Nigel Farage’s right wing Reform UK Party has appointed a spokesman for the Congleton Constituency after the leadership announced that it would be standing candidates in every Parliamentary seat at the next general election.
Reform UK was originally formed as the Brexit Party by Mr Farage to campaign for a no-deal Brexit and changed its name after Britain left the EU.
Its Congleton constituency spokesperson is Martin York, who has lived in Congleton and Alsager during the last 15 years.
Until the 2016 Brexit referendum Mr York was a “staunch” Conservative, “but has become totally disillusioned” with the party.
He helped the Leave campaign in the run-up to the referendum and joined the Brexit Party in early 2019, campaigning for the European elections and later stood for Parliament in the 2019 election.
Mr York said: “The state of the country today bears no resemblance to the country I served; common sense has given way to a mass of ridiculous policies on all fronts.
“It is imperative we put the Great back into Britain. I am convinced from speaking to people that the time for reform is here. We urgently need to fix the economy and deal with the energy crisis – net zero is firstly unachievable and secondly makes everyone net colder and net poorer.
“We need a concerted effort to deal with immigration, fundamentally sort out the mess that the NHS is in, and reform our public sector.”
Mr York was an engineering officer in the RAF and, following his military career, was a sales director with McDonnell Douglas and Siemens Nixdorf.
He later part-owned a software development business before it was sold, going on to form a management consultancy.
Hybrid
According to Wikipedia, the party’s first non-Brexit-related policy was announced on 4th June 2019: a proposition to transform British Steel into a partly worker-owned company, in what has been described as “a hybrid of Conservative and Labour policy”.
The party also supports cutting Britain’s foreign aid budget, scrapping the proposed HS2 project and introducing free Wifi On all British public transport. It has said it would scrap all interest paid on student tuition fees, suggested reimbursing graduates for historic interest payments made on their loans and has pledged to abolish inheritance tax.
On its website it says the country “needs to do Brexit properly”. It says it would free more than 6m people from paying income tax and 1.2m small businesses and self-employed from paying corporation tax; demand zero NHS waiting lists work to prevent crime and catch criminals and educate children “to prepare them for a competitive, challenging world”; nationalise 50% of key utility companies “to stop consumers being ripped off” and use more home coal and gas, and reform “the unelected cronyism of the House of Lords, the unaccountable civil service and the bloated BBC”. It would also bring migration down to net zero, saying it would “declare a national security threat, leave the European Convention on Human Rights, and use existing legislation robustly to stop (the) illegal trade.”
It would also use offshore processing centres for migrants as Australia did.
(Photo: Martin York).
