Reform Mansfield

Seven years on from our momentous vote to leave, we still have not done so.
Northern Ireland has been left behind – subject to EU laws, made by its legislature and adjudicated its court. What sort of country allows a foreign power to rule its people? All without so much as a single shot being fired?
And if you think we, in Great Britain, are better off, think again.

Boris’s Brino committed us to being aligned with EU state aid, competition, employment and environmental law. We cannot buy British first. We cannot support our own industries without falling foul of EU regulations. And we are bound into net zero insanity through the same deal. Our country is being sunk in a morass of EU regulation. Brexit should have been about ejecting all this nonsense and making policy for British National Interest – not that of the EU’s Single Market!

The capitulation does not stop there.

There are still over 4,000 other EU Regulations on our statute books. These are laws made by the EU for the EU – not for the UK. They were adopted into our statute books WITHOUT ANY SAY by Westminster. An unelected bureaucracy in Brussels made laws for its interests and, even though we are no longer obliged to abide by them, abide by them we do.

Kemi Badenoch blames the civil service for not having the courage to ditch these laws. In doing so she is admitting two things:

• after 13 years in government, the Conservative Party is out of control. It cannot even control its own administration – how useless is that?
• the Conservative Party has given up on Brexit.

She also says a complete survey of these laws must be undertaken just in case the binning of some of them might have adverse consequences. She is talking nonsense. British law works differently to European law. In the UK everything is allowed unless a law specifically prohibits it. In Europe nothing is allowed unless a law specifically allows it. Ditching laws in Europe may therefore be difficult. You may inadvertently prevent honest endeavour. But not so in our wonderful country. Ditching these laws would simply return us to the status quo before they were foisted on us.

No - the truth is Brexit has been betrayed. Sunak and the Conservatives, elected by the British people, have instead decided to ignore the biggest democratic mandate in history and serve, instead, the European Union.
The United Kingdom has been partitioned and put into servitude to the EU.
The only hope of defeating these malign forces is through root and branch Reform!!

What do you consider to be the three main issues facing Mansfield? What is concerning you?
• It may be the cost of fuel, food, or energy;
• It could be community crime;
• drug abuse;
• It might be nuisance neighbours;
• Quality of our high streets and town centre;
• Dog owners allowing misbehaviour; 
• Flytipping;
• Homelessness;
• Housing;
• Refuse collection; 
• It may be access to health care or,
• It might be something like the state of our roads.
(to give but a few examples).

What would be the first three things that you would change if you could?

Please email me at

mansfield@reformuk.com

with your concerns. 

I am standing as a candidate in the local elections in May for the West Bank Ward in Mansfield. I hope that I can count on your support if you live in the ward. 

My third F is Freedom. Freedom to:

• enjoy more of your earnings;
• choose the schools that you want;
• speak your mind without fear of reprisals;
• go about your business without fear of crime;
• see a doctor within a given time frame;
• to have your operation without delays;
• put on the heating without fear of huge bills.

Our freedom is so precious, yet we have taken it for granted. Our freedom is so valuable, yet so vulnerable. The restrictions on our freedoms by the Government during the Covid pandemic amount to a major erosion of our rights and civil liberties. Governments are very good at imposing temporary measures, but very bad at getting rid of them — income tax was a temporary tax on the rich to pay for a war over 200 years ago!

Reform UK will campaign relentlessly to:

• Return all the freedoms and liberties that we enjoyed before Covid. Every single one.
  We are the only party making this commitment.
• Free us from the woke nonsense that pervades through Westminster and far too much
  of our lives.
• Restore true freedom of speech.
• Restore the democratic right to protest.

The Tories have been in government for 12 years. That’s 12 years of broken promises.


It was all just Tory talk. Families, communities and businesses around the country have been devastated. Trust in government has been destroyed. And for good reason. Here are just 12 of many promises the Tories have broken. One for each year of office.


1. David Cameron promised to keep net migration numbers to “tens of thousands.” “No ifs. No but’s.” Theresa May set an annual limit of 100,000. Boris Johnson guaranteed to control our borders.


How’s it working out? In 2022 net migration numbers reached a record high of 504,000. Another record was broken with 45,000 illegal migrants crossing the channel. Most were smuggled over by criminal gangs.


Nearly four cities the size of Birmingham have been added to the population since 2010. That’s millions of extra GP registrations. Record NHS waiting lists. And enormous pressure on housing and school places.


2. The Tory record on tax is no better. In 2019 they pledged not to raise any form of tax for five years. Instead, they’ve raised nearly all of them, making millions of people poorer. Jeremy Hunt’s austerity budget wiped out a decade of income growth. Millions have been dragged into higher taxes by freezing or reducing thresholds. Corporation tax has gone up for the first time in 50 years. And our tax burden is set to rise to 37.5% of GDP. The highest level since WW2.


3. They promised a “stronger more dynamic economy.” But after tax hikes, botched trade deals, shameful levels of waste, disastrous lockdown policies and the self-harm of Net Zero, our economy is barely growing at all. With Britain’s resources and talent, we should be the leading western economy.


4. They promised to control the national debt. Remember that 2010 election poster? A picture of Gordon Brown saying, “I doubled the national debt. Let me do it again.” In fact the Tories did it again. They more than doubled the debt from £1 trillion in 2010, to nearly £2.5 trillion today.


5. David Cameron promised a “bonfire of the quangos.” He said they were “one of the main reasons so many people feel that nothing ever changes.” Johnson, Truss and Sunak agreed. In 2010 the cost of quangos was £90 billion. In 2021 was a staggering £265 billion. Now they want another quango to "restore trust" in our institutions and…democracy.” You couldn’t make it up!


6. But with all that spending, surely they’re building those 40 new hospitals they promised? Only 5 have been started. Even worse, the number of hospital beds has fallen from 184,000 in 2010 to around 158,000 today. This is one of the lowest number of beds per capita in the developed world.


7. The Tories promised full control of our fishing waters after Brexit. Instead, we saw a complete and utter sell-out of our fishing fleet. The EU still have access to our waters. Our fishermen are way short of their rightful quotas and they still have to dump good fish back into the sea.


8. The government promised safe streets and neighbourhoods; To “take violent criminals off the streets and protect us.” Instead crime is at record highs including knife crime and police are solving the lowest number of crimes ever. The bobby on the beat is extinct. Or maybe they are just too busy virtue signalling on twitter.


9. For nearly 10 years the Tories have promised to leave the European Convention on Human Rights and replace it with a British Bill of Rights. But unbelievably our laws are still being overruled by biased, unaccountable, poorly qualified European judges.


10. The Tories also promised to “champion freedom of expression and tolerance.” But their online safety bill wanted to put people in prison for hurting others’ feelings. Even worse, across the UK the Tories have stood and watched while woke, cancel culture destroys freedom of speech in public life.


11. The 2019 Tory manifesto promised to support entrepreneurs and the self-employed. Yet this sector has been crushed by regulations and new tax rules. Self-employed numbers are down by 20%.


12. And finally, Brexit. We were promised full control of our borders, our laws and our money. After more than 6 years of deliberate delays, obstructions and reversals, Brexit has been betrayed.


There have been so many broken promises over the years. It’s difficult to find a promise they kept.


Our country deserves so much better. We are a nation of lions led by donkeys. But we don’t have to put up with Tory talk. Reform UK is now the 3rd largest party in the polls. We have nearly 600 candidates ready for a general election. We are recruiting hundreds of new members every day. The Tories are running scared.


I can’t wait to start our 2023 campaign, and I look forward to meeting each and every one of you as we take our message to doorsteps around the country. In the meantime I want to thank you, my fellow Reformers, for all your hard work and support. We have a massive opportunity to reform the way our great country is run. To serve the people not the elite. To restore trust in politics. To make Britain Great.

Dear Supporter,

Even before the rumoured new Swiss-style sell out to the European Union, the Conservative Party was already in deeper trouble than it knows. The game of musical chairs in Downing Street may be over for now, but the party is stuck at about 20% in most opinion polls. After twelve years of Tory rule, the only concrete achievement it can point to is that it “got Brexit done”. (In fact, even this claim barely stands up to scrutiny when you take into account the way Northern Ireland has been left in limbo).

So, are we close to another ‘Chequers deal’ surrender, as we saw under Theresa May in 2018? The fierce denials from government ministers and Rishi Sunak in his address to the CBI this week may reassure some, but I'm far from convinced.

The appointment of Jeremy Hunt as Chancellor of the Exchequer on 14 October and the installation of Sunak as Prime Minister 10 days later represent nothing less than a coup. Any belief in a growth-driven strategy, or of encouraging the enterprise of Britain’s millions of small businesses, has died. There can be no more pretence. This government is a high tax, big state, social democrat betrayal of all that the Conservatives have ever stood for. A softening of our relationship with the bully boys of Brussels would be entirely in keeping with its current identity.
Even before this latest row there was growing disenchantment among Brexit voters at the sheer inertia at government level. Just “getting Brexit done” is nowhere near enough on its own. The majority of Red Wall voters who handed Boris Johnson an 80-seat majority three years ago did so in the expectation that immigration into our country would be reduced. Yet last week the Office for Budget Responsibility forecast net migration at roughly 224,000 in 2023 before holding steady at 205,000 per annum from 2026 onwards. Given the 1.2 million visas that were issued over the course of the last year, the OBR’s figures probably represent the tip of the iceberg.

What has really brought matters into focus, however, is the continued failure to deal with the English Channel emergency. For months, hotels across the country have been filling up at an estimated cost to taxpayers of £7 million every 24 hours – that’s close to £300,000 an hour. There are now 40,000 people being accommodated in this way. Chaos on this level is completely unacceptable, to say nothing of unsustainable.

When British citizens – many of whom are struggling to pay their own bills – see young men from different cultures hanging around in their towns and villages, they feel an understandable sense of confusion and anger at the lack of control shown by the state. The state’s first duty is to protect its own people, a principle that seems to have been shredded without discussion. Most Brexiteers did not vote in 2016 for thousands of people to turn up in the UK uninvited and have public funds lavished on them in this way. Taxpayers want to know what those who claim to be in charge are doing about this.

In recent weeks, a PR campaign has been mounted to lead the public to believe that the government’s relationship with the EU is improving and that a better deal with Northern Ireland is close at hand. And Sunak virtually fawned over President Macron at their recent meeting in Egypt. It can only mean one thing: our position on the EU is slackening. The ultimate consequence of this will be to make it easy for the next Labour government to sign up Britain to the single market again. Brexit in Name Only (BRINO) seems to be on its way.

Many Tory MPs with whom I have spoken are hoping against hope that the party can turn this situation around. Let me save them a lot of trouble: it isn’t going to happen. The Brexiteers and free-marketeers have been reduced to a backbench rump. Sunak, who allegedly voted for Brexit (though was noticeably quiet during the referendum campaign) and Hunt (an out and out Europhile) run the show now.
All of this means that the conditions for a new insurgency in British politics are ripe. Some polling for the Sunday Telegraph this month asked the question: “Would you be interested in voting for a new Nigel Farage-led party?” It found that 38 per cent of Conservative voters would consider supporting a new party led by me, with 43 per cent of Brexiteers saying the same. The most popular reason for doing so, among 62 per cent of respondents, was that "we need someone to stand up for ordinary British people".

I was flattered by these results, but there's one thing I want to make clear. I was the founder of Reform UK, a political party that came directly from the Brexit Party. Over the course of the last few weeks, thousands of former Conservatives have joined Reform UK and paid their subscriptions. The party’s poll ratings have climbed as high as 9% recently, putting it above the Liberal Democrats. As honorary president of Reform UK, I communicate regularly with its leader, Richard Tice, and have been kept up to date with his preparations to field a full slate of candidates at the next general election. I can confirm that there will be no more deals, no more standing aside. The Conservative Party needs to understand just how many people in this country now believe that it is the problem and not the solution. Public trust has been frittered away.

Inevitably, some will cry: “But all you will do is let Labour in.” My answer is simple: so what?

Whether I take a more active role in Reform UK in future will depend on the extent of the betrayal of Brexit. But at the risk of stating the obvious, I didn't spend 25 years of my life battling to secure a seemingly hopeless cause only to watch Jeremy Hunt give it away.

Many Thanks,
Nigel Farage Honorary President of Reform UK

Are you sick and tired of:
• inflation?
• fuel prices?
• our open borders?
• the cost of food?
• waiting for an appointment?
• rising crime?
• woke cancel culture?
• being afraid to voice an opinion?
• present day insecurity?
• future uncertainty? 
• Conservative mismanagement?
• lack of leadership?
• political privilege?
• parliament over the people, and not, people over parliament?
• government excuses?

You and just about everyone else! What are you going to do about it?
What can you do?
Vote for reform.

Things have to change.
It's time for reform.

It's time for Reform UK!