Caerphilly - A Warning, NOT a Defeat for Reform
How Reform threw away their chance of victory, but are still on course to break the mould
The Reform vote in Caerphilly yesterday is a great result which doesn’t look like one. The usual left-wing media suspects are all crowing happily, with the Labour-supporting Mirror trying to gloss over the catastrophic Labour showing as a “crushing blow for Farage”.
Remember, South Wales was one of those areas where it used to be said that Labour votes were “weighed not counted”. As recently as 2021, Labour took 46% of the total vote in Caerphilly. In yesterday’s byelection, Starmer’s party crashed to just 11%.
Meanwhile, the Tories collapsed from 17% to just 2%. The real significance of the overall result is that BOTH “natural parties of government” face electoral annihilation. To a large extent, people aren’t really voting for someone else, but against the Establishment.
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In Wales and Scotland, the fact that voters can kick the Westminster parties by voting for the fake nationalist Plaid Cymru and SNP, will stop them turning en masse to Reform. But, in England, the fake nationalist party is Reform, and there is no other credible protest vote to make.
Last night’s result, far from being a “crushing blow for Farage”, in fact confirms that – absent some gigantic event that changes the political picture entirely – Reform is set to win the majority of English seats at the next general election.
The more they attack Farage and his party, the more they will add to Reform’s credibility as the protest party. On top of that, we’ve still got Rachel from Account’s next three or four tax-raising, service-cutting, budget disasters to come, with an odd-on-chance of the pain of another global financial meltdown to come. Plus several million more ever-more unwelcome immigrants.
By the time all that hits the political fan, they won’t so much be counting Labour votes, as trying to find some! And with Reform having such a swamping poll lead over the hopeless Tories, the old “wasted vote” argument against electoral insurgents is now switched against the Conservatives. They’re even more screwed than Labour!
The only Westminster party in England which can take heart from Caerphilly is the LibDems. Yes, they did worse even than the Tories last night, but the result more than anything else showed that tactical voting by “progressive” voters is from now on going to be a huge factor. In England, that will mean big LibDem gains.
Anywhere the combined LibDem and Labour vote can top Reform, tactical voting will obliterate Labour and give the LibDems a real chance. The Lib Dems are likely to eclipse the Labour party as the largest party of the left.
A few places will see the same factor helping far-left pro-Islamist parties, but Corbyn & Co have moved so far from their white working-class roots that they will not be credible anywhere which isn’t massively ‘enriched’. The Greens are in the same position, but their commitment to the very special and expensive madness of Net Zero means that they too will remain confined to a handful of very unrepresentative and peculiar seats.
Having assessed what the result means for UK politics in general, let’s turn now to what it really says about Reform.
Fortunately, I speak with two people who were there as unnoticed, but heavily involved, Reform volunteers throughout the campaign. An older, ex-BNP activist from a neighbouring Valley, who hasn’t joined the party (and hence hasn’t been ‘weeded out’ by Nige Farage’s uneasy but long-term allies in hopenotHate) and a young English Reform member who joined the large number of volunteers driving in from all over south west England to help the campaign.
So what have they told me, and what can we learn from it? In simple terms, that Reform had plenty of volunteers, and enough support to win but ran a poor campaign and got what they deserved.
Here’s why this is the case:
ONE. Their messaging was awful
The Democracy Club election leaflets collection at https://electionleaflets.org/
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Oh, dear God! The image only gives a flavour of the full horror of this effort. For a start, who decided to use blue as the main colour for a leaflet in a place where the colour still says ‘Maggie Thatcher’ to every voter over sixty?
Reform’s main propaganda offering put so much effort into attacking the others that, in the couple of seconds trip between doormat and bin, the average householder could easily missed even seeing who it was from.
Just as bad, it picks a fight on the NHS, the one issue in which Reform are automatically on the back foot, feeling it necessary to give more scarce space to denying (and thus drawing attention to) Labour’s claim that they want to privatise it.
We all know that Reform’s main attraction to voters is immigration, but whichever bunch of fools designed their leaflets decided not to mention it. This was especially insane given that Plaid Cymru are committed to making Wales a “sanctuary country”. So although Caerphilly has very little immigration at present, Reform was gifted a simple and stunning narrative:
“We haven’t got them round here yet, because Labour has let you down so much that they’d rather stay in wealthier bits of England. But Plaid wants to open up Wales to UNLIMITED ‘sanctuary immigration’.
“Basic services round here are falling apart already, but Plaid want to FLOOD our valley and the whole of Wales with unvetted illegals. They’re going to invite them to our streets from all over the world, when we haven’t even got homes, jobs or hospital beds for our own people. We say, put local people first. Remember Southport and keep them OUT!”
Now, quite likely the Post Office would have refused to deliver such a hard-hitting leaflet, but that would only have drawn attention to it, and pulled the debate off the left’s NHS ground where Reform can’t win, and onto immigration, where Reform can’t lose.
They should then have produced a leaflet which the Post Office would accept, and had their ample volunteer teams deliver “the leaflet they didn’t want you to read” by hand.
Among the 50% of voters of electors who didn’t bother to vote will have been very few who oppose Reform, but large numbers who oppose immigration, because Reform made no attempt to wind them up and get them to the polls.
TWO. Lack of Urgency
The contest was on a knife-edge. Reform’s campaign organisers and volunteers were all well aware that they might either win or lose. But at no time was there any urgency. From start to finish, the campaign organisers treated the whole thing as a nine-til-six job. Everything knocked off at six, despite peak canvassing time being 5p.m. until 8p.m.
This is especially damaging when your core support base is ‘white van man’, who may not even be back from work by six, or may have just got home and be in the shower. The six-to-eight slot is the most valuable of all canvassing time, and Reform just threw it away.
THREE. Poor Use of Volunteers
People travelled serious distances to get there, but they were scarcely thanked, let alone properly used. There was no attempt to inform or motivate them or to organise them into effective teams. There was no attempt to put together balanced teams, with locals and outsiders, experienced and inexperienced, put together.
FOUR. Time Was Wasted
Volunteers were constantly kept waiting. In a well-run campaign, the HQ is quiet, almost empty, every day (until the mad rush of polling day itself). That’s because, bar a small meet-greet-inform-equip-direct team, everyone is out pounding the streets, returning only to bring back their data and to get supplies and maps for their next target.
In Caerphilly, groups of unused volunteers were hanging around, if they weren’t pottering off to Greggs for another pie while waiting to be put to work.
FIVE. The Candidate was Underused
Nigel Farage’s visits were put to great use, but the candidate had a much lower profile, when he should have been all over the constituency. Not his fault, in the past he’s been a local council candidate, but in a campaign of this importance he should have had a dedicated team keeping him at full-stretch, going round to meet people and do photo ops for social media and small run leaflets on issues specific to just a couple of streets.
SIX. It’s the Data, Stupid!
Some volunteers just aren’t cut out for canvassing, so they should be put into teams which only leaflet. But, in Caerphilly, people who were willing and able to knock doors and canvass were used as leafleters. In military terms, it’s like using Special Forces soldiers to dig trenches.
Most leaflets pushed through doors go straight in the bin with the Meal Deal flyers from the local kebab shop. Seats are won by canvassers.
Not because they win people over – standing arguing with voters is a classic waste of time and energy – but because they identify firm supporters. They gather election-winning data.
This is especially valuable for Reform for two reasons:
Many of their most fervent sympathisers are not even on the electoral register, precisely because they’ve long ago given up on the old parties. Even in a by-election called at quite short notice, there is at least a month during which supporters can be registered to vote. It’s a very simple process, and it only takes a few minutes to show canvassers how to use the forms they have on their clipboards to get a voter – often a whole family of voters – registered to vote.
Second, parties of local government, such as Labour and the Blaid, automatically have long lists of people they have met and helped, of people who are already firmly on their side. Plaid’s candidate and his team had been working the area for 25 years. They know who their core voters are.
Reform, as newcomers, have no such database. Canvassing is the only way to get this vital data. You have to identify your voters in order to whip them in on polling day; it’s the sine qua non of winning elections.
Actually, there’s a third reason. Canvassers also identify hostile voters. It really isn’t a difficult job to use this data to provide street-by-street guides for your leafleting teams and follow-up canvassers to AVOID their doors.
Strangely, this is important in a tight contest nt because it saves your teams time and unsettling abuse, but because it makes it harder for the opposition to get these hostiles out to vote for them. The less they see of you for the rest of the campaign, the less urgency they’ll feel to go and vote, or to vote tactically, to stop you.
It’s a subtle point, but it’s not remotely difficult to act upon, so why on earth is Farage paying salaries to politics graduates who understand all sorts of fancy theories, but don’t know what any Labour or Tory activist coud have told you back in 1974?
SEVEN. Lack of Training
Most Reform volunteers are new to the job. They are keen and willing, but don’t know what to do, let alone how to do it properly. The very start of each campaign should therefore be to train the trainers, and to set up a rota so that someone is there every day to do this vital job.
It’s not rocket science: The do’s and don’ts of canvassin; the key issues to hammer; the simple tricks to start a conversation; voter registration; getting an answer and getting on to the next door. It only takes a few minutes to turn a group who haven’t got a clue into a team which can help win the seat.
Losing a Seat Which Was Theirs to Win
Put all these things together and it is immediately clear why the opinion polls showing Reform with a narrow but solid 4-point lead over Plaid, turned into Plaid’s comfortable 47.4% vs Reform’s 36% in the ballot box.
Yes, tactical voting was clearly a factor but, in the end, if Reform use that as their excuse for losing a seat which was theirs to win, they will keep on losing.
Not everywhere, of course. Large swathes of England would now elect a pig as long as it was standing for Reform against the swine in Westminster.
Yet elections are not won overall in safe seats, but in the marginals. And, at present, Reform’s election machine is a smug and amateurish operation (exemplified by their truly abysmal ‘Best Digital Practice’ online election training videos site, as well as its woeful failings in Caerphilly).
From speaking with my two good volunteers, I can now tell you that, at present, Reform couldn’t organise an electoral piss-up in a political brewery. That’s why they lost yesterday. Not because they don’t have the potential to win, but they do not yet have the organisational ability to realise that potential.
To put it simply, Nigel used to sneer at the BNP as “knuckle-draggers”, but - given underlying support surge, numbers and money which Reform just wasted in Caerphilly - our band of overwhelmingly working-class heroes would have taken them and all the rest to the cleaners.
CONCLUSION
At 50.4%, the turn-out was high for a by-election. But Plaid’s margin of victory makes it clear that most of Reform’s votes came from the useless Tories and the hated Labour party. Most of the high turnout wasn’t people voting for Reform, but against them. And much of Labour’s collapse was their people voting tactically to stop Reform.
For Reform to win in the future, on the scale they need to form a government, they need to stop relying on the unpopularity of the others and build a firm support base of their own – and to ensure that all those people get out there and vote.
The huge surge in Reform’s vote, in Caerphilly and in many council elections in recent months, proves that the tide of public opinion is flowing strongly in their favour. The Daily Mirror, Guardian, BBC, Telegraph, etc can all use Caerphilly to say that Farage has “peaked too soon”, but that won’t take away Reform’s opportunity.
The real danger to Reform is internal. Electoral power isn’t won merely by surfing a pre-existing wave, such currents and tides merely make victory possible. It isn’t even won by money. Elections are won by outfighting the other side organisationally.
That means having a central team that actually understands how to win British elections. Better messages. Better leaflets. Better training and deployment of volunteers. Better data collection, by canvassing by phone and in real life. Better contact with firm voters. Better whipping in efforts, by phone, text and door-knocking.
Reform have enough volunteers. They certainly have enough money. They just need to stop relying on Starmer being a w*anker and the Tories being a bad political joke, and start running their campaigns properly.
Why It Matters to Real Nationalists
What’s it to me? I detest Nigel Farage (though I appreciate his political cunning and skill; he is the greatest politician of our era – an accolade which should not be taken as unmitigated praise). If he gets to wield power, I expect his priorities to be City slickers and the terrorist state of Israel.
I have no doubt that, even if Reform do manage to form a government, they will break many of their promises and fail to deliver on most of the others. I am well aware that no government can turn the clock back or save us from what is coming.
But victory of populist parties like Reform will break the old mould, making more radical change possible once they too have failed. If Reform only breaks the Tory party, that alone would make the thing worthwhile, since the utterly fake ‘conservativism’ of the Tories has done more to bring Britain to its current sorry state than any other single factor.
Furthermore, precisely because victory for a party like Reform will hand the reins of constitutional power to so many new people, I have a reasonably well-founded hope that they will, almost unnoticed, do a few useful things.
Before they fail and go under, a Reform government could easily be induced (by way of the ideological and policy infiltration being outlined in other articles on this Substack) to make a few seemingly minor laws which would make an enormous practical difference to the long-term struggle of our people for a place under the sun in our own homeland.
They might, for example, legislate to protect and aid families which homeschool. They might stop taxpayers’ money being used to chemically and surgically mutilate children who have been brainwashed into thinking they can and should change ‘gender’. They might just pass a burqa ban which could lead to a few thousand fast-breeding, Muslim Brotherhood supporting families to emigrate.
Most important of all, if the only thing a Reform government did was to pass one law - to end the currently grotesque position in which you can set up a charity or NGO for any ethnic group in the UK, except for the British in general and the English in particular - then that would be all the justification needed for putting the sleazebag Farage in Number 10.
Think about it for a moment: In a multicultural society in which we are already a minority in entire cities, in a country in which we are set to become the largest minority in a population of minorities, we alone are not allowed to set up a charity or NGO for our own people. Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Jews, Africans, Ukrainians, West Indians, Poles, Roma, Sinta, Lithuanians – they can all set up and run ethnic or religious charities for their own group in Britain. But we cannot.
It’s such a small thing to ask, so obviously fair and just, so difficult for a populist regime to resist – but also absolutely critical to our collective ability to organise for, and thus come through, the civilisational clusterfuck which is now baked into the future of the West.
If we cannot secure this right in law, then we will just have to make ways to take it anyway, but it will be so much easier if we can get it on the statute book. So we have to push for that if there is any possibility of it happening and, for the next five to ten years at least, Reform is the only possible vehicle for this.
Our recognition as the indigenous peoples of these islands. Our right to organise local and national institutions. Our right to self-association. Our right to our own spaces. Such a self-evidently just demand; superficially such a little thing. But such an important one.
We could of course make other demands, “remigration” for example, but there is not the faintest possibility that parliament would ever grant it, or that the army and the police could make it happen if they did.
But, fortunately, the right to organise, as ourselves, by ourselves, and for ourselves, is the only demand we even need to make of the parliamentary system, because everything else which we need to do starts from here.
If you’ve read or listened to any other analysis of Caerphilly, you will know that this is a WAY more serious and useful piece than anyone else is even remotely capable of giving you. That’s not me being big-headed, it’s just a fact. If you appreciate this, and want to help me to move from writing about the future to making it happen, please support my work by restacks, or becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you!
