Reform’s poll numbers are slipping because Yorkshire folk are not daft - Yorkshire Post Letters

Reform UK slipping in the polls again will shock absolutely no one north of Watford. A party that promised to be ‘different’ seems instead to be collecting ex-Tories like Panini stickers, except instead of legends you’re mostly getting the ones that never made the starting team.

Jonathan Gullis, who only recently described Reform as a circus of “oddballs,” has now leapt aboard grinning like a man who’s discovered the last lifeboat. Lee Anderson insists, again, he’s finally found a party that “speaks for real people.” I’d love to meet these real people, they must be rare creatures, given how often he claims to rediscover them.

Then up pops Nadine Dorries, declaring “the Tory Party is dead” with all the melodrama of someone reading out a plot twist on daytime telly. If Reform thinks this bunch is its salvation, then they’d best ring the co-op funeral home and check the availability of wreaths.

But here’s the thing: while they talk a good game about ‘common sense politics,’ Reform-led councils already give us a taste of what that looks like; plenty of shouting, lots of culture war bluster, but precious little in the way of functioning services. If that’s the future of local government, most of us would rather take our chances with potholes and bin strikes than whatever this lot are cooking up.

And then there’s the party’s national image. It can’t be helpful when commentators keep pointing out how often Reform’s rhetoric seems to echo the sort of lines you’d expect from Moscow’s state broadcasters; all doom about “a broken Britain,” endless attacks on the West, and a steady supply of conspiracy-lite mutterings.

No one’s saying they’re taking lessons from Putin, but you’d think they might at least try to sound less like his warm-up act.

Finally, we’ve had Nigel Farage himself, never one to miss an incendiary headline, now busy batting away accusations of racism and even fascism after his latest outbursts. Whether people believe those accusations or not, it hardly makes Reform look like the future of moderate, sensible government. More like the “comment-section-at-closing-time” party.

So yes, poll numbers are slipping. Yorkshire folk are not daft. If it looks like a sinking ship and sounds like a sinking ship, they’re not climbing aboard, especially if it’s captained by a collection of former Tories who claim they know all the mistakes because they made most of them.