they got bored. That’s how Reform chairman Richard Tice was able to immediately take over from Farage & keep his seat warm for a few years while Nige’ was on sabbatical, & then immediately step aside again when Farage decided the snap election was interesting enough & a big enough opportunity for him to finally end his 3 year holiday. If the party had to hold a leadership election with their members like a normal bloody party they wouldn’t have been able to pull those manoeuvres with such speed!

It also meant that rather than the standard UK party method of selecting candidates for elections, where a party’s local branch usually picks one of their own to run for races in their area, Reform’s candidates were all personally vetted by head office (though some more hastily than others; I’m reminded of that GE candidate of theirs based in Gibraltar) to ensure their loyalty to the Big Man himself.

As you can imagine, Nigel’s cult of personality hasn’t been enough to stymie accusations that this whole structure is a wee bit undemocratic. There’s been calls from the party grassroots to professionalise & ditch the limited structure layout, & Rupert Lowe, as it turns out, has been the main agitator for this position within the parliamentary group. It had initially been hush-hush, but he eventually went public with his gripes in an interview for useless tabloid rag the Daily Mail. The article talks up his suitability for the top job, brings up his odds of becoming PM at the bookies, & when asked if he thinks Farage could become PM he gives this somewhat mixed answer:

It hits all the main points that a section of the party have been calling for for a while now: Reform needs to stop being a Farage-oriented personalist protest vote-accumulator & start being a structured, organised party that can win elections & not just instantly fall apart as soon as The Messiah (as Lowe calls him) decides he’s had enough, Rupert even saying he’s considering leaving if the party doesn’t shape up & professionalise before the next GE. Worrying stuff! I think these are valid concerns for Reform supporters, to be quite honest; a Reform without Farage is inevitable in the end, & it’s something they’re going to have to be able to survive if they want to make their odious political project stick.

Farage, however, doesn’t really care about the broader party. He’s always been in it for himself, & any dissent will not be tolerated. Once this article came out (with Rupert saying crazy things like being open to an electoral pact with the Tories, something Nigel’s firmly - & wisely, in my opinion - against), this indiscretion had to be punished. Not only did Farage respond to Lowe’s interview after its publication, but a day after it came out allegations suddenly emerged that Lowe had bullied female staffers within his parliamentary office & made threats against Reform UK Party Chairman Zia Yusuf. Now, I very much find it plausible that Lowe would engage in belligerent behaviour towards women & Muslims, but the timing of these allegations coming out implies that if true, the party’s top brass had most likely been sitting on them until it would be politically-expedient to drag Lowe through the mud. After all, it’d be an embarrassment to the party to actually take action if Rupert wasn’t currently in their bad books!

Lowe, of course, has had the whip suspended & has been reported to the police. He’s insisted that the allegations are false (unlikely) & that this whole debacle is a political purge in retaliation for the Daily Mail interview he gave, as well as apparent tensions between him & Farage since the last election over the issue of the party professionalising (almost certainly). The Internet Neo-Nazis that previously rallied to Lowe over the Robinson issue have come out en masse to bully Farage on X, the Everything App (cruelty towards women & Muslims being far from a dealbreaker for them), & the party in general seems to have fallen into disarray & bickering (in spite of their expected victory in the upcoming Runcorn & Helsby by-election, where the now-ex-Labour ex-MP’s assault charges put Labour at quite the disadvantage).

The most interesting thing about this split to me is that it represents the more radical, & dare I say chronically-online elements of Reform (that Rowe has increasingly identified with) clashing with the more old media-conscious & generally cautious elements of the party (represented by party “Messiah” Nigel Farage) to an extent that has largely been absent outside of occasional Twitter dogpiles. Rupert hedging a little on the issue of Robinson & his supporters was just the start; he’s been banging the drum in favour of adopting a hardline “mass deportations NOW!” stance behind the scenes & had all-but-been marginalised within the party before the Daily Mail interview was published. At this point he’s been sucked fully into the vortex of far-right Internet brainrot, & Nigel & co. correctly recognised that as a threat to the party’s fortunes. He had to go.

That’s the conundrum the party finds itself in, really; it should be a bad thing that the party (even with the rather limited democratisation reforms it’s enacted) is largely centralised around Farage & his crony Yusuf with little method of defying them, but time & time again Farage has shown himself to be the only far-right politician in the UK with a shred of cunning or charisma. They need him! No-one else can effectively rabble-rouse & cause controversy without crossing so many lines that they become a pariah! If Lowe took over he’d run the party into the ground faster than he did Southampton FC, & any other prospective replacement’s fortunes would be similarly-dire. Remember when a post-Farage UKIP ran a bunch of anti-SJW YouTubers in their European Parliament elections only for one of them to cause a national fucking scandal by calling a sitting MP "too ugly to rape" & then proceed to lose all of their fucking seats to Farage's brand-spanking-new Brexit Party? Because I certainly fucking do! It’s in the party’s best interests to retain Farage, & thus I’m hoping this Loweist coup succeeds so that they eat dirt next election.

I think the party’s done a decent enough job of excising Rupert from the party, however; it doesn’t seem to be slowing them all too much (especially with the Tories continuing to nosedive in the polls) & if this suspension becomes a full-on expulsion (which I find extremely likely) I doubt whatever no-name group of racist rapscallions he joins up with will really see too much of an electoral surge even with his endorsement (remember the Reclaim Party? They had an MP for like, a week? Thought not). It’d be funny if he shacks up with the Homeland Party (the only far-right party round these parts actively catering to annoying Zoomer Nazis on Twitter), but I have a sneaking suspicion they’re too toxic even for him.

Some have suggested Rupert join the Tories, especially given that Badenoch’s seemingly determined to pander to the far-right to an extent that Sunak never did (though still not to Braverman levels, thankfully). I doubt that Lowe is really going to return hat-in-hand to the party he abandoned 32 years ago over the Maastricht Treaty, however. He’s lept from Eurosceptic party to Eurosceptic party, refusing to even touch his former political home with a 10 ft. pole, & I don’t really see him departing from that pattern any time soon. Wherever he goes next, I doubt there’s much of a future for him, regardless of whether Farage is toppled over this or not. He just hasn’t got the sauce, no matter how many Twitter followers he gets or how many MP’s salaries he gives away to charity.