Rupert Matthews: Why I defected to Reform UK

Rupert Matthews is the Police and Crime Commissioner for Leicestershire and Rutland.

As usual, the voters were ahead of the politicians in their appreciation of the increasing volatility of party politics in the UK.

In Europe, there has long been great mobility between political parties. I saw this first hand in the European Parliament when MEPs shifted easily between political groupings with surprising frequency. At the time, I put this down to the near ubiquitous use of proportional representation on the continent. Instead of a small number of large political parties as in the UK, most European countries had a large number of small parties which came and went with some speed.

Here in the UK neither politicians nor voters have been accustomed to such behaviour. Elections were decided not so much by the mythical floating voter who changed which party they supported. Far more decisive was whether the voters of one party went to vote or stayed at home.

This is why canvassing records were so useful. If a person was canvassed as Conservative 10 years ago the chances were they would still be Conservative now. So it was worth pushing a “don’t forget to vote today” leaflet through the door.

That has changed. I first noticed this in the local elections of 2011. The Lib Dems produced many leaflets concentrating on a single local issue and urging voters to “lend us your vote” on this particular issue. Clever. That way, a habitual Labour voter was no less Labour for voting Lib Dem on some local issue.

Brexit cemented that trend, of course. People were far less driven by how their usual party leader voted than by the issue at stake on the ballot paper. Political tribal loyalties broke down.

Now those of us on the right of centre have a choice of parties. When I joined the Conservative Party in the 1980s there was only the Conservative Party. Now there is Reform UK as well. Voters – and politicians – have a choice that they did not in the past. Defecting to Labour would be unthinkable, to Reform UK not so.

On the left there is a similar choice developing. The SDP collapsed, but now the Greens, Lib Dems and Corbyn’s outfit offer unprecedented choice.

And yet the Conservative Party does not seem to have woken up to this. They are still behaving as if all they need to do is wait for Labour to be unpopular and all those Conservative voters will flood out at the next election.

It is not that simple.

Not only has the choice open to voters changed, so have the issues at stake. When I started, the main dividing lines were economic. Free enterprise vs nationalisation; small business vs state monopolies. Now the cultural issues dominate and economics have faded into the background. There is little sign that the Conservatives realise this.

Just as important – at least for me – is the Establishment. These days it is more usual to refer to the “Elites”. For generations they were reliably conservative [with a small c]. The Conservative Party could usually rely on the Sir Humphries to implement their policies if not openly support them.

No more.

These days the Establishment / Elite is on the wrong side on cultural issues. High immigration, soft on law and order, trans self-ID, ECHR membership, woke this, woke that. The powers that be, can be relied upon to be wrong, time and time again.

The police are not immune. I take second place to nobody in my admiration of the front line police officers, PCSOs and staff – but senior police commanders are a different matter. Take the scandalous behaviour of Wiltshire’s Chief Constable. Just days after the judgement against Northumbrian Police openly supporting and participating in Pride marches, Wiltshire Police were doing exactly that. And the Chief Constable was there openly flaunting her Pride paraphernalia. I would have thought that obeying the law would be a prime prerequisite of being a Chief Constable. Not if it involves compromising woke beliefs, apparently.

And yet the Conservative Party can’t see it. In my own Leicestershire the new Reform county administration made a move to ban flags on council property – other than the union jack or county flag. The Conservative councillors immediately sprang to support the council staff who wanted the flags of every woke cause known to man to be flown.

This country needs radical change. It needs the Elites to be put in their place. While Reform UK are getting down to serious work on what needs to be done, when and how, the Conservative Party has not even recognised that there is a problem.

A political party is a vehicle for taking control of the levers of power to implement policies. The Conservative Party has been “weighed in the balance and found wanting”. And now, like Belshazzar of old, their time is passing. Britain needs a new party to drive the radical change this country needs.

Britain needs Reform UK!

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