Reform’s election denial is a cancer on democracy

Nigel Farage is not taking the electoral humiliation dished out to by the voters of Gorton and Denton at all well. Farage lied multiple times at his press conference on the Monday after the vote which saw his hand picked candidate trounced by the Greens. Farage claimed that no-one who voted Green in Gorton and Denton has a job and he’s “certain” that Reform won most British born voters in the by-election, all this is based on zero evidence, just Nige’s feels, but not a single journalist present pushed back on his self-serving anti-democratic bullshit. The line that Farage is determined to maintain in his alternate reality is that the smug carpetbagger Matt Goodwin really won the Gorton and Denton by-election, at least if you don’t count immigrants. Not counting immigrants is exactly what will happen if Farage gets his way.

In that alternate reality of his, when Reform wins a seat it means that true Brits have spoken and we must all sit up and take notice, but when the Greens win a seat it means that Muslims are conspiring to steal elections and civilisation and the British way of life as we know it is imperilled. So for Farage, the question then becomes, how severely should the franchise be limited in response? And the right wing media claps in approval like trained seals eagerly awaiting the next morsel of Reform fish which will be tossed to it. Reform fish which rots from the head down.

With the unceasing help of the British media and the huge foreign donations that pour into Reform’s coffers, Farage’s ego has been massaged into such a state of entitlement that he thinks he’s answerable to no one and is simply owed power. His big problem is that bot farms don’t vote and he’s come to confuse the astroturfed bought and paid for support for his party with the real world. Back in that real world, for every person who has glugged down the Reform Kool-Aid, at least two loathe Farage and everything his billionaire funded hate project stands for and are quite prepared to vote tactically for the party best placed to give Reform a kicking. Farage cannot cope with his own unpopularity. Not one bit.

He has come to live in his alternate reality and cannot comprehend that there’s a real world out there where people see him for exactly what he is. They see right through the fake bonhomie to the reality of the nasty, lying entitled bully boy cosplaying a man of the people all the better to serve the billionaires on whose teats he sucks.

Farage is a fine one to talk about not working. Have his constituents ever seen him? Proving Farage wrong has become a national moral imperative. So let’s prove him wrong by being very clear about what Farage and his right wing supporters are suggesting with their dangerous democracy killing lies about being robbed in last week’s by-election.

Farage and Tice have a long history of screaming about electoral fraud whenever the voters reject their poison at the ballot box. In 2015 when Farage was leader of Ukip he alleged postal voting fraud when his party lost the Oldham West & Royton by-election. No evidence was presented. In 2019 he made the same allegation after his Brexit party lost the Peterborough by election. In the Peterborough case the Brexit Party launched a legal challenge. An expensive police investigation found no evidence of fraud. Farage’s party sought to challenge the result in court. A judge threw the case out and forced the Brexit party to pay costs.

Just as with the Trumpian Republicans whose election denial playbook Farage cribs from, there is no significant voter fraud, but the point is to sow doubt and division, and to put the blame for Farage’s failures on migrants and minority ethnic communities which bolsters the sense of white victimhood upon which Farage feeds. It also prepares the ground for vote suppression measures which will benefit Farage in the future.

In Gorton and Denton the claim is that that Muslim wives and daughters were going into the polling booth wanting to vote for a Reform candidate who has said that you’re not necessarily British if you hold a British passport,and who rejects the entire concept of Islsmophobia, but their controlling Islamicist husbands coerced them into voting for an unmarried, white woman plumber representing a party led by a gay Jewish man. Further, they claim that this occurred in sufficient numbers to give the Greens a 4500 vote majority over a Reform candidate who would otherwise have won. Sounds legit.

The most basic fact is that over 70% of those who voted did not vote for Reform. No amount of dummy spitting by Farage, Tice, or right wing columnists is going to change that. The unpalatable truth that Farage can’t swallow is that ordinary people just are not that into him. That was proven in Gorton and Denton, in Caerphilly, it was even proven in the Runcorn by-election which the polls forecast as a certain win for Reform with a majority of well over a thousand but in which Reform squeaked to victory by just six votes. Reform consistently performs more poorly in real elections than it does in polling, because in real elections decent people are prepared to vote tactically to keep Reform out.

As for claims of sectarianism, well perhaps Reform might want to stop constantly banging on about “Christian values.”

The bile from Farage because his party failed badly to win a by election which he was convinced was in the bag is an alarming sign that Reform will import the very worst aspects of US Republican politics into the UK. Trump’s Republicans have ceased to be a democratic party, indulging instead in voter-suppression, gerrymandering and the outright refusal to accept the result of an election they have lost. That is what Farage has in store for the UK. When a party refuses to accept the result of an election that it lost fair and square, democracy dies.

It’s little wonder that Farage is cheerleading for Trump’s illegal war in Iran and wants the UK to get fully involved. Naturally the exact same newspapers which screamed “Take back control!” now want the UK to become an obedient poodle for Trump and blindly follow him into his illegal war in Iran. War is a big part of the authoritarian playbook. War takes over the news cycle. War protects the right from criticism. War allows the right to condemn those who oppose the war as unpatriotic. War grants authoritarian leaders emergency powers. War consumes everything else. For Farage, a war against Iran provides another toxic opportunity to paint British Muslims as dangerous interlopers that only he can deal with, a war on the enemy without quickly morphs into a war on the enemy within.

Climate change denial, racism, authoritarianism, English supremacism, and a crusade against women and minorities is all you get from Reform. Farage and his lackies want to put the clock back to burning fossil fuels and polluting the environment. They want to destroy communities and tell us our friends, family members, colleagues and neighbours are unwelcome invaders. They are a danger to us all. They are enemies of decency, humanity, kindness and compassion. They are alien to the truth. Reform must be shunned, shamed, and shocked by electoral annihilation. They are a cancer on democracy. The good news is that Reform is nowhere near as popular as it would like us to think it is, and that there is Farage’s big problem which no amount of bluster can solve.

___________________________________

The annual blog fundraiser has reached its initial target but will keep running for a few weeks more. The initial target represented the bare minimum necessary to keep the blog going. Many thanks to everyone who has contributed. There are a number of ways to donate. You can contribute to my fundraiser on GoFundMe, the link is here.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/wee-ginger-dug-annual-fundraiser-2026

By Default GoFundMe has configured the donation page to monthly donations. You can still donate as a one off When you Click donate, on the donate page under the title WeeGinger Fundraiser 2026 you’ll see two buttons, one on the left saying GIVE ONCE and one on the right saying GIVE MONTHLY. This seems to be a new thing with GoFundMe. Click the left GIVE ONCE button so it is highlighted in Green then choose the amount you want to donate or enter it in the box below. If not, you can always make a one off donation by PayPal or Ko-Fi

You can donate via Ko-Fi here:

Or click the following link https://ko-fi.com/weegingerdug

One of the easiest ways to support this blog is with a PayPal donation. Please log into Paypal.com and send a payment to the email address [email protected]. Or alternatively click the donate button below. If you don’t have a PayPal account, just select “donate with card” after clicking the button. You can also donate by PayPal by using my PayPal.me link PayPal.Me/weegingerdug
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/weegingerdug

If you would prefer to donate some other way, for example by bank transfer or cheque, please contact me at [email protected] for details. Once again, thank you to everyone for your support.

Source