'Reform UK has burst the dam and now unhappy Conservatives stand at the crossroads,' says Stephen Pound

You can forget all that now.

Firstly, there is indeed a strong conservative instinct and one that indeed runs through the bloodstream of the body politic.

However; that is not to say that it is the current Conservative and Unionist Party that carries the torch for that instinctive and almost visceral conservatism.

No political party has a God given right to endure forever and rule with regularity.

If the small c conservative majority in the country feel in their bones that the current Conservative Party no longer seems to conserve anything and is becoming every day more like a bunch of winging woke Liberal Democrats then the traditional reaction was to either simply not bother to vote at all or to gravitate to the fringe or personality politics.

July 2024 changed all that – and changed it utterly.

By showing that it could actually win seats in Parliament, Reform UK has burst the dam that was containing the reluctant and increasingly unhappy Conservatives and they now stand at the crossroads with real options ahead of them.

For any political party to succeed it must have structures in place to energise and articulate the voting public and their concerns.

The usual arrogant dismissal of Reform was that it was a one-man band and while Nigel Farage had – and has – undoubted charisma and an almost unprecedented power of personal magnetism, he could not succeed without the bedrock of local organisations, councillors, and party branches.

Here is some bad news for both the major parties.

Reform UK is today setting up 120 local branches – in mostly Labour held seats – where they will start to build from the ground up.

The major parties are seeing a decline membership while Reform UK has a current membership of over 75,000 with about 25,000 new members joining in the final four weeks before last polling day.

Members mean money and money means mobilisation at a local level.

There will be many MPs who won seats with Reform UK snapping at their heels who will be waking up to a new presence on the high street. A local branch of Reform UK may well be springing up and with that physical presence will come the certainty that there will be Reform candidates standing at local and county level in the next elections.

MORE FROM GBN MEMBERSHIP:

• 'I'm 13 and I was called a racist and a Nazi for supporting Reform UK by a member of staff at my school'
• 'The Reform surge is a symptom of the Tory party's problems - not the cause of them,' says Jackie Doyle-Price
• 'If the Conservatives are serious about returning to power- they must consider how our model of Brexit can be upgraded'

It is still my belief that Reform cannot win the next election with anything like a workable majority but I am becoming less convinced that they will fade away like the SDP or the Independent Group of MPs who sat in the 2017- 2019 parliament.

Reform has set its sights firmly on seats currently held by Labour and they will certainly hold some appeal to traditional socially conservative Labour voters.

The reality is that while some Labour votes may be peeled away there will always be a clear dividing line between the small state solutions of Reform and the social democracy of Labour.

There is no such consolation for the Tories.

An entirely plausible scenario would see former conservative seats falling like ninepins to Reform with a top dressing of Labour losses.

Ultimately it would mean that there would once again be a conservative party in power – a Conservative party standing in opposition to Labour.

The bad news for the current Tories is that the conservative party would be called Reform UK.