Was Reform UK a gimmick to win the election for Starmer?

Right, so this is a story I wasn’t too sure about covering previously, surely this was a conspiracy theory? Surely this isn’t possible? Surely there are checks to ensure this can’t happen? But the ramifications for the legitimacy of the General Election just gone, if the limited company that passes itself off as a political party, called Reform UK did indeed put up candidates that didn’t actually exist are huge, not just in votes lost by other parties, but it would be defrauding the electorate, delivering a result that is false and of course numbers of votes dictates how much short money a party gets. And it is in this regard, along with a few other instances that it has been posited to me, that Reform UK were a gimmick to win the election for Keir Starmer, but not only are the allegations of defrauding the election not going away, at least one Reform UK figure appears to have admitted to it.
Right, so this is a topic of conversation in some social media circles that at first I freely admit to just dismissing, surely this isn’t possible, that you can put up for election somebody that doesn’t actually exist. We have voter ID these days don’t we? Surely candidates have to prove their identity too? Well apparently not!
Now this is a story that’s been rumbling on since before polling day actually, Byline Times put out an article the day before, talking about how some Reform UK candidates had not been seen at hustings, not been seen campaigning, the focus point of their investigation at that point, was the local candidate for Bylines report Josiah Mortimer, a chap called Mark Matlock, who’s poster looked suspiciously AI generated.
Now as it happens, Mark Matlock was an entirely real person. An antiques dealer, he was missing from the campaign trail having been hospitalised with pneumonia, which is an entirely practical reason to be missing and when I read that I thought, well that’s that business solved then, a something and nothing story, but it isn’t, as Matlock was just one of several examples of invisible candidates who appear potentially, to not be real.
Another notable example that social media is still trying to track down, is Morgan Young, the apparent candidate for South Dorset and what set the cat amongst the pigeons most of all in this case, was the apparent admission by a Reform UK Regional Organiser named Tara Williams, who on Facebook posted the following in response to the absence of Morgan Young from the campaign trail, saying:
‘It is a democracy vote, because nobody put themselves forward before the candidate deadline. IF Reform get in then a local person will be chosen as MP for South Dorset. It is well worth voting for Reform UK in the General Election as the more votes they get countrywide, the more percentage of votes they achieve. As you will be aware a cornerstone of Reforms contract is to introduce PR…Think of this as a practice run for PR and vote for the party not the name.’
Certainly from that it is easy to construe that Morgan Young may have been completely made up. Now the Times claimed to have interviewed Young, that certainly was enough to placate the then still incumbent MP in South Dorset, Richard Drax, but given Reform UK won just over 8,000 votes there and Drax only lost his seat by 1,000 votes, it seems like we need to make sure, we deserve to know the candidate is definitely real?
Now the ballot sheet stated Young lived at an address in Derbyshire, so it is perfectly conceivable, that she was little more than a paper candidate, not even local to the area, but the fact there has been no blurb about her, no picture of her seen, continues to cause suspicion. If she’d been elected, could she legally just let someone else be the MP though? Her name was on the sheet, so the biggest issue I have with what Tara Williams wrote, is the belief that the victory is somehow transferable to somebody else. Surely that isn’t legal? Perhaps if nothing is signed it is possible, I don’t know and I haven’t been able to definitively find out either because you don’t tend to stand for parliament with no intention of being the MP do you? A fast one certainly appears to have been pulled here, but not necessarily anything illegal, Young does appear to exist according to some sources, just would be nice for such things to not be a material concern for voters, such as if a candidate they are voting for is actually a real person. That said, a Delegated Nominating Officer will have had to have signed off on the candidacy, if anything illegal to do with any of this business of false candidates has been committed, it would be people such as that.
Byline Times claim as of a couple days ago, to have 80 such cases of ostensibly paper candidates now. Whereas I totally accept what happened with Mark Matlock and whilst Morgan Young probably is real, just not local to South Dorset and no real intention of being the MP, that might be a truer reflection of what we’ve observed. Reform UK put up a lot of paper candidates not intending to run, not intending to be MPs, just essentially allowing their names to be used, in seats they were not likely to win, but if they did, Reform would find somebody to take the seat. By standing as many people as possible, they garnered as many votes as possible, gaining as much short money as possible, the money made available to smaller parties, with at least 1 seat and who own at least 150,000 votes, or who hold 2 seats, in order to finance their ability to conduct parliamentary business and under general funding as a for instance, which excludes travel expenses and I’m using 2023 figures here as I haven’t got them for 2024, but it’s just an illustrative example anyway, parties get 21,438.33 for every seat they won, plus £42.82 for every 200 votes they won. This is one big reason to vote for a smaller party, even if you don’t think they’ll win – they get more money.
On the basis of these figures, Reform got 5 MPs and having stood 609 candidates – on paper at least – won 4,072,947 votes, which hands them more than £979,000 in short money, but how much of that was voters voting for someone who actually if they’d won, wouldn’t have been their MP, which is the implication?
But another implication is, given that Reform took the lions share of the Tories lost 20% of the national vote, that they are in no small part responsible for handing Keir Starmer the massive majority he got. Labour’s vote share barely moved and certainly I’m not saying it’s great that the Tories are out and it is great to see them having been hammered as hard as they were, but if I were in Labour and knowing most Tories would never vote Labour in a million years, what a fantastic plot it would be to big up Reform to get Labour in, by cutting the legs out from under the Tories electorally? 609 Reform candidates and a significant chunk of that, if Bylines ongoing investigation is anything to go by, were people who were completely invisible and for good reason – they may well have come from anywhere and perhaps in some cases may not even exist.
As mad an idea as this might sound, and I’m sure there will be some thinking Damo, you’ve peaked in your disdain for everything Starmer, but hear me out, there’s other things we can point to which have never made sense, never added up but which do lend themselves to this kind of thinking.
Let’s imagine for a minute that conversation went down between Farage and Labour to edge the Tories out. Going hard on immigration, bashing Bangladeshis as scapegoats for migrants, we said at the time labour figures, not least Starmer himself were doing this that it was pure Reform UK stuff, but how could they possibly sweeten any would be deal for Farage to work with them? How about giving him a clear shot at winning his seat?
Farage had already picked his seat well in Clacton for his eight attempt to become an MP, that constituency having previously voted UKIP, but then Labour inexplicably pulled their candidate out of Clacton too. Jovan Owusu-Nepaul, who wasn’t likely to win admittedly, but with his colourful fashion sense he was nonetheless a popular figure when out campaigning and a campaign trail clash between him and Farage saw the guy go viral on social media, all of sudden eclipsing posts even by Keir Starmer and this was never going help Farage either was it? Nowhere else in the country did Labour pull a candidate, but Owusu-Nepaul was uniquely pulled out of Clacton and redeployed elsewhere to try and shore up the vote of vulnerable MPs who were deemed at risk, he was packed off to the West Midlands, allegedly in tears that his campaign was brought to a sudden screeching halt for the sake of what was ostensibly just one more body leafleting in the Midlands. The local Labour Party was incensed that of all people, Labour weren’t going to put up a fight against Nigel Farage. They were fighting the Greens more than Reform’s leader. Perhaps that was the prize for services rendered though?
If there is any ring of truth to that kind of thinking, Labour have a majority built on sand that likely isn’t going to last, Farage I’ll be surprised if he lasts a full term, because he’ll get bored of having to work for a living. Without him, Reform have no legs, we saw it with UKIP, we saw it with the Brexit Party that became Reform UK Ltd. If all this was some grand plot to stymie the Tories, punish them for failure, clear the way for a definite change in government from one bunch of establishment shills now seen as liabilities, to another with a clean slate, it’ll have less cut through in 2029 I fancy. Labour might think it can shore things up in it’s new seats, but that’s debatable. Meanwhile it’ll lose seats in it’s old heartlands as people become more fed up with them going forwards as the Tory Party B Team. If we’re going to talk conspiracy theories about Reform UK, I think this is as believable as fake candidacies are certainly. Food for thought, would you put it past Starmer or did I just make my coffee too strong this morning? Do let me know.
Meanwhile, Starmer has already admitted to being able to work with the far right, as he readily announced he could work with Marine Le Pen if her National Front in France won their elections, but of course they didn’t, the left coalition did, and Starmer still hasn’t said if he can work with them after all, just another flea in your ear to ponder on if you care to watch this video recommendation here next and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.