A former Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party, who was suspended from the party for making comments about Islamism, has defected to the Nigel Farage-founded Reform UK Party.
Lee Anderson MP is the first Member of Parliament for Reform UK, having announced his move to the party at a Westminster press conference on Monday morning. Anderson said he is proud of his country’s achievements and said run-of-the-mill opinions held by millions of Britons — such as concerns about mass migration and crime — are not controversial as the media and Westminster political class claim they are.
The blue-collar former Tory, who had been a deputy party chairman and who is known for his blunt, no-nonsense attitude and use of vernacular English not otherwise often heard in the bars and lobbies of Westminster said he would focus now on winning his seat again in this year’s forthcoming general election. He also said he wanted to win other similar seats, saying they had been “let down” by the Conservatives, to whom their voters went in large numbers at the last UK general election during the Boris Johnson era.
Characterised as ‘Red Wall’ seats, these areas that once had a strong industrial base, since destroyed by the flight of manufacturing abroad. While traditionally left-wing ‘red’ voting, these regions can be very socially conservative and turned to the Conservative Party in 2019 to deliver Brexit.
The Conservative Party has since gotten rid of Boris Johnson and through a painful series of challenges finally settled on the ultra-wealthy Rishi Sunak as leader and Prime Minister, who despite his clean and uncontroversial leadership style has seen public support fall to historic lows.
Speaking at the Lee Anderson defection press conference this morning, Reform UK party leader Richard Tice said: “we have to shape and influence, and change the direction of this country of ours, because at the moment it is broken and people are getting poorer. And where does this start… the Red Wall. Millions and millions of people as they hear of us, say ‘thank goodness for Reform’.”
Tice said Anderson would be a “champion” for the Red Wall and be “someone who completely understands it, who is trusted by voters to say it as it is, no-nonsense, no waffle, clear, basic, commonsense”.
Anderson had been useful to the Conservatives as an emisary to the Red Wall seats, as he was a former Labour member who had left the party over its drift to the hard-left, something he would have in common with many of those first-time Tory voters in those former Labour seats. As part of this process of using Anderson as a spokesman for the Conservatives to working-class voters, he was made a deputy chairman of the party in February 2023.
Despite the Conservative attempt to expand its appeal into new demographics, the party seemed unable to stomach the actual views of those voters, or at least those it had promoted as representing their interests. Earlier this year Anderson was suspended from the party for agreeing with former Home Secretary Suella Braverman — already a victim of an internal party civil war clawing it back towards the globalist centre — who said in February that “The truth is that the Islamists, the extremists and the anti-Semites are in charge now”.
Anderson buttressed those remarks by adding the frequent Hamas-Palestine marches in London illustrated the degree to which London was controlled by “Islamists”. London’s Sadiq Khan, who Anderson namechecked in his comments, called the remarks “Islamophobic, anti-Muslim and racist” and Anderson was suspended from the Party and ordered to apologise.
Speaking on Monday on the occasion of his defection, Anderson referred to this episode, and said:
…like millions of people in this country, I feel like we are slowly giving our country away. We are giving away our way of life, allowing people to erase our history, giving up our streets to a minority of people who literally hate our way of life. We are allowing people into this country who will never integrate and adopt our British values. Parliament doesn’t seem to understand what many British people want, and frankly, some of them need to get out more.
I made some remarks a few weeks back about the London Mayor, for which I was stripped of the whip from the Conservative Party. And let me be clear right now, that I will not apologise. It is no secret I have been talking to my friends in Reform for a while, and Reform UK has offered me the chance to speak out in Parliament on behalf of millions of people up and down the country who feel they are not being listened to… this may sound offensive to the liberal elite, but it is not offensive to my friends, my family, my constituency…
It is not controversial to fight back in a culture war, Anderson said, who insisted concern about high levels of legal and illegal migration, failures by the police, and high levels of crime are not in any way controversial. “I cannot be a part of an organisation which stifles free speech, and many of my colleagues in that place, in the Conservative Party, do back me on this privately”, he said.
Reform UK leader Richard Tice predicted other defections to follow unless the next general election is called imminently.
