John Major is right: Farage and Reform betrayed Brexit

What a turn up for the books. I am very much in agreement with John Major’s recent remarks about Reform UK and Nigel Farage, in which he warned Conservative voters to beware of them both.

As I said during the General Election and as it turned out correctly, Reform, in taking over 90 seats away from the Conservatives but without gaining a single shred of influence in Parliament, have betrayed Brexit and handed Starmer a substantial majority, which has also cost us dearly in terms of Select Committee representation as well. Reform have betrayed Brexit and betrayed Britain, as I predicated, and with a massive majority, the Labour Party are now intent on “resetting” (as they put it), our relations with the EU.

The consequences of this are dire, not least of which is Starmer, who described the referendum result as a catastrophe and who also argued for a second referendum to remain in the EU. The very notion of this is grotesque considering that we have now regained our self-government, our democracy and our sovereignty. Starmer does not seem to have noticed that Europe itself, as everyone can see, is imploding economically and politically, as country after country is reasserting its national identity and voting with their feet against EU political integration.

In a matter of months, Starmer has demonstrated one failure after another, including letting down pensioners with the winter fuel allowance and surrendering to the unions, and has now sullied the office of Prime Minister, swaggering around in expensive suits paid for by his cronies, like a third-rate Burlington Bertie.

With the prospect of massive taxation to come in the Autumn Budget, many voters who either abstained in the General Election or voted against the Conservative Party are now beginning to realise what a mistake they have made. It was the Conservative Party, with its values and principles, which delivered Brexit in the 2019 General Election which endorsed the 2016 referendum result. Reform and its predecessor, the Brexit Party, claim to have delivered Brexit but they, like the Labour Party, merely obtained a fraction of the vote and on a derisory turn out.

However, on the question of illegal migration in particular and the Rwanda scheme, I profoundly disagree with John Major in what he said in his interview. Of course, as I have always argued, we should protect genuine refugees, but that is not what we are faced with through the criminally organised and lethal small boats operations. What is needed is a re-negotiation of international treaties, which are now some 70 years old. It is an illusion to conflate the current global and European crisis of migration with the kind of protection needed for refugees of the Holocaust in the 1940s.

With our uniquely unwritten constitution and as the Rwanda Supreme Court Judgement dismissal of the case of an Iraqi national demonstrated, on the principle of legality, where our statutes are clear and unambiguous, the Supreme Court will support that statute even when it overrides international law, including the ECHR and international treaties. This is not possible in the EU because of the Charter of Fundamental Rights and many of the countries, such as Germany, have constitutions which put international law above domestic law and they are tearing their hair out over illegal migration and are imposing compulsory fines and quotas which do not apply to us because of our own constitutional arrangements and because we have now left the EU.

The Rwanda Act needed to be clear and unambiguous, but Starmer’s abandonment of the Rwanda policy has increased the small boats problem and John Major is wrong.

Bill Cash CH served as a member of Parliament from 1984 to 2024 and was long-standing Chair of the House of Commons’ European Scrutiny Committee